Aftermath, p.1
Aftermath, page 1
‘Aftermath is written from the heart. I am both impressed by it and so grateful that someone has tried to make sense of the many issues surrounding what happened at Fishmongers’ Hall. There is so much truth in this slim volume.’
David Merritt, father of Jack Merritt
‘Aftermath is a major landmark in British narrative non-fiction. It’s a beautiful and profound account of creative writing teaching as a radical act of trust and interrogation of power; its anti-racist and abolitionist stance makes it a vitally important and deeply moving book to read now in these dismal days for the British political project. It is fearless in the way it shows its agonised workings as it unfolds into a complex map of grief.’
Max Porter
‘In this stunning book, light bleeds into darkness. An astute indictment of our carceral system and the violence it perpetuates, it is also a compassionate meditation on our interconnected lives. Taneja blurs the lines between literary genres so that the divisions between ‘us’ and ‘them’ also blur. I was challenged, inspired and grateful for every word.’
Tessa McWatt
‘Astonishing. Radical, beautiful, broken, intimate. A surge. A yearning. A tribute. An indictment. You won’t read another book like this ever. Taneja’s wrestling with radical empathy, survivor’s guilt, politics – is a masterclass in literary brilliance.’
Nikesh Shukla
‘With We That Are Young, Preti Taneja established herself as one of the most courageous and lyrically gifted writers of her generation. Here again she offers living proof that great literature does not rise fully formed from the canon. It begins, rather, with a grasping in the dark for voices worthy of trust, until its urgent call for equality and dignity comes true – first on the page, and then in the hearts and minds of all who read it.’
Maureen Freely
‘Illuminating, daring, world-expanding. Essential, in the truest sense of the word.’
Daniel Trilling
‘This is a remarkable book: generous, searching, insightful and searingly intelligent as it draws out the complex relationship between writing and terror, language and the unspeakable, trauma and event.’
Olivia Sudjic
‘A piercing inquiry into the ways criminality is perceived … [Taneja] skilfully and carefully unpacks the complex systems violence emerges from. This is an inspired book fortified with acute contemplation and courage, a book born out of a love for the world and the people in it.’
Anthony Anaxagorou
‘A study, a song, a calling – Taneja’s work offers a crucial and radical account of control, conviction, complicity and trauma.’
Eley Williams
‘Aftermath is impossible to categorise: it sits in a tradition of bereavement literature; it sits with poetry. There is no fake moralising in its pages, just Taneja patiently walking us through the wreckage of unimaginable grief, noticing everything, lifting up the rubble, she makes us question everything we know and hold fast – a courageous and brilliant book.’
Mona Arshi
‘This searing abolitionist work sees, and refuses, other prisons too – of narrative-for-hire, racial shame, the trauma industrial complex, cause and effect. It tries to convince no one of nothing, to confess nothing to no one. Instead it breaks sentences and pages open, makes language rush into you (you are an estuary, the dam is gone). Its shape is unmappable. It lives on as a drumming in your head.’
Maria Tumarkin
‘A tremendous feat of scholarship, of historical interlacing, of contemporary criticism, of literary examination, of ethical clarity and personal interrogation and, most indelibly, of grieving.’
Gina Apostol
‘Aftermath is a book of extraordinary heart and intellectual force … Its achievement lies in its generosity and intimacy, and, crucially, in how it shows the way traumatic rupture can occur amid the less visible but equally pernicious forces of systemic violence.’
Los Angeles Review of Books
‘Stunning … [Taneja] turns a critical lens toward the way language shapes violence … This poetic, urgent, and self-reflective work will delight fans of Valeria Luiselli’s Tell Me How It Ends and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen.’
Publishers Weekly, starred review
This edition published in 2022 by And Other Stories
Sheffield – London – New York
www.andotherstories.org
First published in the United States by Transit Books
Copyright © Preti Taneja, 2021
All rights reserved. The right of Preti Taneja to be identified as author of this work has been asserted.
ISBN: 9781913505462
eBook ISBN: 9781913505479
Proofreader: Gesche Ipsen; Typesetting and eBook by Tetragon, London; Cover Design: Anna Morrison.
And Other Stories gratefully acknowledge that our work is supported using public funding by Arts Council England.
Contents
I. Radical Doubt
An Event Happens and
Order, Order
Disenfranchised Grief
Violence as Trauma as Form
Metaphors for Shame
Before and After
Backstory as Event That Happens
September Comes Again
II. Radicalising Thought
Poetry
Theory
Citizenship and Politics: A Postcolonial Story
Citizenship and Politics: A Postcolonial Glossary
Abolition
III. Radical Hope
The Single Shelf
The Point of Departure
The Prophet
Falling Prey
You as the Terrorist: You in the Room
The Prison Inside the Prison
A Singularly Talented, Wildly Imaginative Debut Novelist
The Question of Healing
Those Who Leave, Those Who Stay
Reality Hunger as Joint Enterprise (a Killjoy Manifesto)
Antigone’s Lament
In Prison, the Lack of Resources Improves One’s Creativity
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Notes
How long
can I lament
with this depressed
heart and soul
how long
can I remain
a sad autumn
ever since my grief
has shed my leaves
the entire space
of my soul
is burning in agony
how long can I
hide the flames
wanting to rise
out of this fire
how long can one suffer
the pain of hatred
of another human
a friend behaving like an enemy
with a broken heart
how much more
can I take the message
from body to soul
I believe in love (and I know that you do too)
I swear by love
believe me my love
how long
like a prisoner of grief
can I beg for mercy
you know I’m not
a piece of rock or steel
but hearing my story
even water will become
as tense as a stone
if I can only recount
the story of my life
right out of my body
flames will grow
Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207–1273)
Translated by Nader Khalili
with Nick Cave refrain
I
Radical Doubt
An Event Happens and
It is a bright morning when the call comes. Everything becomes brighter: like a vision of a nuclear blast in a film. It is as if everything solid has broken into pieces. As if the world has cracked. It is a shivering, an unshakeable sickness. It feels like concrete in the stomach. Shattered and stark as ice on deep water, struck with a blade. Like being held under, lungs filling. Sorrow deep enough to drown in. And this is a failed attempt to say: it feels like being locked in a dark room, screaming. Alone and falling. The repetitive rhythm is not a glitch, it is an artefact of pain repeating. It feels like being constantly watched. It is an assault: it is a wailing. It is being forced into a nightmare without being allowed to sleep. It is everywhere, as if all the masks have dropped. It is living in the real and it is the remembered real. This is a shattering. A ‘textbook version’ of trauma as an extreme cliché. The silence after an echo of a stone, pounding. It is begging: no one hearing. Like losing a mind while breathing and smiling. Like a hand around the throat. Forced deeper into the wreck of it. A rage. Like raging. This is the core of the atro-city. The outside world turned inwards.
There is so much violence. It is mainlining butterflies. It is swallowing nails. It is being hollowed. Scraped out. As if saturated with a secret that must only pour from eyes. The wind exists only as pine trees, moving. Trust, the elixir, seeps from our bodies. Always too far away to feel. We cannot stand. There is just skin and hair and fragile bone. It is like being stabbed from the inside. Being held under: struggling, still. Not wanting to move. Holding out a hand, finding nothing. Losing any grip. Being interrogated by buildings, by streets, by your absence, the air. Standing in silence. What is left? It is a heart, broken.
There is no syntax or simile to do justice to this. No metaphor.
As if to speak would be more violence.
It was as if I had lost language / been forced / to the outer e dge of words
Left with a body that even Antigone
would refuse to hold in her arms
It is the immediate aftermath. I am living / at the centre / of a wound still fresh.1 Inside only silence. I have lost all sense of countable time and all respect for aesthetics or that which, Audre Lorde writes, pertains to things perceptible to the senses; that pertain to things material as opposed to things thinkable,2 the unthinkable has happened: it is here. I can only bear this body, these words heavy, in plea to others’ words as the I is not only mine it belongs to many
Ocean Vuong writes that metaphor in the mouths of survivors becomes a way to innovate around pain.3 But language locks in my throat. It is wrong to innovate around this pain. My limbs are frozen. Is it futile to dig for the roots of violence? I have nothing to dig with but my fingers, these primitive keys as words the only way in. Metaphor belongs to the Eurocentric sublime: it has no place in this brown skin (which has only ever been understood in relation to, as shadow is to light).
An event happens and happens and happens: this is a definition of trauma. Splintering trust in language. This is horror, and horror is piercing. This is terror, and it floods the synapses, freezing all response. Break to gesture. And the gesture of horror is hand over mouth. And the gesture of terror is the blade. And the gesture of trauma is hand over eyes. And the gesture of pain is head in hands. Do not see, do not speak, do not hear. There are acts of such vicious duplicity and damage they turn solid bodies into molten grief.
In moments of deep loss we become as children, trained to seek comfort in the old fairy tales: the fundamental good versus the fundamental evil. We crave the redemptive hope of the hero’s journey in the old tradition of linear story from when we are born we are immersed in this the dominant mythic; we wait for someone to deliver us
But my skin and tongue are dark. My mind made multitudes by history. Memory as pani water as anagram of pain. I experience love through a porous border. I apprehend faith as the lack of it. Trust only as its loss. The body is grief, the body is guilt, the body is doubt, the body is the state I must write it. I cannot skin myself. I am shattered: cannot put the pieces down. Cannot speak, cannot ask you to listen. It would be too much to hope for as the event has happened, and when hearing is a form of feeling.4
Is it easier to write fiction, to represent?
An event happens and happens and happens, as wave after wave, breaking us. My blood turns on itself. I have always known whiteness / as splitting. I was schooled to know brownness as shame. The world as experienced keeps turning. I know that the quiet ones are inside us, waiting, ferocious and bound to harm.
Something has happened: I no longer believe in the potential of words to resist, to heal or to sing the horizon.
This is the heart of the country of radical doubt: the atro-city called home.
Its rules were written in the beginning. The ivory towers stare straight ahead. Their dizzying heights demand we do not look down. To the unsurvivable depths. Power covers its pale stone red as the autumn ivy cultivated to hide the crumbling bricks. Its delighted beauty rises from these foundations: the organising fictions of gender and race. A class system: education, literature as structural harm. Cracking and breaking: law and order, cement of the atro-city walls. Some of its subjects are citizens, and all of us are its subjects.
And its fairy tale goes that violence is born in some bodies, it lies innately within. The ontological categories are: human, not quite human, non human That we hide our nature until we choose We must be forfeit from feeling: from our feeling. We must be punished and banished. Made and remade and nurtured to obey, or reveal ourselves in our monstrosity and when one case proves the rule
To create such categorical myths requires, in fact, a novelist’s skill. And your suspension of disbelief. The endgame is a child’s life and mind. Maybe one day even ours
What does the atro-city fear above all? The dissolving of distinctions that would separate the inside from the outside; the collapse of the fantasy of sovereignty5
Extreme power is a drug; beckoning solace with the promise of community / tantalising the shine of individual glory / demanding obedience whilst it peddles death.
The distance from words to violence is infinite, unmeasurable, and intimate and infinitesimal, and felt as relentless until. Inside the gates of the atro-city the threat level is extreme
This body is heavy as words they are unbearable. Carry them now through this pale, flat land, the page. To fact / to lie, to grief / to shame. To daring to speak. There is no safety here.
When we speak, no wonder: it can feel like everything shatters.
We can become the point from which things cannot be reassembled.6
Turn an imperfect circle: seeking solace in familiar forms now splintered by violence into radical doubt: school, stories, poetry, theory, stories, politics, stories, police and return: to prison, which at most we only apprehend through the hammering fictions of the reading room, written, they say, for empathy – heavy, heavy my arms reach out, palms open, fingers splayed – but they cannot find yours.
This is a lament for many. Who will gather and hold these fragments? Who will, O who will?
Order, Order
‘INQUESTS INTO THE DEATHS ARISING
FROM THE FISHMONGERS’ HALL AND LONDON BRIDGE TERROR ATTACK: CASE MANAGEMENT’7
with asides, insertions, questions
and other patterns repeating
Begin with the facts: A convicted terrorist attacked and killed Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt at Fishmongers’ Hall on 29 November, 2019. The attacker [… ] was shot dead by police officers on London Bridge.
No: again.
A terrorist incarcerated in a high-security prison appeals his indeterminate sentence He will now be released automatically, in a fixed number of years, without parole board assessment
December 2018. He is released. He is living halfway and then alone under myriad restrictions. He had counterterrorism mentors the government contract abruptly ended. Months pass. No train stations, no trains no internet access, no trips to London, no level of security stops what happens next. The oversight of Multi-Agency Public Protection Arrangements (MAPPA) probation, police, counterterrorism, Prevent, Special Branch, MI5 who read creative writing, who read Cambridge University programme (there was none, post-release) and with bare discussion, and the risk downgraded from very high to high and no one exactly gives permission no one exactly assesses the risks
he takes the train to London for one day. 29 November, 2019.
Arrives at London Bridge to celebrate five years of Learning Together, a prison education programme.8 Taking university students into prisons to learn alongside incarcerated people. In minimum, medium and maximum facilities (call it high-security, Category A), learning Plato in Philosophy, the laws of probability, and creative writing.
The Justice asked the prison governor: did you consider the risks of putting people who were potentially violent, manipulative and predatory directly alongside potentially young students in a learning environment yes and the course began
No physical harm came to them there. The deep violence of the prison apparently held outside the writing room. The meeting of writing together considered low risk the violence of the prison where he was known as emir. The concentration on him and his masks the violence of the prison, the breaking the drug abuse, the harm the many serving long and life there the violence of the prison only seen in reflection the emphasis on counter-narrative on hope
He took part. He was enthusiastic, did more learning, became a mentor on the probability course he was released. He was welcomed / encouraged / writing / allowed to keep close to the education programme, it was considered a protective factor (there were no others) the only thing he had apart from the gym.
He sits through the morning. After the break, he straps knives to his hands, wears a fake bomb vest he made and murders two people at the event. He injures more. He is apprehended by citizens He is shot at twenty times by police on London Bridge.
No: again.
A British youth, who all the teachers liked, is bullied at school though tried to fit in. He is involved in racist incidents, and in violence turns recluse9 and is done with the place by age fourteen. At fifteen, as his sister’s house is raided by police, they find jihadi leaflets, and so on he faces local news cameras to say he aint no terrorist, that everyone around knows him. He goes to Pakistan for time and returns to gangs he never goes back to school and no one can corroborate those lost years whether he was excluded / expelled / just didn’t show up no one can state the details now ask how is it that
