Aftermath
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $9.99
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- $9.99
Publisher Description
"Stunning... poetic, urgent. [Taneja] turns a critical lens toward the way language shapes violence, suggesting that 'power tells a story to sustain itself, it has no empathy for those it harms.'”—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review
Usman Khan was convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for one day, to attend an event marking the fifth anniversary of a prison education program he participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers’ Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt.
Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt oversaw her program; Khan was one of her students. “It is the immediate aftermath,” Taneja writes. “’I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.’ The I is not only mine. It belongs to many.”
In this searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, she draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.
Aftermath is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Novelist Taneja (We That Are Young) explores colonialism, violence, and grief in this stunning experimental collection. Taneja taught creative writing for three years at a prison in Britain, until one of her students, Usman Kahn, went on to kill two people after his release. She digs into her subsequent grief and places it within the context of capitalism, white supremacy, and terrorism. "There is a hierarchy to grief," she suggests in "Disenfranchised grief," while in an essay titled "An event happens and," she writes "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." In "Violence as trauma as form," meanwhile, she wishes for "a different map... other words." Taneja writes with clarity, depth, and specificity about the role of writing as a source of survival and power, while remaining blunt and clear-eyed about the moments when words fail. She also turns a critical lens toward the way language shapes violence, suggesting in the epilogue that "Power tells a story to sustain itself, it has no empathy for those it harms." This poetic, urgent, and self-reflective work will delight fans of Valeria Luiselli's Tell Me How It Ends and Claudia Rankine's Citizen.
