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Aftermath: Radical Doubt; Radical Hope
Preti Taneja*†
taneja.preti@gmail.com
Abstract
Preti Taneja taught creative writing as part of Learning Together, Cambridge University’s prison education programme which took students into high-security prison to learn alongside incarcerated men. One of her first prison students was Usman Khan. Released on licence two years later, he went on to perpetrate the 2019 London Bridge terror attack in which Taneja’s Learning Together colleague Jack Merritt, and Saskia Jones were killed.
Aftermath is Taneja’s 2021 award-winning work of abolitionist, lyric non-fiction about the attack: a searching lament on institutional violence and structural harm, Islamophobia, trauma and terror, prison and grief. This article presents two extracts from parts one and three of the book, Radical Doubt and Radical Hope, which were included in Taneja’s 2022 British Academy Lecture at the University of Leeds.
Keywords
terrorprisongriefnon-fictionabolitionradicalCambridge UniversitylyricalhopeIntroduction
Aftermath 1 (Transit / And Other Stories, 2021) is a searching lament on trauma, terror, prison and grief, following the London Bridge terror attack in 2019, perpetrated by Usman Khan. Convicted of terrorism-related offences 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 Cambridge University’s prison education programme, Learning Together, which he had participated in while incarcerated. On 29 November 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers’ Hall, some of whom he knew. Then he went to the bathroom 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 young people: Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. Preti Taneja taught creative writing at HMP Whitemoor for Learning Together. Jack Merritt was her programme coordinator. In her first year of teaching, Usman Khan was one of her students.
Aftermath 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, Taneja 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.
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, inevitably. 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 as pine trees, moving. As if senses exist to lie. Trust, the elixir, seeps from our bodies. Always too far away to feel. We cannot stand. There is only 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, just. 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 edge 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. (The words are from the poet Octavio Paz.) Inside only silence. I have lost all sense of countable time and all respect for aesthetics, which, Audre Lorde writes, pertains to things perceptible to the senses, which pertains 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 feeling4.
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 sovereignty 5
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?
[…]
– Wendy Trevino, Juliana Spahr, Tim Kreiner, Joshua Clover, Chris Chen and Jasper Bernes.7
IN PRISON, THE LACK OF RESOURCES IMPROVES ONE’S CREATIVITY
It is early November 2019. Her writing seminar is now in its third year, the semester is almost done. She decides to set Ahmet Altan’s ‘Voyage Around My Cell’, a chapter from his prison memoir, I Will Never See The World Again, in translation by Yasemin Çongar.8 Altan, the renowned Turkish writer and journalist, was arrested in 2016 on allegations of spreading subliminal messages announcing a military coup, on television. He was charged with attempting to overthrow the national order and interfering with the work of the national assembly and the government. He was given a life sentence in 2018 and subsequently tried on Turkey’s terrorism charges, often used to convict high-profile people speaking against the state. He was finally released after three years.9 He is the category of prison-writer people campaign for, listen to. The bona fide prisoner of the pen.
She knows that so much of what he has to say in this piece might have been written by one of the men she teaches. The description of the dimensions of the cell. An invitation in, to think about place as feeling. The question of hours locked down. An ability to think about time as a condition for reflection. The details of materiality: the plastic trestle table, the stackable chairs. A way to show how the objective correlative might work for difficult emotions. The things that become precious, when those are all there are.
The writing is mostly sparse, as prison itself. The students might also have something to say about the moving descriptions of abundance and scarcity, Altan’s observation that in prison, the lack of resources improves one’s creativity. It’s something she has thought about before, in another discipline: how the monastic cell allows, even encourages the inner life to become consuming; how the writer craves solitude yet is constantly open to distractions, called research in this world. Writing seminars for beginners often start with a conversation about where ideas come from. The cells.
Altan muses about the value of writing as an exercise during incarceration. The possibility of forgetting about everything for a while, about prison itself; indignity. Like all writers, I want both to forget and to be remembered, Altan says. Here is the bind of this art, and perhaps of the prison writer’s condition in the strange room. Altan writes:
I throw myself into unachievable dreams. Those are the dreams where I can alter time and space, where I can be in the century and the age of my choosing. It is a magical jungle filled with pleasure and games. There I take life and mould it into a different shape every day.
This is the kind of freedom she thinks that these writers get from those few hours spent writing together. With a group of young students who make the journey from the heart of the atro-city to what society considers its underworld, to work alongside them. And the same happens to them. The writers in her class of 2019 wrote their own, ‘Voyage Around My Cell’ pieces. All of them considered, crafted, fresh interpretations on the theme. Some of the men argued with Altan. He got it wrong. The cell can be a solace, one said, from the rest of the prison; offering some kind of dignity when it is hard to hold to inside oneself; even while a sentence lasts into years. Trying to capture the sense of something, and release the joy of writing in the capture: in form.
The prison courtyard here is quite sparse, she understands. In Altan’s piece, which contains some whimsy, (the kind rarely expressed by her students,) courting birds drop pale flowers on the prison yard as they fly overhead and the prisoners pick them up and take them inside. The next morning, the wardens come in and take them away. Flowers are forbidden in the prison.
Reading those words now, she is reminded of the last time she saw Usman Khan. In the visitor’s room at HMP Whitemoor, in March 2018, at the end of course celebration for that year’s writing seminars. It was a bright day, at which all the graduating writers read their work to guests, some with pride, some nervously. One reminded the audience, his voice shaking, that the last time he had read in front of a crowd, he had been in court.
Each student had been allowed to invite a guest. Friends, family members, University representatives and a Member of Parliament mingled with the men. Characteristic of the prison’s faith in the education programme it was allowed that tulips could be brought in to decorate the tables of the meeting room. At the close of the day, everyone took a bunch, and offered stems to each other. As we left, visitors reclaimed the prisoners’ flowers, and took them home with us.
References
AhmedS. (2017), Living a Feminist Life (London, Duke University Press). https://doi.org/10.1515/9780822373377
AltanA. (2018), I Will Never See the World Again (London, Granta Books) (trans. Yasemin Çongar).
FloodA. (6 November 2019), ‘Jailed Turkish author Ahmet Altan freed after three years’, The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/06/jailed-turkish-author-ahmet-altan-freed-after-three-years
KlineD. (14 April 2021), Racism, Islamophobia, Antisemitism: Othering and the Weakness of Christian Identity, panel discussion, Blavatnik School of Government, Oxford University, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBa_x_jfxxY [accessed 15 April, 2021].
RodriguezM.A. (2020), Audre Lorde: Dream of Europe, Selected Seminars and Interviews, 1984–1992 (Chicago IL, Kenning Editions).
TrevinoW., SpahrJ., KreinerT., CloverJ., ChenC. & BernesJ. (2015), ‘Responding to “What is Literary Activism”’, Poetry Foundation. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet-books/2015/08/responding-towhat-is-literary-activism
VuongO. (1 October 2019), ‘The 10 books I needed to write my novel’, LitHub, https://lithub.com/ocean-vuong-the-10-books-i-needed-to-write-my-novel/ [accessed 4 July, 2020].
1
Aftermath was a Book of the Year in the New Yorker, the New Statesman and The White Review, and was shortlisted for a British Book of the Year award. Max Porter called it a ‘landmark in British narrative non-fiction.’ David Merritt, whose son Jack Merritt was killed in the attack, said, ‘Aftermath is written from the heart. I am both impressed by it and so grateful that someone has tried to make some sense of the many issues surrounding what happened at Fishmongers’ Hall. There is so much truth in this slim volume.’ Aftermath is the 2022 winner of the Gordon Burn Prize, awarded for literature that is ‘fearless in ambition and execution’.
2
Lorde in Rodriguez (2020: 90).
4
Lorde in Rodriguez (2020: 77).
6
Ahmed (2017: 14).
Cite
DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a14
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
Issue: Issue 1 & 2
Article view count: 168
Article download count: 7
Copyright statement
© The author(s) 2024. This is an open access article licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International LicenseCite this article
Taneja, P. (2024), ‘Aftermath: Radical Doubt; Radical Hope’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a14 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a14Crossref
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Received
October 2022
Accepted
May 2023
Published
July 2023
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