Aftermath, your second book, which won the Gordon Burn Prize, deals with the Fishmongers’ Hall attack in 2019. The perpetrator had attended a creative writing course that you had taught as part of a prison education programme and one of the victims, Jack Merritt, was a colleague. How did you approach this traumatic subject and what did writing it teach you?
Aftermath is the hardest thing I hope I’ll ever write. It began as fragments – notes made in the initial days and weeks after the attack about the intense complex grief of that time. There were those closest to the victims, then people, like me, who knew one or both victims and the perpetrator. Who had worked in the prison, or alongside those who died; or who had gone to university with them, or school – there were many currents to it all. I realised I could only approach the trauma through my own singular experience and relationship to what happened as a British-South Asian (Indian) writer and teacher of writing; by looking via narratives of violence, terrorism, saviourism at a history of structural discrimination and punishment, to try to place this event in a long context. It’s also a craft manual for writing about trauma. Writing it taught me again that there’s nothing words can’t do. Publishing it has reminded me how important it is to have nuanced public conversation about the relationship between state and individual violence: we don’t have it enough.
Our reviewer wrote: “Aftermath evokes the intensified suspicion cast upon the British and global Muslim populations in the wake of 9/11. It charts the alienation produced by a society wilfully ignorant of its imperial past, and which prefers to spend millions on incarceration, or on failed programmes to prevent “radicalisation” than on the provision of essentials for a worthwhile life. What does it mean to be Muslim in Britain under this Tory government?
I guess it means trying to live a full life full of joy and security and potential, while constantly being reminded in cultural and institutional life that you’re not considered a full citizen, or even fully human. The state sets up constant surveillance and forces a relentless, exhausting hypervigilance. There’s a sense of being othered, continuously; against a right to basic acceptance beyond everyday suspicion. That’s what my Muslim friends born in Britain now experience. For Musilms seeking shelter as refugees, there are no safe routes and a constant criminalisation and demonisation in public life. To really get answers to this question, read British Muslim women writers in Sabeena Akhtar’s edited collection, Cut From the Same Cloth? Or Sabba Khan’s intensely beautiful graphic novel, The Roles We Play, or Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan’s poetry or her brilliant critical work, Tangled in Terror. Her new book, Seeing for Ourselves: And Even Stranger Possibilities is out in September with Hajar Press: as with all their books, it’s a profoundly important read.
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Are there parallels with how the Irish in Britain were treated as a “suspect community” during the Troubles?
British colonial-era laws used in India were honed in Ireland first, and they still exist in the Indian penal code and constitution. These are laws that grant impunity to the army and police; to punish “radicals”, shut down resistance and instil fear. The current Hindu fascistic government now uses those laws to shut down dissent and criminalise and disenfranchise Indian Muslims and other minority groups; we see the same practices, more covertly and insidiously in England. Though the “suspects” or the technology might be different over time, the method of cruelty does not change much. The imperial state shape-shifts but it also lacks imagination; its patterns of violence repeat.
Our reviewer again: “Evolving a not-yet-existent form, Taneja weaves a mesmerising blend of recollection, theory, aphorism, poetry and, yes, fact.” Do you see yourself as an experimental writer?
The form in Aftermath is a conscious, careful act of craft, written to achieve a set of effects in a work that deals with history, trauma, memory, grief and the act of writing itself. The book is not evolving the form, the form exists there fully, and I wrote it. Children of first-generation immigrant parents are born experiments, and to be born an experiment is to write experimentally, making whole new worlds out of all the multitudes of histories, languages, cultures and experiences we carry.
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Your 2017 debut, We that Are Young, a reworking of King Lear set in modern India, won the Desmond Elliott Prize. Was it challenging or satisfying as a child of the diaspora to hold up a critical mirror to India?
The novel tracks the legacies of imperial violence in India via a divide-and-rule patriarchal culture that is as central to the play as it was to British policy for a hundred years there. So the book is not only holding up a critical mirror to contemporary India, but tracing how certain aspects of contemporary Indian society came to be, from partition in 1947 to today. The most devastating effects have been felt in Kashmir; the world’s most militarised zone, where the majority Muslim population have suffered sanctions, state-supported violence, torture and imprisonment for over seven decades. Using King Lear as a lens to bring those connections into focus, finding correlations to solve to the puzzle Shakespeare sets in terms of language, plot, themes and characters was satisfying. The challenge was writing away from the play’s big set pieces and into something absolutely right for the novel. In terms of the challenge of writing about India, being born in the diaspora didn’t come into it: actually, that helped. What to leave out was the main issue.
You are professor of world literature and creative writing at Newcastle University and have judged many prestigious prizes. What do you look for?
I love thematic courage and defiance, a sense of authority, linguistic confidence and playfulness, and especially stylistic control: all of it adding up to a take on the world that feels true to both its characters but also aware of absurdity and harm as well as our potential for compassion and tenderness. The book can be short or long; a monologue about a quiet life, or polyvocal in the city, any genre, time or setting, but fearlessness is probably how I’d describe it best.
You’ve been a journalist and a successful screenwriter. Does this feed into your books?
I was a terrible journalist; although I trained as one, it was so I could work in writing. It wasn’t a world I could thrive in. It did teach me how to interview people, how to find my way into situations and places meant to be closed to me, like border crossings, army camps and certain elite spaces; it also trained me to work with first-hand research, witness statements, public records and so on. That experience feeds into the ethics I try to bring to my writing: not to appropriate but to find a form that allows for agency, that shows the workings of authorial doubt.
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What projects are you working on?
I’m working on two new books, a novel and a connected set of interviews. This is the project that’s been waiting for me for the longest time, I think I finally might be ready for it.
Have you ever made a literary pilgrimage?
I was in Paris a few years ago and came upon Gertrude Stein’s statue there. There’s a plaque on the wall commemorating her, and I was turning over as I walked what it meant to be read, misread or considered either remarkable and/or unreadable, remembered or lost. Everything cleared in my mind when I reached Gertrude: it felt like my feet had led me to her.
What is the best writing advice you have heard?
Just do your work: only you can.
Who do you admire the most?
I admire people who stand up for others and make space for them: who share their privilege and validation, their own safety with those who don’t have that. Who do it because it’s right, not because they expect something back. In the literary world I’m lucky enough to know a very few people like that.
You are supreme ruler for a day. Which law do you pass or abolish?
I’d abolish the supreme ruler and all the laws and structures that support it.
What current book, film and podcast would you recommend?
Book: The Penguin Book of Indian Poets, ed Jeet Thayil (2022); Film: Everything, Everywhere, All At Once; Podcast: The Trojan Horse Affair, hosted by Hamza Syed and Brian Reed for the Serial podcast.
Which public event affected you most?
Recently, the Fishmongers’ Hall attack. It shattered so much and completely changed me.
The most remarkable place you have visited?
Srinagar, Kashmir.
Your most treasured possession?
The diary my mother wrote for me in secret in my early 20s, in the years before she died.
What is the most beautiful book that you own?
Hers. In the late 1970s and early 1980s as a young mother and immigrant in England, with no writing experience or connections in publishing, she found an editor through her own tenacity, and went on to write eight cookery books. They are full of her voice, her recipes, her love for flavours and ingredients, and for communicating the rich variety of Indian food culture to the non-Indian readership of that time, whose tastebuds weren’t familiar with that world.
Which writers, living or dead, would you invite to your dream dinner party?
Toni Morrison, Gina Apostol, Kate Briggs, Claudia Rankine, Mahasweta Devi, Omar El Akkad, Eley Williams, Karthika Naïr and Niven Govinden. How big is the table?
The best and worst things about where you live?
The food culture in Newcastle is outstanding, as is the artistic life and live music. A current longing for me is for more independent bookshops in the city centre, although the excellent Forum Books has a concession in the Biscuit Factory gallery. I like my city independent bookshops Edinburgh-style: radical, beautifully curated, and open every night of the week until at least 9pm.
What is your favourite quotation?
“Definitions belong to the definers, not the defined.” (Toni Morrison)
Who is your favourite fictional character?
Jean Rhys’s Antoinette in Wide Sargasso Sea.
A book to make me laugh?
The Sellout by Paul Beatty.
A book that might move me to tears?
Raghu Karnad’s The Farthest Field, about three young Indian soldiers who fought in Burma in the British army in the second World War. I read it recently: it is so beautifully written, and very moving. I rarely say this, but I couldn’t put it down.
Preti Taneja was shortlisted for Discover Book of the Year at the British Book Awards 2023
