Aftermath by Preti Taneja: Terror attack recalled for a deeper purpose

It’s easy to be suspicious of this book. It centres on the London Fishmongers’ Hall attack of November 2019, when Usman Khan, a paroled terrorism convict, stabbed five people at a conference on offender rehabilitation, killing two of them. Both of those who died, Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones, were involved in the co-ordination of Learning Together, a programme devised at Cambridge University that offers courses taken jointly by college students and prisoners.

Khan had been a participant in one of the creative writing classes taught at Whitemoor Prison by British novelist Preti Taneja. Invited to the conference, Taneja happened not to attend. There’s no reason to doubt her conclusion that Khan “would have killed any person associated with prison that he could reach that day”, or the overwhelming grief precipitated by the event.

What might prompt misgiving is the ubiquity, in contemporary culture, of the “trauma” memoir, and the sense that this tragedy makes sensational material. An initial impression of pretentiousness in the writing may also induce reservations. But Taneja’s subject, as it turns out, is “trust” itself. To the first statement in this review, the book would pose the question: “easy for whom?”

“The brown female voice,” Taneja writes, “is one we are not taught to hear, and so we cannot feel for.” 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.

“It struck me again that my country has so much to admit,” Taneja writes, a recurrence of observation that “the Irish”, who have their own walk-on role in her narrative, will understand. “Trust” is an attitude demanded by literary genres as much as institutions. Evolving a not-yet-existent form, Taneja weaves a mesmerising blend of recollection, theory, aphorism, poetry and, yes, fact.

At times, her prose approaches the effect of a work she is rewriting, Antigone: appearing in gaps and fragments, delicate like the flowers that at the end pay tribute to Saskia and Jack; bearing the shock of ancient vibrancy made new.