Taneja writes that “his greatest skill was passing,” but this claim is unaccompanied by the kind of specific detail that might inform us of what that passing looked like. Yet aside from these broad strokes, the reader learns very little here about Khan. Taneja suggests that her and Khan’s life followed different pathways within the same problematic system, Khan’s funneling him toward radicalization and terrorism, hers toward academic success and Cambridge she became the teacher in the prison and he became the prisoner. Taneja recognizes that, as the daughter of Indian immigrants, she is interestingly positioned in her relation to Usman Khan, who was born in the UK of Pakistani descent, a “British Asian” like her who must have faced similar racist microagressions growing up in England. Taneja’s debut novel, We That Are Young, was a rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear set in India and Kashmir. Observations about the British response to the War on Terror mingle with theories about the prison industrial complex and literary critique. Taneja often slips into the second or third person, noting that “Trauma cannot be written, or survived, in the first person singular.” At times, the text itself is a collage of the words of others, incorporating in italics quotes from a number of feminist thinkers and Black Abolitionists, including Adrienne Rich, Audre Lorde, Sara Ahmed, and Mariame Kaba. Her inability to find language commensurate to the horror of the tragedy becomes both the subject and the method of the text. Taneja was not present at the event, having declined the invitation as she was busy preparing for an upcoming literary conference her absence at Fishmongers’ Hall that day is only one source of guilt that haunts her recent work of nonfiction dedicated to the fallout from that day, Aftermath.Īftermath is, by Taneja’s own admission, a “( postcolonial) fragmented essay.” Its early pages enact the immediate aftermath of trauma, giving us a series of similes and metaphors to try to evoke the initial shock of the news before concluding, “There is no syntax or simile to do justice to this, no metaphor.” As a writer, Taneja feels the failure of language in the face of horrific violence as a particular wound. Before he was fatally shot by police, he attacked five people and killed two teachers, both in their early twenties, Saskia Jones and Jack Merritt. During an intermission, Khan went to the bathroom and emerged with two knives strapped to his wrists. On November 29, 2019, Usman Khan, a former prisoner and one of Taneja’s former students, travelled to London to attend an event at Fishmongers’ Hall marking the fifth anniversary of Learning Together. For three years, Preti Taneja taught creative writing in a program overseen by Cambridge University called Learning Together, in which undergraduates travelled to a local high-security prison to study alongside prisoners.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |