The kernel of this book is that the author taught fiction writing in a prison in the UK for three years and one of her students, after being released, came to a celebration of the program and murdered two of the teachers (the Fishmongers’ Hall attack). I wanted to read it, in part,* because I have also taught in a prison and am interested in how people write about that experience — but this is of course something else, something much harder to grapple with.
The ad copy for the book describes it as a lament, which is right, I think. But it’s not what you might expect, or maybe it’s exactly what you might expect: a searching meditation on the profound violence of structural racism and the prison system, and a utopian longing for an ethics of love; threaded with the belief that writing matters, somehow, in spite of it all.
One thing I hadn’t really expected or thought about was that it’s fundamentally about the UK, and so the structural issues, the specific forms of racism, are somewhat different — it’s not that issues of empire and colonialism, especially post-9/11, don’t apply to the US, of course, it’s just that they’re not quite the same. Another thing is that Preti Taneja was teaching fiction writing, whereas I was teaching literature. The kind of community that generates, I was realizing, is really quite different. Although discussions about books can and do involve vulnerability and intimacy, there is also a certain distance, a way that the conversation is refracted through the text under consideration, de-personalized. On the other hand, there were no guards in the room when I was teaching, which probably also changes the dynamic. But I never read anything by the guys I taught until the pandemic, when they wrote me letters with their thoughts about the final portions of the Iliad, which lockdown prevented us from discussing in person. I felt like I got to know them in a totally new way, reading those letters (even the handwriting!).
I’m writing more about myself than I am about the book, but funnily enough, one last aspect of the book that surprised me is that it’s so much about Preti Taneja herself, particularly in the first third or so. I’m not saying that it’s narcissistic or navel-gazing, not at all. I think, I suspect? that it’s so deeply personal because there is something about the experience of working in a prison that throws you into an intellectual confrontation with the society you live in, and yourself within it. And cataclysmic tragedy heightens that necessity. I don’t know. It’s difficult for me to write about this stuff, and indeed, one senses that it is almost unbearably difficult for Taneja as well.
Aftermath is a really profound and powerful book, is my point. In mourning a palimpsest of harms that inextricably mingle the individual and the social, it’s a really potent meditation on the world we live in. But it’s also a visceral account of grief, one that continues to echo in my mind.
*Also in part because it’s a Transit Books Undelivered Lecture — I loved Mariana Oliver’s Migratory Birds and am really looking forward to reading Namwali Serpell’s Stranger Faces; at this point I think it’s probably a safe bet to just assume that they’re all terrific?
Kasia Reads 