THE AFTERMATH BOOK SERIES
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.
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