Aftermath

Usman Khan was convicted of convicted of terrorism-related offenses at age 20, and sent to high security prison. He was released eight years later, and allowed to travel to London for an event marking the fifth anniversary of Learning Together, a prison education program he had participated in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmonger’s Hall, some of whom he called friends. Then he went to the restroom to retrieve the things he had hidden there: a fake bomb vest and two knives, which he taped to his wrists.

Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Jack Merritt, 25, who was killed in the attack, oversaw the program; Usman Khan was one of her students. It is the immediate aftermath, Taneja writes. ‘I am living at the centre of a wound still fresh.’ The I is not mine, it is ours.

In this bold and searching lament by the award-winning author of We That Are Young, Taneja interrogates the language of terror, trauma and grief; the fictions we believe and the voices we exclude. Contending with the pain of unspeakable loss set against public tragedy, Taneja draws on history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to contemplate the systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and recapture a politics of hope among the lives that many think have forfeited the right to be mourned.