Usman Khan was 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 one day, to attend an event marking
the fifth anniversary of a prison education program he participated
in. On November 29, 2019, he sat with others at Fishmongers’ Hall,
some of whom he knew. 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. That day, he killed two people: Saskia Jones and
Jack Merritt.
Preti
Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. Merritt
oversaw her program; 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 only mine. It belongs to many.”
In
this 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, she draws on
history, memory, and powerful poetic predecessors to reckon with the
systemic nature of atrocity. Blurring genre and form, Aftermath
is a profound attempt to regain trust after violence and to recapture
a politics of hope through a determined dream of abolition.
Aftermath
is part of the Undelivered Lectures series from Transit Books.
