SWALLOWING NAILS
Aftermath by Preti Taneja
And Other StoriesApril 2022Selected by TANK
The prose of Preti Taneja – prize-winning author of We That Are Young (2017) – refuses to stay still. In Aftermath, Taneja moves between voices, forms and genres to write on and from within the language of grief, terror, trauma, violence and tragedy. Taking the story of convicted terrorist Usman Khan – who fatally stabbed Jack Merritt and Saskia Jones during a prisoner-rehabilitation conference in November 2019 – as its source, Aftermath is an attempt to recover a politics of hope through the restitutive and restorative possibilities of language.
It is a bright morning when the call comes. Everything becomes brighter: like a vision of a nuclear blast in a film. It is as if everything solid has broken into pieces. As if the world has cracked. It is a shivering, an unshakeable sickness. It feels like concrete in the stomach. Shattered and stark as ice on deep water, struck with a blade. Like being held under, lungs filling. Sorrow deep enough to drown in. And this is a failed attempt to say: it feels like being locked in a dark room, screaming. Alone and falling. The repetitive rhythm is not a glitch, it is an artefact of pain repeating. It feels like being constantly watched. It is an assault: it is a wailing. It is being forced into a nightmare without being allowed to sleep. It is everywhere, as if all the masks have dropped. It is living in the real and it is the remembered real. This is a shattering. A “textbook version” of trauma as an extreme cliché. The silence after an echo of a stone, pounding. It is begging: no one hearing. Like losing a mind while breathing and smiling. Like a hand around the throat. Forced deeper into the wreck of it. A rage. Like raging. This is the core of the atro-city. † The outside world turned inwards.
There is so much violence. It is mainlining butterflies. It is swallowing nails. It is being hollowed. Scraped out. As if saturated with a secret that must only pour from eyes. The wind exists only as pine trees, moving. Trust, the elixir, seeps from our bodies. Always too far away to feel. We cannot stand. There is just skin and hair and fragile bone. It is like being stabbed from the inside. Being held under: struggling, still. Not wanting to move. Holding out a hand, finding nothing. Losing any grip. Being interrogated by buildings, by streets, by your absence, the air. Standing in silence. What is left? It is a heart, broken.
There is no syntax or simile to do justice to this. No metaphor.
As if to speak would be more violence.
It was as if I had lost language / been forced / to the outer edge of words
Left with a body that even Antigone ‡
would refuse to hold in her arms
It is the immediate aftermath. I am living / at the centre / of a wound still fresh. Inside only silence. I have lost all sense of countable time and all respect for aesthetics or that which, Audre Lorde writes, pertains to things perceptible to the senses; that pertain to things material as opposed to things thinkable, the unthinkable has happened: it is here. I can only bear this body, these words heavy, in plea to others’ words as the I is not only mine it belongs to many
Ocean Vuong writes that metaphor in the mouths of survivors becomes a way to innovate around pain. But language locks in my throat. It is wrong to innovate around this pain. My limbs are frozen. Is it futile to dig for the roots of violence? I have nothing to dig with but my fingers, these primitive keys as words the only way in. Metaphor belongs to the Eurocentric sublime: it has no place in this brown skin (which has only ever been understood in relation to, as shadow is to light).
An event happens and happens and happens: this is a definition of trauma. Splintering trust in language. This is horror, and horror is piercing. This is terror, and it floods the synapses, freezing all response. Break to gesture. And the gesture of horror is hand over mouth. And the gesture of terror is the blade. And the gesture of trauma is hand over eyes. And the gesture of pain is head in hands. Do not see, do not speak, do not hear. There are acts of such vicious duplicity and damage they turn solid bodies into molten grief. ◉
† Taneja’s term refers both to the atrocity, as all-encompassing traumatic event, and the world of structural violence that exists, or sprawls, around the event. The word encompasses the idea that the nexus of trauma that exists around an act of violence is part of what issues it into existence.
‡ In Sophocles’ play of the same name, Antigone is condemned to death by Creon after contravening his orders to leave her brother, Polynices, unburied. She performs funeral rites for her brother’s body and covers him with a thin layer of earth, and is confined to a tomb to be buried alive.