Newcastle University alumnus and host of The World Literature Podcast Dr. Ivan Stacy discusses his recent conversation with Preti Taneja, Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics.
He explains how 'Aftermath', Taneja’s award-winning work of creative non-fiction, asks us to consider the relationship between trauma and complicity.
Contents:
- What is 'Aftermath' about?
- What is complicity?
- What does Aftermath add to the discussion?
- Link between trauma and complicity
- About the Author
What is Aftermath about?
Winner of the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize and shortlisted for the 2023 British Book Awards Book of the Year in the Discover category, 'Aftermath' is a poetic interrogation of the language of terror, trauma, and grief.
Preti Taneja taught fiction writing in prison for three years. One of her students was Usman Khan, who was convicted of terrorism-related offences 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 programme he participated in. There, at Fishmongers' Hall, he committed an attack which killed two people.
Preti Taneja draws on history, memory, and public tragedy to capture a sense of trust and compassion after such violence, told through a minimalist non-fiction narrative which transcends genre and form.
What is complicity?
In 2020, I wrote a piece for this blog called ‘Complicity, and what fiction can tell us about it’ which described my PhD research at Newcastle University, since expanded and published as The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction (Lexington 2021).
As the book’s subtitle indicates, I argue that complicity often occurs as a result of failures to bear witness to wrongdoing, and our own contributions to it.
It is unlikely that many people wake up each morning with the intention or desire to be complicit with wrongdoing in any form, yet many – perhaps most – of us do indeed contribute to exploitation and injustice in various ways at some point in our lives.
The novels that I have read and written about tend to suggest that that one of the reasons why we do find ourselves complicit with, and in denial of, wrongdoing is that taking a non-complicit stance often involves actively challenging the social and professional structures by which we define ourselves. Doing so would therefore exact a heavy emotional toll, and for this reason complicity often occurs as a result of the desire to avoid traumatic experience.
What does 'Aftermath' add to the discussion?
Preti Taneja’s 'Aftermath' offers an important consideration of the relationship between trauma and complicity, as well as its direct subject matter, the terror attack at Fishmonger’s Hall in 2019 by Usman Khan, to whom Taneja had taught creative writing in prison as part of the Learning Together Programme run by Cambridge University.
A notable feature of the book is that it is not satisfied with immediate and easy attributions of cause and effect, and it in fact goes back to the structural violence of the Partition of India in its efforts to untangle the long multifarious threads that led to the atrocity, in all their complexity.
'When you’re writing out of a place of such acute trauma, sometimes the only way to really do justice to that is to allow the page to help you. You can't write a straight narrative.' Preti Taneja (The World Literature Podcast)
As fellow Newcastle University alumnus Arin Keeble has argued, 'Aftermath' is typical of a movement in literary representation of terrorism away from ‘event-based’ narratives and towards those that interrogate the way that longer histories and structures create the conditions for such atrocities to be committed.
Link between trauma and complicity
In my recent two-part interview with Taneja for The World Literature Podcast, we discussed the relationship between trauma and complicity.
One of the features of trauma is the repetition of the traumatic event, and this tends to occur on both an individual and collective level, although the psychological mechanisms are not necessarily the same. This repetition means that the structures of inequality and injustice that produce violence and trauma perpetuate themselves.
'By taking on individual trauma, you kind of lock yourself in shame, and that shame can often become so debilitating and so silencing that it can cause people to do such extreme things.' Preti Taneja (The World Literature Podcast)
On the other hand, for those who profit from, or at least exist comfortably in, those same structures, any recognition of this might itself involve an emotionally difficult reckoning.
For those complicit with or implicated in structural violence, it is the avoidance of trauma – the failures of witnessing mentioned above – that lead to the continued reproduction of these causes and conditions. In this way, systemic harms are perpetuated both by those who experience these and by those who try to retain their distance from them.
'One of the key things that links all of these things is silencing. The things we aren’t allowed to talk about. The things we’re repressed from talking about. The ways in which that silencing operates.' Preti Taneja (The World Literature Podcast)
The full interview, in two parts, can be watched on The World Literature YouTube channel.
About the Author
Professor Ivan Stacy completed his PhD in the School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics at Newcastle University from 2008-13. He is now Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University. He has taught in China, Thailand, Libya, South Korea, and Bhutan.
He is host of the World Literature Podcast, and his monograph, 'The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction' (Lexington Books) is available now.
Recommended for you:
- listen to part one and part two of The World Literature Podcast interview with Preti Tanjela
- find out more about author, Preti Taneja, Professor of World Literature and Creative Writing at Newcastle University
- explore Newcastle University’s School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics
- listen to the World Literature Podcast
- find out more about Ivan Stacy, Associate Professor in the School of Foreign Languages and Literature at Beijing Normal University
- read Ivan Stacy’s blog exploring ‘Complicity, and what fiction can tell us about it’
- discover Ivan Stacy’s monograph, 'The Complicit Text: Failures of Witnessing in Postwar Fiction' (Lexington Books)
