Preti Taneja - Aftermath

Preti Taneja

Published by Transit Books

2301 Telegraph Avenue, Oakland, California 94612

www.transitbooks.org

Copyright Preti Taneja, 2021

ISBN: 978-1-945492-54-9 (paperback) | 978-1-945492-58-7 (ebook)

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CONTROL NUMBER: 2021942663

COVER DESIGN

Anna Morrison

TYPESETTING

Justin Carder

DISTRIBUTED BY

Consortium Book Sales & Distribution

(800) 283-3572 | cbsd.com

Printed in the United States of America

9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

How long

can I lament

with this depressed

heart and soul

how long

can I remain

a sad autumn

ever since my grief

has shed my leaves

the entire space

of my soul

is burning in agony

how long can I

hide the flames

wanting to rise

out of this fire

how long can one suffer

the pain of hatred

of another human

a friend behaving like an enemy

with a broken heart

how much more

can I take the message

from body to soul

I believe in love(and I know you do too)

I swear by love

believe me my love

how long

like a prisoner of grief

can I beg for mercy

you know Im not

a piece of rock or steel

but hearing my story

even water will become

as tense as a stone

if I can only recount

the story of my life

right out of my body

flames will grow

Fountain of Fire, Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273)

TRANSLATED BY Nader Khalili

with Nick Cave refrain

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 painrepeating. 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 clich. 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. the unthinkable has happened: it is here. I can only bear this body, these wordsheavy, in plea to others wordsas the I is not only mineit 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.

In moments of deep loss we become as children, trained to seek comfort in the old fairy tales: the fundamental good versus the fundamental evil. We crave the redemptive hope of the heros journeyin the old tradition of linear storyfrom when we are born we are immersedin this the dominant mythic; we wait for someone to deliver us

But my skin and tongue are dark. My mind made multitudes by history. Memory as paniwater as anagram of pain. I experience love through a porous border. I apprehend faith as the lack of it. Trust only as its loss. The body is grief, the body is guilt, the body is doubt, the body is the stateI must write it. I cannot skin myself. I am shattered: cannot put the pieces down. Cannot speak, cannot ask you to listen. It would be too much to hope for as the event has happened, and when hearing is a form of feeling.

Is it easier to write fiction, to represent?

An event happens and happens and happens, as wave after wave, breaking us. My blood turns on itself. I have always known whiteness / as splitting. I was schooled to know brownness as shame. The world as experienced keeps turning. I know that the quiet ones are inside us, waiting, ferocious and bound to harm.

Something has happened: I no longer believe in the potential of words to resist, to heal or to sing the horizon.

This is the heart of the country of radical doubt: the atro-city called home.

Its rules were written in the beginning. The ivory towers stare straight ahead. Their dizzying heights demand we do not look down. To the unsurvivable depths. Power covers its pale stonered as the autumn ivy cultivated to hidethe crumbling bricks. Its delighted beauty rises from these foundations: the organising fictions of gender and race. A class system: education, literature as structural harm. Cracking and breaking: law and order, cement of the atro-city walls. Some of its subjects are citizens, and all of us are its subjects.