The Fortune Men

Nadifa Mohamed's Booker longlisted novel is my favourite for the prize, and I enjoyed it even more than the Ishiguro novel that also appears on the list.  Set in Cardiff, we follow the lives of Mahmood who is accused of a murder he did not commit, and the lives of a shopkeeper and her family, in the aftermath of the shopkeeper's murder.  The thing I take from this novel has overwhelmingly to do with race, and the spaces in which others are judged according to dominant and hegemonic norms of the coloniser.  

The Fortune Men is a postcolonial novel that examines the impacts and ongoing effects of damaging colonial legacies on one man's life and family. Critically, Mahmood has married a Welsh woman, a fact that he believes has led to his harsh treatment by the police and the witnesses they call in Mahmood's trial. It is also a tragedy in the sense that the outcomes have a fatalistic yet entirely avoidable (in the sense of possible worlds in which Mahmood's innocence would have been recognised), yet not by hair-thin margins.  Mahmood's fate is a brutally predetermined outcome as we see by the actions of individual police as well as institutional sense of generalised policing and surveillance of race as a whole in postwar Wales and England.  

We are there with Mahmood at the end when he loses all hope, then regains it, and loses it again as his hopes fade and both appeals and pardons fail. His wife and children seemingly remain loyal and yet they feel very far away, even through visits to the jail, which is situated only across the street from the family residence.  One of the most touching scenes is when Mahmood arranges for his family to stand at the edge of their property so that he can see them and signal to them that while he cannot be with them, he is ok.  As the action moves forward we increasingly see how not ok Mahmood is, and how the various institutions with which he interacts are designed to keep him in a state of agitated subjugation.

We also go into the lives of the family members of the murdered shopkeeper, and we are helped into sympathies with the white people populating this novel. But critically we see that race is itself a tool of oppression, one that is used to its full extent and power by those that wield it, including those whose loss of a sister or aunt, feel so poignantly.  The reader here is ineluctably drawn to think about recent events that have led to raised consciousness around race and critical race theory, and the Black Lives Matter activities and visibilities that have circulated on various media platforms recently.  From the 1950s in Cardiff, with its Somali and West Indian residents; to present day US; these would seem to be overly wide in time and space, and yet, it is race that brings them together, and this novel is therefore both very timely and very much a toolbox for thinking about race, space, and power in new ways.  

It is also a beautifully written novel that is full of poetry of the places described from Somalian cities of Mahmood's earliest years; to the alternatingly bright and dreary Cardiff byways and docks in which the primary action of the novel occurs. There is such depth in the characterisation and sympathy that loses none of its effect in the critical treatment of how the prisoner is treated; of how he has lived his life imperfectly and yet is so much more believable for all that: Mahmood is deeply flawed and very human; the breadth of his knowledge of the world outstrips those whose narrow circumscribed lives end up stripping him of his humanity, of his intelligence, his sense of self. This is the tragedy at the heart of British life, and here is a unique evocation of how the tragedy continues to play out through and despite complexities of class, race, and their intersections.