Revisiting Trauma and Recorrecting the Damage: A Study of Nadifa Mohamed's 'The Fortune Men'

Abstract

Aim/Thesis: Nadifa Mohamed's ‘The Fortune Men,’ Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, is an intriguing novel about an ordinary criminal in Cardiff who, after being falsely accused of murder in 1952, is the last individual to be executed there. The novel tells the real-life story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor in Wales who was falsely accused and hanged in 1952 for the murder of a shopkeeper.

For Mohamed, who was born in Somalia but grew up in England, writing “The Fortune Men” was “cathartic,” she said, an opportunity to return to her father’s world as well as a way of processing the death of one of her uncles, who was killed outside his shop in Hargeisa. It underscores the complex interplay between colloquial practices, institutional histories, and discursive structures that shape individual lives, as seen through the lens of categories like madness, pharmaceutical use, migrant households, and failing social services. This particular text sheds light on how the culture and the structures of society can subjugate persons like Mattan and reduce their existence to a state of social death in which their circumstances are rarely comprehended or explained as the result of structural factors but are rather seen as self-inflicted. This narrative also allows the author to raise and discuss the methodological, ethical, and conceptual issues that anthropologists encounter in the field. It highlights the importance of affirming the personal narratives of such persons as well as documenting the social structures that perpetuate their marginalization. The present paper will study the Mattan narrative from the perspective of trauma revisionist writing and will emphasize the need to listen to the subject’s perspective while being able to critically evaluate the structures that govern their lives – as is the revisionist endeavor to find the link between the individual and society when studying human variation and social relations.

The research aims to confirm whether Trauma revisioning helps alleviate the pain or if it is a historical injustice inflicted on a particular community, can we reclaim and re-correct the damage and set the narrative right through revisiting?

Methods: The subjects of the study are cultural and social texts from Pre- and post-colonial times in Somalia. Nadifa Mohamed’s text ‘The Fortune Men’ will be analyzed in the larger context of Somalian Colonization by England and Italy and the subsequent racial as well as personal trauma. An in-depth textual analysis will be conducted with the application of Maurice Halbwachs' theory on cultural memory and the theory of Cognitive liberation in the context of trauma revisionist narratives.
Results: The present paper will analyze the complex interplay between colonial practices, institutional histories, and discursive structures that shape individual lives, as seen through the lens of categories like Colonial Trauma, Racism, madness, pharmaceutical use, migrant households, and failing social services. It will show how the cultural hegemony and the structures of society can subjugate persons like Mattan and reduce their existence to a state of social death in which their circumstances are rarely comprehended or explained as the result of structural factors but are rather seen as self-inflicted. It highlights the importance of affirming the personal narratives of such persons as well as documenting the social structures that perpetuate their marginalization.
Conclusions: Nadifa Mohamed's ‘The Fortune Men,’ Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize, is an intriguing novel about an ordinary criminal in Cardiff who, after being falsely accused of murder in 1952, is the last individual to be executed there. The present paper will study the Mattan narrative from the perspective of trauma revisionist writing and will emphasize the need to listen to the subject’s perspective while being able to critically evaluate the structures that govern their lives – as is the revisionist endeavor to find the link between the individual and society when studying human variation and social relations.

Keywords: Trauma, Revisionist Writing, Subversion, Racism, cultural Memory