“The Fortune Men” by Nadifa Mohamed is 
a story that exists off the page. Nominated for 
the 2021 Booker Prize, “The Fortune Men” is 
based on true events, as Mohamed brings to light 
the wrongful conviction of Somali 29-year-old 
Mahmoud Hussein Mattan for the murder of 
Jewish shopkeeper, Lily Volpert. In the book, 
Mattan is referred to as ‘Mahmood,’ while Lily 
is renamed ‘Violet.’ Mattan was the last man to 
be hanged in Cardiff prison. “I wanted to make 
the line between fact and fiction imperceptible 
so [I] immersed myself in the minute details of 
Mahmood’s life so that I could almost think his 
thoughts,” said Mohamed in her Booker Prize 
Q&A. 
And that is exactly what she does. Leading up to 
the crime, we follow Mahmood as he goes through 
the motions of his everyday life. He begins at the 
Employment Exchange office, where Mohamed 
initially makes clear the racist and classist 
commentary that inform this story — “There is 
nothing worth trying for; none of the usual firms 
that can be relied upon to take coloured fellas are 
advertising” — before making his way to place bets 
at the racetrack. 
During these initial chapters, Mohamed 
intertwines the perspective of Violet Volacki, 
the shopkeeper who is later murdered; her sister, 
Diana; and Diana’s daughter, Grace. Mohamed 
includes only enough backstory for the reader to 
understand the history of the Volacki shop, opened 
by Violet’s father when he immigrated to Cardiff, 
and its prominence to the community. Everyone 
knew Violet, and she knew them; at her funeral, 
“there must have been more than two hundred 
mourners from all districts of Cardiff.” 
She was murdered in the shop after closing, 
having gone to answer the doorbell before settling 
down to eat with Diana and Grace. The latter 
remained in the adjoining dining room when 
Violet left to help the customer, each catching a 
brief glimpse of the man waiting outside the shop 
door: “A black shadow with a mouth of gold.” 
It was following Violet’s death, under the 
perspective of Diana, that I was first struck with 

the magnitude of Mohamed’s writing. “The tide 
of it all just pulling her in and pushing her out, the 
shipwreck slow and ongoing until maybe, one day, 
she will wash up on some distant, unknowable 
beach, hopefully with Grace still beside her.” 
Mohamed’s 
talent 
shines 
in 
profound, 
emotional moments of grief. Though I had wanted 
more of these heart-wrenching lines, I think 
their infrequent use was purposeful to the novel’s 
intention. While some aspects are more fictitious, 
the book is still conveying a true story, after all. 
In real life, we fail to speak in constant imagery 
and metaphor; in that sense, Mohamed strikes a 
delicate balance between these descriptive, almost 

lyrical moments and the more realistic accounts of 
trauma and injustice. 
After Violet’s death, the narration sticks to 
Mahmood’s perspective. Though there is little 
evidence beyond the general description of a 
“tall, coloured man,” Mahmood is arrested the 
day after the murder. The police try to pressure 
Mahmood into a confession, taking advantage 
of his limited English to create an intensely 
stressful environment: “Mahmood stumbles, his 
English is fracturing, words of Somali, Arabic, 
Hindi, Swahili and English clotting at once on his 
tongue.” 

The police also fail to read Mahmood his rights, 
specifically the fact that he can leave the station. 
The abuse of the police is portrayed repeatedly 
throughout the novel as they try to pin Mahmood 
for the crime. During the interrogation, Mohamed 
reveals the Chief Detective’s racist train of thought, 
demonstrating that catching the right man was 
less crucial than their desire to protect their own 
influence and power. 
Though “The Fortune of Men” is largely 
responsible for sharing Mahmoud Hussein 
Mattan’s story with a modern audience, much 
of this story is not unfamiliar. In an interview 
with The New York Times, Mohamed shares the 

following: “I’ve always seen the side of the state, 
and that’s probably why I was able to keep the 
interest in Mahmood Mattan’s story for all those 
years, because I knew this wasn’t anything that 
was changing quickly. Even now when I speak to 
the children in my family, and they talk about their 
experiences of racism, the way that the teachers 
talk to them or about them, you can see that they’re 
another generation that will have to carry on the 
struggle.”

4 — Wednesday, November 3, 2021 
Arts

Faith and injustice bloom in Nadifa Mohamed’s 
Booker-nominated ‘The Fortune Men’

LILLY PEARCE
Books Beat Editor

It’s the most wonderful time of the 
year. Fears come back from the dead and 
walk in the day. Goths thrive at midnight 
showings of “Rocky Horror” and vandals 
throw eggs at houses. And the Film Beat? 
We’re popping popcorn and crawling 
under blankets to watch some of our 
favorite scary (or just vaguely spooky) 
films. ’Tis the season for tricks and treats 
— whether we’re jumping in our skins or 
howling at the moon. Join us as we walk 
through films that remind us of the dark 
night of Halloween.
I think I was 11 the first time I 
watched “Jennifer’s Body.” I can’t be 
sure because I remember it through 
the kind of exhausted haze that only 
a middle or high school sleepover can 
induce. Through the struggle to keep 
my eyes open at one o’clock in the 
morning, trying to hide the fact that I 
usually went to bed at ten every night, I 
remember watching Megan Fox (“Night 
Teeth”) hover above a pool in a soaked, 
blood-stained white dress and elbow-
length gloves. I definitely remember 
a close-up shot of her and Amanda 
Seyfried’s 
(“Mank”) 
locked 
lips, 
lingering indulgently as they kissed, and 
I remember myself thinking, fleetingly, 
“This is making me feel a weird new 
feeling; I wonder what it could mean.”

Pretty much everything other than 
that was lost on me. I fell asleep right 
after the movie, and by the next morning, 
I’d basically forgotten I watched it at all. 
Aside from occasionally scrolling past 
that one screenshot of Fox holding a 
lighter’s flame to the end of her tongue 
when I ventured onto the emo side of 
Tumblr, I didn’t really interact with 
it again until April of this year when 
a couple of friends and I sat down to 
watch it with some cheap wine.
There are a handful of movies that fall 
into an incredibly niche genre for me 
that’s kind of hard to describe. They’re 
movies that I just know would have been 
incredibly formative had I seen them in 
my early teens. Maybe even more than 
the potential to have been formative, 
though, is that they somehow felt 
nostalgic to me upon first viewing as if I 
didn’t only get around to watching them 
in my early 20s. I connected to them 
immediately because they scratched 
an itch in a very particular part of my 
brain, so much so that it feels like I’ve 
always known them intimately. So far, 
I’ve only found three movies that fall 
into this category: “Frances Ha,” “But 
I’m a Cheerleader” and “Jennifer’s 
Body.”
It’s possible that I don’t watch enough 
horror movies to make this call, but 
as far as I know, there’s nothing like 
“Jennifer’s Body.” I’m sure there are a 
lot of movies that mix scares, gore and 

humor well, but Fox’s performance as 
Jennifer simply elevates everything. 
Jennifer is a Midwestern, late-aughts 
wannabe Kardashian, complete with 
the vocal fry, who delivers every single 
one-liner with a complete lack of self-
awareness and all of the confidence 
in the world. It makes all of the jokes 
feel like surprises. Every laugh it got 
out of me during that first rewatch 
was halfway between a laugh and an 
incredulous bark.
Take, 
for 
example, 
the 
climax 
of the movie: Jennifer and Needy 
fight in Jennifer’s bedroom. Needy’s 
brandishing a knife because she’s 
there to avenge her boyfriend, who the 
demon-possessed Jennifer killed to 
satiate her appetite for male flesh. The 
two fight, fall onto Jennifer’s bed in 
slow motion, and Needy stabs Jennifer 
in the chest. As she gasps and bleeds 
out, Jennifer croaks out quietly, “My tit 
…” These are her last words.
When the movie premiered back in 
2009, it was critically and commercially 
panned, but it’s since been revisited, 
reevaluated and redeemed as a “feminist 
cult classic.” I think of it as something of 
a rape-revenge film as well, the kind of 
movie that “Promising Young Woman” 
could only ever dream of being. Jennifer 
is killed as a virgin sacrifice by an indie 
band (yes, really) in search of fame and 
fortune, but because she’s not actually 
a virgin, she comes back as a possessed 

succubus with the insatiable urge to 
eat men. It’s easy to see why a movie 
like this would’ve been met with such 
resistance a decade ago, and why it’s so 
loved now. Women have always been 
angry, but now we’re louder about it.
The world wasn’t ready for “Jennifer’s 
Body” in its time, and, as much as I like 
to think otherwise, I can’t be sure that I 
would’ve been ready either. I suppose I 
can’t be too hard on myself about that, 
though. I was young, and I had a lot of 
internalized misogyny that would’ve 
made it hard, if not impossible, to like 
this movie. I probably would’ve found 
Jennifer grating, probably would’ve 

lied through my teeth and gushed with 
my friends about how hot Adam Brody 
(“Promising 
Young 
Woman”) 
was, 
probably would’ve walked away from it 
and then dismissed it outright as a bad 
movie.
So maybe I have to amend my earlier 
criteria 
for 
could’ve-been-formative 
movies because the reality is that I 
just wasn’t smart enough to enjoy 
“Jennifer’s Body” for the vast majority 
of my tween/teen years. Instead, I 
should say that, if I’d been able to fully 
appreciate them, movies like “Jennifer’s 
Body” would’ve helped me become a 
better person sooner.

Frights, Camera, Action: ‘Jennifer’s Body’

KATRINA STEBBINS
Daily Arts Writer

Design by Madison Grosvenor

Cover art for “The Fortune Men” owned by Viking.

The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com

David M. Dennison 
Collegiate Professor 
of Physics

QUESTS AND 
DISCOVERIES 
AT THE ENERGY 
FRONTIER

Thursday, November 4, 2021 | 4:00 p.m. | Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

LSA COLLEGIATE LECTURE

A public lecture and reception; you may attend in person or virtually. 
For more information, including the Zoom link, visit events.umich.
edu/event/84263 or call 734.615.6667.

JIANMING 
QIAN

A public lecture and reception; you may attend in person or 
virtually. For more information, including the Zoom link, visit 
events.umich.edu/event/84264 or call 734.615.6667.

Rhys Isaac Collegiate 
Professor of History
Susan 
Juster 

 Mumbling 
Masses and 
Jumbling 
Beads”

Wednesday, November 10 2021 | 4:00 p.m. | Weiser Hall, 10th Floor

LSA COLLEGIATE LECTURE

Finding Catholics 
in Early America

“

Read more at MichiganDaily.com

Yellow is not always the warm 
color everyone thinks it is. 
People always seem to assume 
that things that carry the color 
yellow automatically convey the 
spirit of the color: the warmth of 
the sun, the prosperity of coins, 
the sweetness of a ripe banana. 
Besides the fact that the sun is 
a blinding ball of heat, music 
made with this color possesses 
so much more than warmth. 
Like 
afternoon 
shadows, 
yellow covers a ground that is 
constantly shifting.
In “yellow is the color of 
her eyes” by Soccer Mommy, 
all of this yellow holds intense 
grief. It is the warmth of the 
sun, yes, but also her mother’s 
illness. When I think of yellow, 
I often picture it as a solid 
color block. My mind becomes 
a length of yellow, stretching 
out and wrapping over the 
insides of my eyes. But, as any 
painter will tell you, colors 
never 
exist 
as 
something 
defined by a singular word. 
Yellow is not one bright shade, 
providing a beach backdrop 
to everything. In this song, 
yellow ribbons are wrapped 
around her melancholy, tying 
everything together, gathering 
many emotions into one song as 
her mother’s illness fades into 
yellow.
Yellow is unexpectedly the 
color of loss. This is again the 
case with “Big Yellow Taxi” 
by Joni Mitchell (a woman 
determined to give her listeners 
a color palette). The song is 
upbeat, the color is specified, 
but the content is sad. It 
details someone, possibly a 
lover or father, leaving her 
unexpectedly in the middle of 
the night. Yellow and love have 
their fingers linked and their 
hair braided together, a mix at 
times goofy and at other times 
melancholic. 
Somehow, 
this 
song is both.
“Yellow Eyes” by Rayland 
Baxter 
carries 
mostly 
melancholy. It has the syrup 
of heartbreak in it, the kind 
so sad that it’s also kind of 
lovely. There is a kind of 
light 
engulfing 
the 
song, 
unclear 
whether 
from 
the 

sun or elsewhere. The song 
carries its subject tenderly, 
acknowledging that yellow is 
more breakable than we think.
It’s funny to think of a color as 
an object. How many different 
emotions can yellow objects 
convey? There is the slow drip 
of yellow-honeyed love in “Just 
Like Honey” by The Jesus and 
Mary Chain. It does not rush 
itself to you; it acknowledges 
that it is worth the wait.
Meanwhile, in “Yellow” by 
Myles Cameron, the romantic 
pair is suspended in a yellow 
hour, mangos hanging around 
them and daisies at their feet. 
And, of course, the classic 
“Yellow Submarine” by The 
Beatles 
submerges 
you 
in 
an ocean of pure weirdness. 
However, 
even 
this 
is 
not 
straightforward in its drug-
induced state. “Lucy In The 
Sky With Diamonds,” also by 
The Beatles, features yellow as 
well in its color-heavy lyrics. 
There is a swirling confusion 
added to the color. Unlike most 
confusions, 
there’s 
nothing 
ominous or worrying about 
them, but it does introduce 
an added layer to an already 
complex color.
“Yellow” 
by 
Coldplay 
is 
viewed as a top-tier love song, 
as evidenced by its recent 
incorporation 
into 
TikTok 
culture. People will post about 
their significant others to the 
tune of the song, answering the 
question, “Who’s your yellow?” 
To give someone a whole color, 
to allow them to fully take 
up its meaning, is a powerful 
thing. But in the song itself, the 
love is parasitic. When you give 
absolutely 
everything 
inside 
yourself to love, what is the 
point of separation between 
romance and breaking? When 
everything turns one color, does 
everything become the same?
There is an excitement to 
yellow — there is an excitement 
to any color — but does one want 
to experience love as the same 
shade?
The 
loophole 
of 
this, 
perhaps, is that yellow holds 
infinite things in its pockets. 
Surprisingly, yellow is rarely 
used to be the sun; yellow is 
specified as its own thing. It has 
a deep identity overwhelmingly 
its own.

Music in yellow: 
A shifting

ROSA SOFIA KAMINSKI
Daily Arts Writer

Design by Erin Shi