Jasanoff explained, “As the book goes on, the wheels of justice effectively grind him down. He’s innocent but he ends up unable to prove that to the standards required by the court, the layered imperatives of pressure on the police to solve the case, and the racist disregard for finding the truth.”
Mohamed told the Booker Prize committee, “I knew I wanted to make the line between fact and fiction imperceptible.” This genre-bending blur between fiction and nonfiction fascinates Jasanoff, too. She teaches a popular Department of History graduate seminar at Harvard each year titled “Narrative History: Art, and Argument.” The course’s goal, she said, is to encourage students to practice ways of storytelling that go beyond some of the formulaic methods one might find in an academic journal article.
Jasanoff said she asked Mohamed to speak to the wider Harvard community because, “I think that bringing a novelist who is engaging with history will help us think about different ways to tell stories about the past.” She also expects that Mohamed will share how she first uncovered Mahmoud’s story and researched his life and community — one that until very recently never made it into European history textbooks.
Is it possible that at times fiction is actually a more truthful means of understanding historic events than the documents found in an historic archive? “In the fiction genre, we can find different ways to hear voices that have been potentially marginalized by more traditional methods of scholarly writing,” Jasanoff said. She explained that documents from an archive are filtered through the person who wrote them — more often than not, a colonial official or someone in a position of power. “We need to be more imaginative and open about the way we approach the archive,” she tells her students.
In Jasanoff’s own case, that rang true during the research process for her book “The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World,” which was awarded the 2018 Cundill History Prize for historical literature, and digs deeply into Conrad’s biography as a vehicle for understanding globalization and migration routes.
Interestingly, these themes intersect with those that Mohamed returns to again and again in her books, as she followed the Somali British sea merchants in her 2010 novel “Black Mamba Boy,” arguably an unofficial prequal to “The Fortune Men.” The protagonists’ struggles to belong and overcome discrimination in the era encompassing decolonization and the consolidation of the British Commonwealth of Nations echoes historic events closely.
Although “The Fortune Men” doesn’t reference current events, the comparisons are obvious. “That’s part of the strength of work like this. It’s not addressing present-day parallels overtly, but it’s giving you something to think about in the present,” Jasanoff said.