People casually toss around the phrase “bad juju” to indicate a malignant vibe or lousy luck. But for the young Nigerian women victimized by a human trafficker in 2016, their belief in the juju religion was a controlling force. In Cursed, presenter and journalist Femi Oke not only recounts an appalling story of women trafficked for sex but also explains how the power of juju was used to keep them in line.
Facing a grim life of poverty in Benin City and hearing tales of wealth and success about those who migrated to Europe, the five young women at the center of what became a groundbreaking international case were easy pickings for the formidable figure they knew as “Madam Sandra,” who promised to get them to Europe and find them work in return for 37,000 euros.
But not before they submitted to a harrowing ceremony performed by a juju priest, who made them strip and eat raw chicken hearts, cut them with razor blades, and cut off tufts of their pubic hair. Thus, they pledged their fealty to a goddess who would put a curse on them if they didn’t do Madam Sandra’s bidding.
After a horrific voyage that eventually led to Italy and Germany, the young women were installed as prostitutes, finding themselves effectively enslaved. They had no legitimate papers and no hope of paying down the sum Madam Sandra demanded, nor could they pay rent and living expenses. Between that and their fear of the curse, they were stuck.
Then one of them caught the attention of a German police investigator who became part of a multi-country network trying to rescue three of the women and bring down the trafficker.
In this unusually well-produced podcast, Oke interviews the important players in this saga, including the dedicated investigators, the three women (with whom Oke strikes up a nice rapport), the prosecutor, and the defense lawyer.
Thanks to wiretap audio and police interviews, we hear the voice of Josephine Iyamu herself, also known as Madam Sandra, who’d pulled off an amazing double life. In southeast London, she lived modestly and worked as a nurse; in Benin City, she ran a trafficking syndicate that paid for her huge, gated house and her career in local politics. A trial in Birmingham yielded her conviction in 2018 as the first person to be found guilty under a new British law called the Modern Slavery Act. Even juju couldn’t protect her from that.
In Cursed, presenter and journalist Femi Oke recounts an appalling story of women trafficked for sex.
The stormy Atlantic Ocean inspires a troubled artist and swallows up a few sins in a fine new novel by Paula Hawkins, who’s best known for her debut, The Girl on the Train. Three books later, she’s elevated her game with The Blue Hour, a disturbing, elegant, and psychologically probing inquiry into the final years of a troubled artist and the mess she left behind.
A rangy beauty with a splashy love life, Vanessa Chapman baffled the art world when she moved to the (fictional) Scottish island of Eris, inaccessible to the mainland half the day due to the tides. She became the Garbo of contemporary British art, preferring the freedom of isolation to the treachery of society. “The energy it takes to disguise my contempt could power a city,” writes Vanessa about the rich people she’s forced to make nice with.
When a human bone is discovered in one of her sculptures after her death, the museum to which she bequeathed her art faces a crisis. Her roguish ex-husband had disappeared years earlier, and they’re concerned that this news will stir up macabre gossip, so a curator travels to Eris to see what he can winkle out of Grace Haswell, a 60-ish retired doctor who was Vanessa’s companion and the executor of her estate. Plain and no-nonsense, Grace lives alone in Vanessa’s house, guarding the artist’s memory. She has tried to remain in the shadows, but the curator’s intrusion threatens to shed light on things better kept in the dark.
Hawkins writes knowledgeably about an artist’s life, capturing Vanessa’s stubborn unconventionality in slightly mad diary entries and describing both art-world shenanigans and the evolution of Vanessa’s work with equal fluency.
She mentions Daphne du Maurier early on, and some of Rebecca’s themes emerge here, such as Grace’s complete devotion to Vanessa, reminiscent of Mrs. Danvers’s obsession with Rebecca. Grace is mousy where Mrs. Danvers is imperious, but that shouldn’t be mistaken for weakness. Those who do are in for a surprise.
The stormy Atlantic Ocean inspires a troubled artist and swallows up a few sins in The Blue Hour, a fine new novel by Paula Hawkins.
If you’ve been on the fence about whether to invest the 107 minutes it takes to watch Wolfs, the Brad Pitt–George Clooney streamer that unfolds over the course of one snowy night in New York City, you might as well jump off. Is Jon Watts’s film worthy of these two effortlessly engaging movie stars who still have it? Maybe not. Do they deserve a more original and inspired vehicle but didn’t mind coasting on their gifts and easy charisma? Probably. But their presence, even in a lightweight Coen brothers/Tarantino knockoff, is enough to make Wolfs worthwhile.
Clooney and Pitt play two fixers who bump into each other in a luxury hotel room where the ill-advised tryst of a district attorney (Amy Ryan) with a college kid (Austin Abrams) has just ended with him in a bloody mess on top of a glass coffee table. Each man thought he was unique, a lone wolf, but Clooney’s character, there at the behest of the D.A., and Pitt’s character (both are nameless), called in by the hotel, discover they aren’t and reluctantly agree to work together to clean up the D.A’.s mess.
It gets complicated when they discover the body in the bag is still alive and was carrying drugs belonging to the Albanian Mafia, who have issues with the Croatians. Albanians, Croatians, potato, potahto … it doesn’t really matter. There’s a lot of shooting.
Abrams gives the suave veterans some manic kid energy to play off of as the three of them tear around the snowy city trying to stay alive and get rid of the drugs. There are jokes about reading glasses and tricks of the trade, with Pitt as the younger partner needling Clooney, who looks pretty silver-foxy in his black turtleneck sweater. There are no instantly iconic bits, but it’s a charming enough ride that reminds us why the entertainment gods made movie stars.
Lisa Henricksson reviews mystery books for AIR MAIL. She lives in New York City
