On the first page of Isabella Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost, Sonia Nasir arrives at an airport and passes through security. For Sonia, who is Palestinian, this is no ordinary border crossing. As she expects, she is interrogated and inspected:
They particularly wanted to know about my family links to the place, and I repeated four times that my sister lived here but that I personally hadn’t returned in eleven years. Why? they kept asking. I had no explanation. At points the exchange seemed to come bizarrely close to them insisting on my civic rights. Of course they were only trying to unnerve me. Why does your sister have citizenship and you don’t? Right place right time, I shrugged. I didn’t want to bring up my mother…. Surely this isn’t necessary, I said in a haughty voice while a third woman officer ran her detector over my bare flesh, as though I might have hidden something under my skin, and dawdled over the straps of my bra and knickers, which I had matched in preparation, blue lace, and as she knelt before my crotch the laughter began to quiver in my stomach. I put my clothes back on, surprised by how hard I was shaking, and ten minutes later they called me to a booth, where a tall man I hadn’t seen before gave me my passport and told me I was free to enter, Welcome to Israel.
I was immediately taken by Sonia’s nervous, clever, swerving voice—the way her haughtiness gave way, in the next sentence, to her shaking. But what really got me was the mention of color-coordinated underwear worn in anticipation of a strip search—a small act of self-defensive pride. It is the kind of detail that one finds on every page of Enter Ghost and that brings to life this complex, suspenseful story of Palestinian homecoming.
Hammad’s first novel, The Parisian, was a sweeping historical saga set in pre-1948 Europe and Palestine and based on the life of her grandfather. Robyn Creswell described it in these pages as having “a defiantly old-fashioned scope and pace.”1 Enter Ghost, on the other hand, is a contemporary story, a satisfying tangle of professional, familial, and romantic intrigue, and an exploration of the meaning of political commitment and artistic ambition.
Its narrator is a woman who is very sympathetic yet occasionally frustrating. Sonia is attractive, intelligent, a bit vain; kind, impulsive, prickly; desirous of attention but given to insecurity. She is perceptive enough to make many sharp observations and just blind enough to fall prey to various misunderstandings. When the story opens, Sonia is at loose ends—an actress in her late thirties, living in London, whose career has had some high points but hasn’t quite taken off. She is still passionate about acting but worried about how long she will be able to go on doing it, and she is also recovering from a bruising love affair with an older married director. She has come to Israel for the summer to visit her older sister, Haneen, who lives in Haifa.
It turns out that Haneen is the only member of the Nasir family left there. The loss of Haifa—a beautiful seaside city with a thriving port—stands out as a particular shock and tragedy for Palestinians even among the many other losses of the Nakba. On April 21, 1948, a few weeks before the British Mandate for Palestine was set to expire, British troops suddenly withdrew. Jewish militias (who allegedly were working in concert with the British and who controlled high points in the city) used a combination of military tactics and psychological terror to drive Haifa’s Arab residents into a panicked exodus from their homes. Crowds stampeded downhill to the port, where they were evacuated by British ships. By July 1948 fewer than 4,000 of the city’s nearly 70,000 Palestinian residents remained.
Sonia and Haneen’s paternal grandparents were among those who stayed. The girls grew up outside Israel/Palestine, visiting Haifa during the summers. Sonia remembers a garden whose ground was sticky with fallen plums, blue bathroom towels that “shrank each year until they were too indecent to wear in the corridor,” days at the beach surreptitiously observing Israeli boys, afternoons spent watching the first intifada on TV. And one unforgettable visit to the West Bank, during which their uncle took them to see a boy close to their own age who had been on a hunger strike in prison and who even after his release refused to eat. “They have broken his spirit now,” his furious, desperate mother says, “and Rashid cannot stop.”
When Sonia returns over two decades later—seemingly around 2017—her grandparents are dead. The aunts who inherited the family house have sold it, without telling anyone, to an Israeli. The family has scattered, pulled apart by divorce, rifts, moves, secrets.
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Sonia calls her trip a vacation, but it is clearly a search for refuge and direction. She finds this, not from the older sister she admires and resents but from Mariam, a childhood acquaintance who is now a theater director. When they first meet, Mariam asks, “Have you ever thought about acting in Palestine?… It’s bad when all the talent gets away.” Sonia finds Mariam’s bluntness, curiosity, and confidence irritating but irresistible. Within days she is living with Mariam in Ramallah and playing Gertrude in a production of Hamlet to be staged in the West Bank.
“Shakespeare’s Hamlet was first performed in Arabic in Gaza in 1911,” Hammad writes in an essay on Palestinian theater, in which she also notes that during the first intifada, Hamlet was on the Israelis’ list of banned books in the West Bank, because lines such as “to take arms against a sea of troubles/And by opposing end them” were viewed as an incitement to violence.2
Palestinian theater had its heyday in the 1970s, when artistic avant-gardism flourished alongside political radicalism in many Arab countries. In Enter Ghost, Hammad references the staging of the famous play al-Atmeh (Darkness): just as the performance was beginning, the lights in the theater went out. At first the audience took this for a real power cut. Performers sitting in the audience stepped forward to complain, comment, and argue, drawing everyone into a discussion and an attempt to solve the problem. The response to this fourth wall–breaking play was by all accounts rapturous.
Precisely because of its potential to provoke collective responses, theater in the occupied territories has also always been heavily monitored and censored. Hammad writes in the essay:
As a live, essentially unrepeatable art form, theater can be unpredictable and even volatile. It can incite action—the double meaning in the English word “act” is brought to life in the Palestinian context. It’s also an art form comprised of bodies occupying space. The backbone of the Israeli occupation is a military regime whose principal mechanism of power is the control of bodies in space.
One of the questions that drives Enter Ghost is: Will they manage to put the play on? The production’s funding is in danger once Mariam’s politician brother, who is helping to finance it, comes under Israeli investigation on nebulous charges of treason. In fact, Israeli authorities can shut the play down on any number of pretexts. When Mariam finally unveils a dramatic stage set in Bethlehem, abutting the so-called Separation Barrier, the Israeli army simply confiscates it.
The other question, which matters just as much to Mariam and her performers, is: Will the play be any good? Mariam has cast her young cousin, Wael, as Hamlet. Wael is a pop star; he will draw large crowds but has no acting experience. Eager and vulnerable, he must be trained and also protected from the jealousy of the other actors.
Hammad does a wonderful job of depicting the dynamics of rehearsals—the hierarchies, rivalries, and attractions among performers, the different ways Mariam soothes, cajoles, and challenges her cast. Mariam will try anything once; a spirit of experimentation, of playful discovery, of clever strategizing, infuses Hammad’s storytelling as well. At crucial points she switches her narration into the format of a script, with nothing but dialogue and stage directions. When Mariam asks Sonia to run through a scene between Gertrude and her accusing son—but by herself, only hearing her scene partner’s lines in her head—Hammad renders Gertrude’s pained exclamations between wide gaps on the page. In these spaces, we have to imagine the lines in Sonia’s head, the emotions on her face, the expectant silence of her audience. The technique, she tells us, unlocks something in her:
Mariam was right: the attention I’d been paying to his performance had been interfering with my own. Once she cancelled him out and left me to converse with his silence I could feel the contrast. My first words, What have I done?, spoken in that vacuum, under the bright sun, with the sea behind me and my sister and a man who might become my lover before me, unleashed a fear that reared up inside me like a flame, protected from rage by the thinnest of membranes.
Meanwhile, the oppressive and potentially violent reality of the Israeli occupation continually intrudes. Rehearsals proceed semiclandestinely, interrupted by power cuts and tear gas. Everyone involved assumes that their phones are being tapped; they are wary of informers and, when news of the play leaks in the Israeli media, suspicious of one another. Just getting the actors together and moving them from one place to another is difficult. For Palestinian drivers, there is always traffic, and there are always checkpoints—the source of most of the traffic.
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The Israeli occupation has purposely fractured Palestinians into groups that are geographically, legally, and administratively divided, and the ubiquitous checkpoint is the place where these divides are enforced. Sonia describes a typical car ride: “One foreign national with an Arab name, two Palestinian citizens of Israel and one West Bank resident with a temporary permit sit in a car with yellow Israeli plates approaching a checkpoint.”
Hammad’s novel depicts a strikingly rich and complicated spectrum of Palestinian identity and experience. It draws out the differences and frictions among Palestinians who live in a difficult city like Hebron, in daily confrontation with Israeli settlers, and those who reside in the more protected “Ramallah bubble” under Palestinian administrative control; among those who have the relative privilege of Israeli citizenship, those who grew up in refugee camps, and those who live abroad and feel guilty or defensive about it. Hammad draws out the divides and silences between generations—when Sonia questions her father about his youthful militancy, he tells her, “Forget about it, my love. Palestine is gone. We lost her a long time ago.” She also pays attention to the way the occupation affects men and women differently. After he is interrogated by Israeli soldiers, Sonia finds that Wael
was unable to look at me directly. At the same time, he seemed not to know where else to put his gaze, so his eyes shifted back and forth, up and down, like a dog’s…. It was an expression of defeat, and of shame. I have never seen this expression on a woman’s face.
Wael is able to channel this shame into his acting. The actors draw a sense of purpose from the difficulties put in their way and from the growing tension and confrontation outside the theater. After the killing of two Israeli soldiers, Israel installs security gates around the al-Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem. Palestinians stage huge protests, praying in the streets around the mosque. (This is based on real events.) A sense of escalating stakes permeates the production.
And yet the theater troupe members also constantly question the point of their endeavors. “Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary,” Sonia thinks ruefully. After attending one of the protests in Jerusalem, Sonia experiences “a horrible, useless revelation, which was that in some way the meaning of our Hamlet depended on this suffering. The context gave our Hamlet its force.” Not only does much Palestinian art draw its power and significance from pain and struggle; Palestinians have been playing assigned roles—heroes, villains, victims—for so long that some find themselves second-guessing the authenticity of their reactions and the purpose of any artistic expression. Mariam worries about art being little more than therapy: “When you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring.”
There are some fairly evident ways in which Hamlet resonates in a Palestinian setting: it is a tale of usurpation, suspicion, and revenge, set in a land that is “rotten” and “a prison,” featuring a young hero who is doomed to a violent death almost from the beginning. And yet when the troupe discusses what the play is “about,” the most obvious political interpretations are far from satisfying. The idea that Hamlet is a martyr or a freedom fighter, for example, raises a number of questions:
IBRAHIM: It’s not a very optimistic vision of national liberation, if everyone dies in the end.
AMIN: True.
MAJED: This might be a stupid question
MARIAM: Nothing is stupid.
MAJED: but which nation is Hamlet liberating?
So does the argument that Gertrude symbolizes Palestine:
GEORGE: Gertrude is, you know, the land that gets manhoobi.
MARIAM: Looted.
GEORGE: Like Palestine does, and like Palestine part of her accepts this, part of her betrays the old king, forgets what it used to be like, forgets her loyalty. Like those traitors on the inside, and those people who sold land to the Jews and, you know, these kinds of people, this betrayal is also the story of Palestine. It’s not just we have been oppressed, it’s also we have betrayed ourselves, our brothers.
SONIA: This is a very particular reading of the play.
Most of Hammad’s characters are much too self-aware to adopt simplistic political readings. At one point, Mariam and Sonia joke about all the obvious Palestinian metaphors and clichés they could inject into the play:
“You’ll be fine as long as you don’t make Majed wear a kuffiyeh and sunglasses, and speak with a stutter.”
She shrieked, and I glanced up. She was covering her mouth. Laughing. “Oh God!” She slapped her forehead and banged her elbow onto the table. “I’m just so bored by it all. The symbols. The keys, the kuffiyehs—I mean, is this all we have? Olive trees? Is this really all we have?”…
“Why don’t we just make Ophelia a suicide bomber,” I said, “and call it a day?”
But Mariam’s hilarity was spent, and she responded in full seriousness: “We can’t. Someone already did a version like that quite recently.”
There is another well-known Palestinian story set in Haifa. I expected Enter Ghost to refer to it, and I was not disappointed. Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa is one of the most famous works of one of the most celebrated Palestinian writers. As the novella opens, it is 1967, and Said and Safiyya, a middle-aged Palestinian couple, are driving to Haifa from Ramallah. Twenty years earlier, in the chaos of the evacuation, they left their infant son behind at home and were unable to return for him. Now that Israel has gained control of the West Bank in the Six-Day War, the border and road to Haifa are open again. Said and Safiyya visit their former home and find that not only did an Israeli couple take up residence there right after they left; this couple also adopted their son. Khaldoun has become Dov, an Israeli who shows up in his military uniform and disavows his birth parents.
The melodramatic premise of the story is balanced by the concentrated force of Kanafani’s writing and, as Hammad has pointed out, by the way he preemptively acknowledges the theatricality of the situation. As he watches his long-lost son pace back and forth in the living room of the house he once lived in, “the strange sensation came over Said that he was watching a play prepared ahead of time in detail. It reminded him of cheap melodramas in trivial movies with artificial plots.”
When I reread Kanafani’s tale, I was struck by other references to theater. Kanafani tells us that to Dov’s adoptive father, Irphat—a Jewish Holocaust survivor from Poland who “had never met a single Arab in his entire life”—the land he emigrated to in 1948 was “nothing more than a stage set adapted from an old legend.” To Irphat, “the fighting he heard and read about every morning in the Palestine Post seemed to be taking place between men and ghosts.” To the young Zionist, Palestinians are invisible, already evacuated from his reality.
Unsurprisingly, the idea of Palestinians as ghosts—haunting history, the land, Israelis themselves—runs through Hammad’s novel. Sonia, self-consciously “enacting a Palestinian cliché,” visits the lost family home, and the new Israeli owner shoos her away from the doorstep. When Sonia calls her father in London and tells him what happened, he is grimly amused:
He was scared of you. You’re like a ghost to him.
Me?
We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die.
But Hammad’s story complicates and enriches the ghost metaphor in unexpected ways. When the cast discusses the choice facing Hamlet—life or death—Mariam and Sonia both see that “there’s a third way. You can be a ghost.” Being a ghost is a way not of being erased but of escaping and enduring, of staying in the story, of returning (to that supposedly empty stage) as the plot’s very catalyst. The ghost, after all, enters.
In the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture Hammad gave at Columbia University in September 2023, she focused on recognition scenes in literature. She described these as moments in which you “perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along but that perhaps you did not want to know.”3
The lecture discussed Returning to Haifa and the moment when the Israeli son and the Palestinian father do not acknowledge each other. But the father does have a realization: “Man is a cause,” not just “flesh and blood.” He suddenly clearly sees another son—Khalid—whom he has left in Ramallah and forbidden, until then, from engaging in the Palestinian struggle. Now he understands that Khalid’s vision of the future is the only thing that can redeem the mistakes of the past. “Thus the failed recognition of the eldest son leads to the proper recognition of the younger,” argued Hammad.
Kanafani’s powerful stories often achieve these revelatory effects. His primary purpose was to persuade his readers to recognize the justice and necessity of the Palestinian cause, and then ideally to act on that recognition. He coined the term adab al-muqawama (“literature of resistance”) to describe the engagé writing he was so talented at producing. His literary activity ran parallel to his political commitments: he was the spokesman for the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a Marxist-Leninist group, when he was assassinated in 1972 in Beirut, along with his teenage niece, by a car bomb planted by the Mossad.
But for a contemporary Palestinian writer, it is hard to maintain the belief that the purpose of literature is to make readers suddenly grasp a truth in order to bring about a change in the world. After all, as Hammad noted in her lecture, Palestinians have become overly familiar with inspiring and witnessing those moments in which outsiders finally grasp some part of their experience. But seeing these “aha moments” repeat—over many decades, with little result—can inspire not hope or relief but “a kind of despairing déjà vu.” This is certainly the case today, when despite endless efforts by Palestinians to share their narratives, to witness and explain and make real their suffering—and despite unprecedented global awareness and outcry—the devastation of Gaza continues unabated.
“The Palestinian struggle has gone on so long now that it is easy to feel disillusioned with the scene of recognition as a site of radical change, or indeed as a turning point at all,” Hammad said. That is partly why, she told her audience, the recognition scene in literature
feels most truthful when it is not redemptive: when it instead stages a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness. This is the most I think we can hope for from novels: not revelation, not the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit.
This is why she has written a novel in which there are no easy answers, no certainties, in which seemingly everyone learns, more than once, that they were wrong.
I would say that there is one other kind of recognition taking place in Hammad’s novel, which is neither the recognition of a buried truth nor the recognition of one’s limited knowledge. It’s recognition as addition, as seeing something more: when a familiar text takes on a new life, becomes electric with new meanings. This is what happens, more than once, with the text of Hamlet—the most familiar work in the Western canon, perhaps, into which Hammad so brilliantly breathes new life by staging it as a Palestinian play.
Toward the end of Enter Ghost, the play is performed on a hastily erected set in an open field; it is an important detail that the field is right on the border between Area B (under joint Palestinian and Israeli control) and Area C (under Israeli control, where to build any structure Palestinians need permits from Israel, which are never granted). During the performance, Israeli soldiers show up, walking through the aisles as Mariam—who is replacing Wael—delivers Hamlet’s Hecuba speech: “Am I a coward? Who calls me a villain? Breaks my skull? Plucks my beard and throws it in my face?”
When she notices the soldiers, Mariam begins addressing them; she gestures their way while saying the lines “I have heard that criminals sitting in a theater have been so struck by the skill of the scene in their souls that they have straightaway declared their offenses.” As the actors and the audience become aware of the soldiers, the audience members become performers, too, the stage expands to include the land around them, and the whole meaning of the play shifts. In scenes such as these, Hammad captures the elation and risk of theater, the power of art to transfigure and to bond.
At the end, when the cast bows to a standing ovation, “there was the distinct, if illogical, feeling that our mettle had kept the army from the stage,” Sonia tells us. She knows and we know this victory is ephemeral, if not entirely illusory. But as Mariam, who is also the mother of a young child, had told Sonia, sometimes the best thing one can do is pretend that one’s words and acts matter, that there is hope. Sometimes “you have to fake it.”
