Enter Ghost is Isabella Hammad’s second major work of fiction. The Palestinian British writer was already well established; she had published in the Paris Review and received a host of prestigious American writing fellowships when her epic-length The Parisian came out (New York: Grove Press, 2019) to critical acclaim. Her first novel, set in the mid-1900s in the long lead up to the Nakba, was named one of the New York Times’ “Notable Books of the Year,” won the Palestine Book Award, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Where The Parisian explored the nuance of familiar themes from an enduring Palestinian past—colonial legacy, Palestinian nationalisms—Enter Ghost has its roots in the future. This future is investigated through Palestine’s 2010s theater scene and the travails of a motley troupe of actors trying to stage Hamlet in the West Bank. Mobilizing cliché and well-trodden stories, the novel recasts the familiar to build a clear pathway toward what has, at least in narrative terms, been an opaque horizon for the tomorrows of Palestine.
Hammad’s Enter Ghost looks square in the face of stale ways of thinking and problematic narratives about Palestinian fragmentation, government corruption, and notions of a divided national family. Through the story of a troupe of diverse actors, Hammad forges a new way of telling Palestine. In Enter Ghost, a past cast as broken is rewritten through a new conceptualization of a national family, one composed entirely of flawed individuals with complicated pasts.
Everyone in the cast, it seems, is trying to make sense of these pasts. In the long wake of the traumatic loss of Palestine, they are all trying to reconcile interrupted, shifted, or multiple narratives. Characters frequently speak of feeling trapped in trajectories that they once chose, but no longer sustain them. Miriam, the play’s director, is a straightforward example of this trajectory shift. Miriam left Haifa for university abroad and came back for a husband in Hebron she met there. Her narrative of return was shaped around the idea of making a difference in Palestine; a Palestine in Hebron and the West Bank that seemed more “real” than the one she left in Haifa. When her marriage broke down, Miriam needed to find a new goal, a new story for herself. Back in Haifa, she needed to craft a new rationale for her return. When we meet her in the novel, Miriam has a young son who she bounces with between her family home in Haifa, an inherited home in Ramallah, and her ex-husband’s home in Hebron. She feels she must pick “one” place before her son starts school, but where? Where will she choose to raise her child and reestablish her theater career? This is a “Mary” whose personal ambitions take center stage, and who will create for her son a Palestinian childhood that she understands as meaningful for the future. Finding a narrative that fits is not only about return, however. Take Faris, the Bethlehem theater director in his sixties who plays the gravedigger and was an aspiring actor on the fringes of the Ramallah/Jerusalem revolutionary theater scene in the 1970s. He now directs a small youth theater, but through the play seeks to make a name for himself, to reestablish revolutionary theater. He seeks a second chance for cultural revolution and wants to rewrite theater into resistance. Then there is Wael, the singer playing Hamlet, who—lightly modeled on Palestinian pop star Mohammed Assaf—made his way to fame in an Arab Idol competition, bought his way out of the refugee camp, and only slightly uncomfortably avails himself of the travel permits that the Palestinian Authority doles out to him as proxy of the Israeli military. He is trying to write a future for himself out of the refugee camp, but it is unclear throughout the novel if that future is in exile (as so many choose) or if he can write a new story of success within Palestine. Each of the characters has had, in some way, a plan foiled or a trajectory challenged and needs to step out of established routes to find an answer that is fulfilling.
The cast very obviously is meant to represent the many experiences of being Palestinian, often as a reflection of the fragmentation and separation that the Oslo Accords created. The actors represent different ages, political affiliations, religions, levels of piety, and degrees of political/national commitment. They are paid at different rates and have varying levels of commitment to the troupe. All these categories jostle against who gets a permit, who gets an interrogation order, who is suspected of being a spy, and who cheers on the rockets coming out of Gaza. The troupe must find a balance if the play is to succeed, must overcome the outcome of a political story that is outdated, and plunge into a narrative void in order to replace it. This cast of characters lets Hammad explain, explore, and in some ways move past so much of the political and generational fragmentation that stymies Palestinian politics (internally and internationally)—for, rather than staging a political debate with its seemingly inevitable dead ends, Hammad stages Hamlet. In their rehearsals, read-throughs, and character development, the actors practice, debate, and take on in their own fashion a story about haunting, guilt, power, and mistrust, and act it out for each other (and eventually, an audience). They grapple with their own experiences of Palestine, so that they can collectively tell a different story.
The novel sets up its story through the reunion of estranged London-raised Palestinian sisters Haneen and Sonia. They reunite in their father’s birthplace—Haifa. Haneen had already “returned” as an academic (at an Israeli university), and Sonia—an actress—joins her seeking a respite from London’s fraught theater scene. In Haifa, Sonia tries to regain her footing after the married director she was seeing passes her over for the role of Gertrude in his new production of Hamlet. It turns out Sonia’s destiny was not to play the mother of the conflicted prince in London. All of her preparation for the role had instead uniquely qualified Sonia to become the mother character in an ambitious Palestinian staging of the Shakespearean drama. Through the character of Gertrude, Sonia confronts in a profound sense the idea of motherhood. This depiction of motherhood is nothing like the one put forth by the “mother of the martyr” figure, which so famously narrowed the representation of Palestinian women as agents of the nation.Footnote1 Instead, the mother as Sonia finds it in Gertrude (combined with the mothers she meets during her journey with the troupe) is the basis for the creation of a new model. This mother is powerful, raw, and vulnerable. As Sonia understates: “Motherhood is important in the play. I think it’s a key element” (192).
This version of motherhood is not just about having or taking care of a child or bearing the responsibility for “birthing the nation.” As Sonia finally comes to terms with the miscarriage that ultimately ended her marriage, the reader is also shown that motherhood is rather the act of caring and deciding to care; the process of family-making in a community sense. This is something that Sonia must do for herself since her own family has scattered to the four winds. Rather than a focus on family in a home or a specific site (Sonia’s family home was sold when her grandmother died, and not to Palestinians) the troupe and common cause become the new “location” of family—and in a sense “home.” It is in the play and the troupe that Sonia finds her “reason” to connect with Palestine. Crucially, the novel does not reveal whether Sonia “remains” once the play is finished. What is absolutely built during the rehearsals and production of Hamlet, however, is a space for her to return to—something she did not feel she had at the start of the work. This “space” is not just to a rejuvenated theater scene, but a reconstituted sense of her own Palestinian-ness—a sort of redefinition of belonging. This reimagination of the structure of the relationship between self and home/land, as well as the individual and their conationals, not only gives Sonia a way to belong and to “remain” even if she is outside of Palestine, but also for the entire troupe (and by extension all Palestinians).
Hamlet, which is acted and rehearsed and discussed and reflected in the “cast” of Hammad’s Palestinian characters, is a crucial device for the novel’s construction of family and foremost of motherhood (and the Palestine that is being reconceptualized by mothers). If for Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the device of the play-within-a-play was famously meant to reveal who killed the king, in Hammad’s work the play-within-a-novel is a chance to take ownership of the past—including its pain, its forgotten elements, the guilt of mistakes, and the skeletons in the closet no one is proud of. In taking on the play, the characters are also refusing long-standing global narratives of Palestinian politics; narratives of fragmentation, corruption, infighting, etc. It thus offers a reconfiguration of Palestine-as-troupe that can be flawed, motley, and meaningful all at the same time.
But it is not just the play and the lives of the actors that combine to forge this new vision of a Palestinian family with a complicated mother-figure at its helm. It is also their pasts (and Palestine’s past) that live on as Hamlet’s ghost on the national stage. The very title of the work reminds readers of the living past: Enter Ghost references the stage directions in Hamlet where the specter of the king is sent on stage to help press the truth from the queen and her new husband about the nature of the king’s death. The past is ever-present and “on stage.” The ghosts of Palestine that “enter” are not only its political history and the structures of erasure that the present inherits, but also the personal pasts of each of the cast members. Perhaps the most significant memory for Sonia in the creation of her new vision of family is from the powerful experience of visiting a dying hunger striker, whose mother, trying and failing to save his life, told the story of his arrest. She explained how the other women of the camp had tried to protect him when he was being arrested:
The women shouted, He is my son! He is my son! And the soldier says to Um Khaled—you know Um Khaled, khalti? Um Khaled was the loudest—and he says to her, You seem to have a lot of children. Of course, Um Khaled is always doing this, walking around claiming sons. Um Khaled says, Thank God, give me my son. And the soldier says, And this boy seems to have more than one mother. And she says, Thank God! Give me my son! (67)
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Nora Parr
Nora Parr works on Arabic and Palestinian literature. She is the author of Novel Palestine: Nation through the Works of Ibrahim Nasrallah (Oakland: University of California Press, 2023), and currently works with the University of Birmingham and the Center for Lebanese Studies. She is a coeditor for the journal Middle Eastern Literatures.
Notes
1 The “mother of the martyr” was best articulated as the titular character in Ghassan Kanafani’s Umm Saad (1969). The woman was defined and identified only through her role as mother to Saad, who had taken up arms and joined the resistance. As the story went, she was a mother to all of the men of the resistance, so that some other mother might also be taking care of Saad. Kanafani would later write that he wished he would have time to write more of her story, intimating that there was more to the story of Umm Saad. This notion persisted, as Rhoda Ann Kanaaneh captured in Birthing the Nation: Strategies of Palestinian Women in Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), it became the role of the woman to create new generations for Palestine and for resistance.