- Enter Ghost, a novel, (Vintage, 2024)
- The Parisian, a novel, (Vintage, 2019)
- ‘Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative’, a lecture, 2023
‘Must every Palestinian story be a family story?’ This question, posed by a British actress taking time out from the West End in the West Bank, cuts to the heart of a novel about the lost futures of the peace process and how it is haunted by the failures of the West. Enter Ghost is the second novel by British Palestinian author Isabella Hammad, whose previous novel The Parisian was a family story of a son from Nablus disinherited by his father because of his love for the West. Both stories are stories of dispossession, and dispossessions within dispossessions. The Parisian (2019) tells the story of a Palestinian doctor who falls in love with the daughter of a French sociologist, only to find that her father is taking notes on the receptiveness of the so-called Arab brain to Western culture. Enter Ghost (2023)is about two sisters rebuilding their relationship in the aftermath of the sale of their ancestral home in Haifa to a family of Israeli settlers. The first novel is set at the end of the British mandate, the second sometime between the end of the third intifada and the beginning of the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Both stories show how art is a form of resistance that asks us to work with our own internal resistance to our sense of romance as it is written in the stars: what it is to ask to know the future, and to belong.
The idea of belonging is central both to notions of family and notions of art. In her essay collection The Last Resistance (2017), Jacqueline Rose writes of an exchange of letters between the psychoanalyst Freud and the novelist Stefan Zweig when Zweig travelled to Israel to research a novel. In the exchange, Freud and Zweig discuss whether psychoanalysis will overcome the resistance it faces, and whether psychoanalysis itself is a form of resistance to violent nationalisms that circumscribe who can belong. For Freud, the notion of belonging sits at the heart of family and identity, and this is never truer than in the idea of a family romance, where a wounded child imagines for themself an origin story in a happier family in order to overcome their internal resistance to the place where they actually belong. The art of the family romance is a tradition especially common to divided cities and the divided selves that are part of the postmodern literary tradition. We see it as much when Hamlet claims his father is the rightful king as when Sally Bowles laments her father’s telegram in Cabaret. In Hammad’s novels, there is resistance as much to the need to belong as to the idea of belonging. I was spellbound by Hammad’s tale of Arabs who were more European than the Europeans, and after it came out last year, I found myself under a similar spell with her novel Enter Ghost. The protagonist of Enter Ghost is an actress, Sonia Nasir, who plays Hamlet’s mother. Nasir is herself is a childless mother who describes losing a baby in the emotional core of the book. When she asks why Palestinian stories must be family stories, it is out of resistance to her own family story. She says, ‘Every family has a nakba story and this is mine’, and then describes how her aunt, watching from the window of a house she refused to leave, saw a woman lose a child in the street and was unable to go back because of the crowd. The passage is like the passages in Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy (1993) that recall the violence of partition. The belonging of children to parents is presented as being as complex and inevitable as the belonging of people to land. If there is a last form of resistance, it is that of stories within stories—a resistance within a resistance that says the role of art is both more and less than that of contributing to a tradition of belonging when self and state and the stars themselves are divided.
When seen from the perspective of his mother, Gertrude, Hamlet is a lost child undergoing catastrophe and creating catastrophe, occasioning a dispossession within a dispossession all in the name of the family romance. Hammad’s Gertrude in Enter Ghost doesn’t state things quite so definitively. Her Hamlet is not a terrorist but a pop star; at one point the protagonist jokes about making Ophelia a suicide bomber, and the director says they can’t because there has already been a recent production like that. When Enter Ghost moves from tragedy to triumph it is not because of the occupation but in spite of it. When media attention alerts the attention of the Israeli army to the production they close off the stage, and the production goes ahead, flashmob-style, in the West Bank. Narrating the production, Hammad states with irony that it is flattering to every artist to see themself as a secret revolutionary. The play’s director argues that art like her production of Hamlet is a balm to the wound of occupation, that it brings people together at times of crisis or catastrophe. The actor protagonist resists the narrative. It is not art in itself that is meaningful, but the process of haunting that engenders it. When she describes visiting her childhood home in Haifa only to find it occupied by a Jewish family, her father says, ‘We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die. Even now we’ve lost nearly everything’. He laughs at the idea that this haunting is a zombie apocalypse, and his laughter has implications for the production of Hamlet, which in itself is also a zombie apocalypse.
Hamlet is the zombie apocalypse of the theatre-maker prince who sees himself as a secret revolutionary. From the perspective of Gertrude, the mother whom he insists on confiding in even as he shows contempt for her role as his confidant, or Ophelia, the girlfriend he drives to madness when he denies ever having loved her, it is possible to imagine Hamlet, whose actions lead to the death of the entire Danish royal family and prepares for the invasion of Denmark by Norway, as a terrorist. It is possible to imagine that the violence of his emotions is itself a form of violence, because his emotions are a symptom of the divided selves engendered by divided states, and because they are a form of resistance to a family that sees itself as synonymous with power, and particularly to the family as an allegory for state power. Hammad is too sophisticated an intellect to be engaged by this interpretation, and her protagonist jokes about it in Enter Ghost. But if it is possible to imagine its pull from her writing, it is in part because her novel The Parisian has its own kind of romance with the divided state and the divided self, at the expense of the family. The terms of this romance brings me back to Hammad’s 2023 Edward Said memorial lecture on ‘Recognising the Stranger’, and the questions she raises about the meaning of recognition. Like the recognition of finding the constant northern star.
In Hammad’s fiction, she notes in the essay, she always returns to recognition scenes, anagnorisis, in which a character discovers the true terms of their identity or situation. The theory takes its origins from the moment where King Oedipus realises he’s married his mother; in returning to its origins, it shows the collapse of the family romance. The king who would marry a queen is once again a troubled young prince. The anagnorisistic recognition appears at the moment of tragic reversal, where rising action peaks before the fall of the denouement. It is a movement from ignorance to knowledge—the recognition, before the zombie apocalypse, that the protagonist has become a ghost. Hammad argues that the meaning of recognition is closely linked to the meaning of the epiphany, and she draws on three kinds of epiphany to make her point. The first is meeting the dawn. The second is meeting an enemy. The third is meeting God. If anagnorisis means to know again, epiphany mean to know intuitively in a way that makes knowing a perpetual present. It is a form of knowledge that is also a form of recognition. It is a form of recognition that occurs, frequently, at times of catastrophe. It creates the future by interpreting the present, as Oedipus maps his course by the stars.
Must all Palestinian stories be family stories, Hammad asks. To this I could add: must all love stories be ghost stories? The spell Hammad cast, and the spell I was under, was the spell of a ghost story told by starlight. Every family story has a ghost story, and this is mine. I was the daughter of an Italian father who collected books and an Australian mother who loved to read them. The house was educated, interested, political, watched the news every night. My parents divorced when I was very young. She became a Shakespeare scholar and travelled for conferences. I moved in with my grandmother, who raised me, and became one of the great loves of my childhood into adulthood. For Dad, divorce was a catastrophe—a dispossession within a dispossession that saw him jump at shadows and quarrel with ghosts. He encouraged me to read, he showed me first editions, but he could not escape his shame at our broken home.
Enter ghost: one year, after one of the frequent trips for work Mum returned with a friend in tow who I’ll call Hirsch. Hirsch was from America’s deep South, a Southern gentleman with molasses-thick charm and expansive curiosity about the world. He’d taken his law degree at the University of Melbourne, where he’d first met my mother. After that first visit, Hirsch would return every few years, sometimes for weeks at a time. From the start, he treated me like a serious person. We watched the news together. It was the era of the Oslo accords, and Israel and Palestine were moving towards an uneasy peace. It was a time of cautious optimism. Interested in the things I was reading, Hirsch gave me my first books in the Jewish canon, starting with the Russian dissidents from Anna Akhmatova to Chaim Potok. He took us to Disneyland dressed in a goofy hat, and pushed me around SeaWorld in a stroller shaped like a dolphin.
In between visits, Hirsch sent us care packages from the Metropolitan Museum of New York, including a number of Chagall prints and posters. Hirsch was such a father figure, it became a family joke that he was my father. There was no way this man was my real father—a heart condition and my mother’s iron-clad sense of principle prevented it—but the joke took on momentum. Then, suddenly the joke wasn’t a joke anymore. My father produced a photo of me as a baby and claimed an alleged resemblance to my mother’s friend. A DNA test was demanded and produced. it showed my father was the same man who’d requested the test, but now became speechless in response to it. Even faced with the facts, he couldn’t let his conviction go. At the time, we were concerned with other convictions, other beliefs, other hopes. It is almost ridiculous to say, but this was all occurring at the same time as the Oslo accords faltered, Rabin was assassinated and the future of the Middle East changed course, and with it, the future of the world. The peace process failed. The war on terror began. Hirsch never returned to Australia, but kept up a stream of letters, a worldly haunting that saw me out of childhood into early adolescence and my first love affairs. I tried to escape the haunting of the story, but a haunting never lets you go. I would go on to do postgraduate work in Jewish studies and learn Yiddish. A French host dad on a homestay in Paris called me la petite revolutionaire. While I was in Paris, Yasser Arafat died at a Parisian hospital. It was later reported he’d been assassinated. By this time, the war on terror had brought the Israeli logic of ‘the situation’ in Israel–Palestine to the world. The trauma of the September 11 attacks became a generational wound, like having a broken home. It was the last resistance to saying a family romance meant more than the loss of innocence of an entire civilisation stretching from Syria to Sicily—that a wound meant more than the world. I began to feel like I could tell the story without resisting it any more.
In Writing in the Dark, his collection of essays about this turbulent time in the history of the Middle East, David Grossman refers to a Holocaust survivor who, in her diaries, refers to herself as ‘the thinking heart’ of the camps. In a discussion of ‘the situation’, which has moved from an uneasy peace with elements of terror in the West Bank to a full-scale humanitarian crisis in Gaza, Grossman reminds his readers to be the thinking heart of a conflict that reads more than ever like a family romance gone bad. The memory culture of the Holocaust makes it controversial for Grossman to use a phrase from the Holocaust in this way, but it is also a phrase that belies the claim to knowledge every culture everywhere has to any culture everywhere: a thinking heart, a sense of belonging, an understanding of the meaning of recognition, and a last resistance to the idea that recognition is the birthright of any one culture. It is a claim all the more impressive in the context of the generational wound of October 7, which rhymed with the wound of September 11 before it.
In ‘Recognising the Stranger’, Hammad talks about writing the central epiphany in her first novel The Parisian. She argues she had to bend the truth to relate the story she was trying to tell, which was about belonging as well as about recognition. In the novel, the protagonist discovers that his father has been withholding letters from his French paramour, and on the basis of this love affair, disinherits his son. The son responds as though to a catastrophe, to both the loss of his lover and the loss of his father. He is forced both to know and to know again: to know the pain of love and loss at the same time. From this the protagonists of The Parisian learns that there must always be a choice as to where to belong, and it is a choice made when the stars hide their fires about our fates. Hammad’s novels are successful because they are a way of knowing again what we already know: all stories about peace and conflict are family stories, and every love story is a ghost story, and every ghost story is a heavenly haunting against a starless night. Now more than ever, her extraordinary work shows us that if catastrophe cannot be averted, it must be made a part of our romance of belonging to a constellation of cultures, all of which navigate by a map of celestial hope, none of whom know what’s written in the stars.