The first paragraph of the Palestinian British author’s second novel, Enter Ghost, begins with: “I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did,” and ends with: “Welcome to Israel.”
Hammad opens with an experience universal to Palestinians: the interrogation and intrusion of existence. The reader is as much a stranger to the narrator as the Shin Bet agent who pulls her aside to sieve through her personal belongings, strip her naked, and demand a reason for why she hasn’t returned to the country in eleven years. Enter Ghost is both kaleidoscopic and haunted by the traditionally perceived contradictions of exile and return, of performance and the political.
Before the switch to a first-person-distant narration, we are briefly put in the position of the oppressor: one who does not require familiarity and instead, thrives off the distance between himself and the deemed Other, to consume their freedom.
“I am looking for gaps in this reality, for proof that not everyone in the West subscribes to this vision of the human—a vision that allows, for example, Ukrainians to resist their occupation but not Palestinians.” In an addendum to her speech, “Recognizing the Stranger,” given to Columbia University just nine days before the October 7th attack, Hammad evoked Edward Said’s idea of humanism, which entails a critical engagement with one’s own culture and that of others.
More pointedly, Hammad tackles the West’s application of “selective humanism,” or humanism that fails to acknowledge all groups of people, to manufacture mass consent for genocidal actions. Hammad references the language of Israeli politicians Avi Dichter and Ben-Gvir, whose dehumanization of Palestinians—often likening them to cattle—functions as a project of nurturing the public into mass indifference towards their suffering.
The narrator of Enter Ghost is named Sonia, and she is a thirty-eight-year-old professional actress. Her father, who resides in London with her, is Palestinian, from Haifa, and was displaced by the occupation. The exact reason for Sonia’s return to Haifa remains opaque. On the surface, it is to visit her older sister Haneen, who lives there and teaches at an Israeli university. But as the novel progresses, and the tensions tying together Sonia’s personal life begin to loosen, we sense the trip is just as much an escape as it is a return to her father’s land. It is an escape from a career of being typecast because of her appearance, from the messy reverberations of an affair with Harold (the married director of her most recent play), from a miscarriage that broke down a doomed marriage, and from a complicated relationship with her mother.
Sonia’s Palestine becomes distinct from the world she knows in London and questions her sense of belonging, as the narrative becomes interlaced with both collective and personal memories of her family in the context of their displacement: stories of the intifadas, her grandparents’ old home now inhabited by settlers, driving through the militarized West Bank, haunted by IDF soldiers and their large rifles.
In one flashback, we witness Sonia and Haneen as teenagers when their Uncle Jad, a doctor, drives them to the West Bank to treat a Palestinian hunger striker who ignores his parents’ pleas to eat. When young Haneen innocently asks Uncle Jad why people choose to protest this way, he responds solemnly, saying, “Our bodies are our only battleground. The Israelis want control, so they want him to live. If he dies, he loses the battle.”
The body politics—using the body as a platform for commentary and dissent—haunts Sonia’s present in Haifa. Performance becomes the medium of protest against the Israeli state in the eyes of Haneen’s close friend and director, Miriam, who ropes Sonia into playing Gertrude in her production of Hamlet, performed in classical Arabic. Sonia, much like Hammad herself, resists such a straightforward interpretation of the art form as an allegory for Palestinian resistance.
In interviews, Hammad has discussed how all art in Palestine after 1948 became political. Intention is investigated with a magnified eye; the implicit meaning behind a body of work is declared. Sonia is cast as Hamlet’s mother, drawing links to the role of women and mother in mobilizing Palestinian resistance, as well as the biblical significance of the Virgin Mary, or Maryam, as she is referred to in Arabic, as a resistor of oppression. Through this role, we also take into account Sonia’s own history—her personal ghosts—as a woman who has had both an abortion and a miscarriage, and has struggled with abandonment issues from her mother.
There is a constant negotiation between scale in Hammad’s novel—the universal and the personal—which serves as a critical reminder that she can only write what she knows, and that her activism does not mean a sacrifice of self, but indeed rather the opposite: the growth of self.
As the novel progresses alongside instances of clear injustice, we see more of Sonia’s distilled anger. She attends a protest at Al-Aqsa Mosque and is tear-gassed. “There comes a feeling of life opening … Life pounded through me, uselessly …” Hammad captures the very-human adrenaline rush of attending a protest. It is a rush that comes to Sonia from experience, rather than some inheritance of identity as a Palestinian woman. Her anger is not predetermined, but rather calcified by all she is witness to in her father’s home: young men starving themselves in protest, cruel IDF soldiers, and settlers sleeping in the home that belonged to her grandparents. The present serves as a reminder that the past endures, and this is the source of Sonia’s anger.
Questions of art’s efficacy as a form of protest are left unanswered. And perhaps there is no answer. Hammad’s novel escapes the direct categorization of a novel one might expect to read by a Palestinian author, especially in a post-October 7th world, one that talks directly to the conflict and abstracts its characters into symbols. The characters of Enter Ghost are not ambassadors for Palestine. They’re human, and they’re also Palestinian, and the geopolitics existentially tied to Palestinian identity do not exist independently or wholly, but are rather fractured by Sonia’s selfhood, her memories, and her flaws.
Hisham Matar—my former professor at Barnard and a friend of Hammad’s—said that “all art is attention.” It is local to ourselves, and art like Hammad’s novel or Mariam’s play, perhaps, does not serve the purpose of educating on the history of the Palestinian people as a whole, but to offer a window into oneself and their locality.
