"Enter Ghost" is one of those rare novels in which several worlds close to my heart collide into one beautiful whole. It is the story of Sonia, a refugee from the cut-throat world of the London stage visiting her sister in Haifa, finding herself embroiled in another world of theater intrigue, where this time, the stakes are higher than a mentor gained or lost, or a bad review in The Times.
Our narrator, Sonia, is Palestinian-Dutch and is the sister who has remained in their native London, while Haneen has decided to "go back" to Haifa to contribute to Palestinian life in her capacity as a university professor. This contribution, of course, as with any family story with a history of immigration, is a theme that runs through the novel, with Haneen doubting whether she is making a difference at all by teaching at an Israeli university, trying to ensure that Palestinian students are treated more or less fairly. Hers is the situation of the Good Samaritan, a fact that comes back to haunt the sisters towards the end of the story.
Reading Isabella Hammad’s account of Palestinian life in Haifa and the West Bank in the book, while Israel is razing Gaza to the ground and settlers are stealing more and more land is a bittersweet experience. It is a story told through Sonia’s own experiences in London as an actor and the title is a stage direction from "Hamlet." Sonia has come to Haifa to put a recent love affair behind her and possibly go through some of the family archives to stir up some trouble, as all home-returners do in fiction. However, she finds herself becoming part of a "Hamlet" production with actors from all over the occupied land of Palestine, holding various passports and identity papers.
With Sonia’s own reluctance to become part of the Palestinian cultural scene – though she may have much closer ties to Palestine than most of the readers – Hammad anticipates the reader’s possible emotional reluctance to pick "a novel about Palestine" up from the shelf. In any case, everyone we know is complaining about how we find it impossible to read stories or watch films now. Sonia goes through the same motions and emotions as she looks through her sister’s bookshelves and is surprised to see many books in Hebrew and turns to the English section: "I selected a few fat American paperbacks from the nineties and hauled them around with me. Submitting to their world was not easy. Maybe it was the subject matter. Sexual misdemeanors of middle-aged Jewish men living in Manhattan." Reading in a time of genocide is already difficult, and reading clever American stories of navel-gazing is impossible. "Enter Ghost" is the novel that pulled me out of my own reading slump, which I’ve been wallowing in for some time.
Sonia relates the stages of the theater production with affectionate detail, which allows her to reflect back on her own acting career and her last relationship. This is one of Hammad’s achievements – no storyline, no character in the story is a "walk-in." Everything she had experienced in London and her summers when she visited Haifa as a teenager reverberates through the events and characters of her present moment.
She tries to understand what has made Haneen choose to live in Haifa and perceives her sometimes as heroic and sometimes too full of her noble choices:
Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought to my mind that this place revealed something about the whole world.
Throughout the novel, it feels like Sonia herself has cut the rubber coating of her life and is looking through the various strands, and one of those strands is bound to resonate with the reader. The hopeful university years, summers back home in the "old country," the failing marriage, the miscarriage, having your story stolen, romantic entanglement with a married man.
Palestine is the stage where these revelations happen. This is also what we keep saying in 2024; as Gazans are living through genocide, so much about our world elsewhere, including the entertainment world, the larger cultural sphere and academia, has been revealed. Of course, Palestine does not owe us any of these revelations and yet it remains the stage where many of the world’s issues are being (en)acted. Hammad turns the Saidian metaphor of the "Orient as a stage" inside out while still working with it.
In the rehearsal scenes, Hammad gives us moments from the theatrical history of Palestine and how "Hamlet" has been interpreted by Palestinian theater-makers for decades. She translates the Arabic translation of "Hamlet" Sonia’s group uses back into English, revealing interpretations and meanings that will be of interest to any Shakespeare scholar. Before rehearsals begin, Hammad introduces the actors rather than the characters in a short biography format, and then we get part of the rehearsals themselves written in play format.
Hammad’s treatment of the situation in Palestine through a theater metaphor was also the theme of Sorj Chalandon’s "Le quatrieme mur" (2014), where this time, a nominal European tries to stage the tragedy of Antigone in Beirut. Seeing that reading Palestine and the larger Levant through biblical texts entrenches the Zionist and Evangelist positions, both Chaladon and Hammad decide to refer to other classical texts (and "Hamlet" does incorporate themes from Antigone) to parse the wires that Hammad is talking about.
The American and Israeli attempt to paint Israel’s settler colonial project as essentially a war between Muslims and Jews is refuted at every point by anyone who knows anything about the region. To this end, as a Christian Palestinian, Hammad goes to great lengths and describes how the Christians embrace the resistance often spearheaded by Muslims. As the sisters watch the culmination of another period of oppression and violence on TV, they decide to join the protests in Jerusalem. They take various circuitous routes and finally make it to the city. The result is one of the most beautiful passages about the Muslim prayer in the English language: "I’d never performed a Muslim prayer before, but Haneen knew how and I would copy her. The general mood was one of anticipation and camaraderie. We laughed, we pointed discreetly at the soldiers, and we asked each other where we had traveled from today. At the same time, anger ran through us like a wire, holding us together ... My nerves crackled with the electricity of opening night. I dread chaos. But this was not chaos. Here was order, ritual, routine and care. The streets were no longer. The streets were a place of worship. The streets were a stage.
"Did they genuinely believe they were waging war against Islam, or Islamists, as they liked to paint it in the media sometimes, when they claimed solidarity with victims of terror attacks in Western capitals, saying, We know how it feels; it’s just like what we have to go through? ... Let them think we were fanatical. I did not care. I discovered I was proud that they might think it of me."
This manifesto in the middle of the novel grounds Sonia and Hammad in Palestinian solidarity and that if, at times, Islam is the visible marker of resistance in the fight against colonialism, people will not shy away from identifying with figureheads of these movements.
After this, Sonia continues to rehearse with the group, and tensions within the cast come to a head, including discovering a spy in their ranks. However, none of this can stop the project and Hammad gives the readers the scene in which the play is staged, with Israeli soldiers in the wings. It is the novel’s alchemy that turns the soldiers into extras, and they shall exit the stage for good when their time comes.
