The Haunting of Palestine in Enter Ghost

In Enter Ghost, London-born Isabella Hammad presents a Palestine full of ghosts. The novel’s ghosts linger and leak past into present, refusing to leave. Taken from an inconspicuous stage direction in Hamlet, the title becomes an echo, repeated by a theatre group as they rehearse an Arabic production of the Shakespearean play; through this repetition, King Hamlet’s ghost appears on stage again and again, a reminder of his claim to the throne, a haunting that also represents the Palestinian peoples’ ongoing connection to their land.

An accomplished writer, Hammad’s 2019 debut novel, The Parisian, was a love story set in the aftermath of the First World War as Palestine becomes divided by colonial powers and the Arab resistance movement takes shape. Hammad is again exploring similar historical themes, this time in contemporary Palestine as her characters navigate life under Israeli occupation.

Enter Ghost is the story of Sonia’s return from London to Palestine in the wake of a broken romantic relationship. Her journey begins as a holiday to visit her sister Haneen, an academic at the local Israeli university, and their fraught relationship is soon apparent. Each sister followed a different path: Haneen dedicated her life to establishing permanent ties to her ancestral home of Haifa, while Sonia built an acting career in London. Sonia’s aloof approach extends to many of the Palestinians she meets, and especially Mariam, someone from childhood she barely remembers who is now Haneen’s close friend. As Sonia begins to acclimatise, she reluctantly agrees to step into the production of Hamlet until Mariam can secure actors to play Ophelia and Gertrude.

The novel’s ghosts linger and leak past into present, refusing to leave.

This slow-burn start accelerates as Sonia comes to love the community production and her role managing, supporting and nurturing other cast members. Her proximity to the lives of her cast, as well as the complex experience of producing Palestinian theatre in occupied territory, galvanises her after the tumultuousness of her personal life in London. Sonia builds a deeper connection to her family’s history in the resistance movement, illuminating what previously was shadowy knowledge filled with gaps and silences. Inhabiting this silence is her estrangement, a foreignness she feels through her initial interactions with other characters.

This estrangement can be read as what British-Australian academic Sara Ahmed would describe as an embodied experience. Examining migration and the social construction of the ‘stranger’, Ahmed writes in Strange Encounters that ‘stories of dislocation help to relocate: they give a shape, a contour, a skin to the past itself.’ Sonia’s return after so long away is uncomfortable as she is struck by all she doesn’t know. She comes to learn that her grandparents’ home in Haifa had been sold by her aunt and uncle to an Israeli family. Grieving this loss, she returns to the house, expressing her nostalgia to the owner, who replies, ‘Well, that’s very nice. But you can keep your nostalgia quiet. Thank you.’

Though only a sparse interaction, Hammad deftly demonstrates the threatening violence undercutting this conversation, a violence that is faced by Palestinians who continue to hold claims to their homeland. Later, Sonia’s father tells her: ‘He was scared of you. You’re like a ghost to him…We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die.’ This ghostliness is what Ahmed refers to as ‘skin to the past’, their ghost-bodies representing ongoing Palestinian connection to land, a connection that Israel is unable to erase.

What’s most striking about Hammad’s writing is the way she uses theatre not just as a plotline but also as form. Sections of her prose shift into dramatic script, with the first-person narration fluctuating into stage directions. Breaking from prose to script in these moments also functions to dramatise action into contained, heightened moments. Theatrical conventions (events, action, dialogue, stage directions and so on) provide a stability, a stillness almost, to the character’s lives that in reality are shaky, uncertain and ever-shifting in an occupied settler state.

What’s most striking about Hammad’s writing is the way she uses theatre not just as a plotline but also as form.

The novel’s movement into script also calls attention to the empty space on the page that seems to symbolise room for practice, rehearsal and imagining new ways of resisting occupation. This experimentation in form is both exciting and memorable, recontextualising the Palestinian struggle through the framework of resistance and art-making.

There is a moment early on when the characters are described in a list that could be found at the start of a theatre script. By shifting between Sonia’s first-person narration to script form, Hammad not only defies reader expectations but also highlights the struggle of displaced peoples who may think of themselves in the third person, accustomed to dissociating in uncomfortable situations to evaluate the nuanced reality of assimilation. The character list resembles this ghostly disassociation as Sonia, becoming the absent narrator, transforms into a character like the others, navigating her place as a diasporic returnee among local Palestinians.

At times, the novel also functions as an elegy to Palestine, grief skimming from character to character. For Sonia, this appears as phone calls to her father to talk about his involvement in the resistance movement, during which he tells her to move on. ‘Forget about it, my love. Palestine is gone. We lost her a long time ago.’ The finality of this loss is presented in the everyday Israeli state violence at checkpoints, traffic jams, and ‘loitering’ soldiers that the theatre group weave through as they rehearse their play: ‘Something exploded on the street behind us’ and ‘We saw children running, heard more cracks of tear gas, saw several more thin loops of white, reaching higher this time.’

The novel functions as an elegy to Palestine, grief skimming from character to character.

Such nightmarish incidents are common in the book, the ‘thin loops of white’ foreshadowing more death and by extension more ghosts with each act of violence. Elsewhere, meeting her Aunt Rima for the first time in years, Sonia ‘felt she was not looking at me but through me, as though I were an emissary, a medium for a ghost’. The novel as a whole is driven towards two distinct types of grief: the first is an anticipatory grief, arising from the expectation of future encroaching settlements resulting from Israeli colonisation, while the second is a collective grief felt by Palestinians for the historical violence they have endured. Readers then become witnesses to state violence, mourning events that are both shocking and normalised simultaneously.

Recently, Al-Aqsa mosque has once again become a symbol for resistance against Israeli colonisation (as it has been several times in the past). In Enter Ghost, large protests break out at the mosque after Israeli soldiers prevent Palestinian Muslims from entering. Haneen brings Sonia ‘to witness’, who, anticipating chaos and violence, is instead surprised to find ‘laughter and camaraderie’ as worshippers distribute food and water, sharing prayer mats as they pray in protest: ‘Here is order, ritual, routine, care. The streets were no longer streets. The streets were a place of worship. The streets were a stage.’ In this moving scene, the text takes on a profound role as an archive of Palestinian resistance, blurring boundaries between history, drama and the contemporary political landscape.

Cultural activism becomes an embodied resistance, a reality for many other artists agitating and unsettling oppressive powers. This is also the foundation of Mariam’s work as the production’s director: ‘They’ve stopped us having political unity but we can put money into building cultural unity, of a kind.’ Yet an underlying futility in resistance is highlighted in the aftermath of Al-Aqsa protests: ‘The day-to-day struggle of an oppressed people had briefly ignited the interest of the world, until that interest was extinguished by the turnover of the next news cycle.’

Shakespeare’s ghosts seek revenge as an opaque tool of retribution. Sonia’s reckoning with her ghosts is much more ambiguous.

And yet, cultural resistance remains enough of a threat for the Israeli state to retaliate both against worshippers and the theatre group at various points in the novel. Sonia, who arrived in Palestine estranged and reluctant, becomes one of the most engaged and active members of the group in direct response to this threat, highlighting Palestinian resolve in the face of material danger, as well as the reality of people’s lives in present-day Palestine.