Book Review: “Enter Ghost”
Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost (2023). Published by Grove Atlantic.
During the first intifada, the Israeli government banned Hamlet from the West Bank. In Shakespeare’s famous “to be, or not to be” speech, lines like “to take arms against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them” were seen as too much of a call to action to be allowed.
Isabella Hammad discovered this while she was working on Enter Ghost, a 2023 novel about a production being staged in the West Bank in 2017. It was all the confirmation she needed—how could a play about an unfairly usurped crown and ghosts of past generations haunting their children to exact revenge be anything but an act of Palestinian resistance? We follow self-centered Sonia, a British-Palestinian actress freshly out of a damaging relationship, as she returns to Palestine for the first time in a decade. While visiting her estranged sister, Haneen, she becomes involved in a production of Hamlet helmed by headstrong director Mariam in occupied territory. Hammad writes with direct precision, sometimes weaving play script line format into the text, to chronicle Sonia’s journey from ambivalence to reawakening. Friends interrogated at checkpoints, tear gas deployed at protests, Israeli soldiers showing up at their performance: not unlike King Hamlet, Palestine and its utterance begin to engulf her life.
It seems intentional that Hammad folds the Western canon into a story that grapples with its own faraway connection to Palestine. She, much like Sonia, is the daughter of a Palestinian man but grew up and lives in West London, where it is easy to forget her Middle Eastern identity. Sonia spends much of the novel wrestling with the guilt that comes from being able to escape and avoid, tuning out politics in favor of her Western life. She stands in contrast with Haneen, who moved to the same Israeli town that the sisters’ grandparents once lived in. While Sonia experiences unique childhood trauma from the intifada, it rings true beyond her experience. Many of her readers surely experience a profound level of guilt at knowing there are people suffering a million miles away, but can engage with it at their own leisure. Who would choose to?
Enter Ghost forces us to see, dropping in language and references that compel unfamiliar readers to educate themselves beyond the confines of the novel. There are significant differences, for example, between the Palestinians who live within Israeli territory (referred to as “’48ers”) and those in the West Bank and Gaza. The demonstration Sonia goes to at Al-Aqsa Mosque is the very same place of worship that Israeli settlers stormed in the lead-up to October 7th. Writer Hisham Matar once said that “all art is attention”—a choice about what we devote our time to and what will stir us to empathy and emotion. With this book, more than just our eyes are on Palestine. The reader needs to grapple with Palestine’s everyday reality with solemnity and new understanding. Hammad may want you to take her book as a novel first and a witness second, but she cannot deny that it is both.
Entrance of the Freedom Theatre at the Jenin refugee camp, in the city of Jenin, Palestine. Image retrieved from Wikimedia, courtesy of Dan Palraz.
Theater has a long history of resistance in Palestine, which the book explicitly draws on in references to past productions. Much of Enter Ghost was inspired by the Freedom Theatre, a performance group and cultural center based in the Jenin refugee camp, which has become renowned worldwide for providing art in the face of occupation. Theater puts bodies in spaces, a revolutionary act, while the Israeli government police where they can and cannot live. Hammad engages this theme brilliantly, pushing it in every direction. At checkpoints and on streets, soldiers engage in a kind of acting, playing out the same old script in every interrogation. Occupation is performative, and the line between theater and life becomes ever thinner.
Despite its brilliance, Enter Ghost is hard to read at times. Sonia is infuriatingly passive, rarely making a single decision throughout the entire book. Even the ones she does make, like getting out of the car to confront an Israeli officer when her fellow castmate is being interrogated at a checkpoint, are seemingly beyond her control, and she is “hardly aware of [her] body” while it is happening. As she journeys from political ambivalence to actualization throughout the story, she remains apathetic in personal relationships. Her selfishness, which comes across especially with her sister (she doesn’t even know in what subject Haneen is a professor), lessens significantly by the end but is prominent and off-putting for a good third of the book. Characters don’t need to be likable for a novel to entrance us, but it certainly makes it harder.
Hammad has said that she cannot write about Palestine now. Enter Ghost would not exist were it to be made in the wake of the genocide in Gaza, where the situation has changed so drastically. The Freedom Theatre has been ransacked, its creatives arrested, and the organization forced to close. And yet we are grateful that it does exist—not as a source of hope or optimism, but a witness of occupation in the everyday. Not many people remember the last line of Hamlet, which Hammad wanted as her original title. “Go,” Fortinbras says, as the dead Hamlet regime lays on the floor and the cycle of violence continues. “Bid the soldiers shoot.”
