Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is a powerful portrait of community resilience, recovery and hope in the face of overwhelming uncertainty, writes Hassana Moosa.

Enter Ghost
Isabella Hammad
Jonathan Cape, 2024

Enter Ghost is not an easy read—at least not at first. Like her debut novel, The Parisian, which awed readers with its stirring prose, effortless realism and evocative meditations on home and nationalism, this latest offering from Palestinian–British writer Isabella Hammad takes as its subject the Palestinian cause. Whereas Hammad’s previous work of historical fiction illuminated an early moment in the Palestinian struggle for self-determination at the beginning of the twentieth century, Enter Ghost confronts us with the present reality of Palestinians living under Israeli occupation. 

The weight of the novel’s political content is intensified by its central story of (un)belonging. Enter Ghost follows a narrative arc typical of contemporary diasporic women’s fiction, tracing the quiet struggles of a protagonist in search of affirmation and a comfortable fit. The story is told through the eyes of Sonia Nasir, a thirty-eight-year-old London-born actor of Dutch–Palestinian heritage. Newly heartbroken after ending her affair with an ‘up-and-coming’ theatre director, Sonia travels to her family’s homeland to visit her sister Haneen, who lives and works in Haifa. 

Although the sisters descend from two lines of Palestinian ancestry, their ties to Palestine are shaped by their father, on whose account their family holidays were spent in Haifa at the home of their Teta and Jiddo, their paternal grandparents, surrounded by aunts, uncles and cousins. Sonia’s trip comes after a ten-year hiatus from spending summers there. She arrives in land ’48 (‘Palestinian land taken during 1948’ now generally ‘considered to compromise the modern state of Israel’) with an apparent determination to wallow in her melancholy in a detached, touristy bubble of anonymity. 

Despite her efforts to withdraw, Sonia is soon pulled into a local Arabic production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, to be staged in the West Bank. She yields to the attention of the play’s director, Mariam Mansour, a childhood acquaintance and close friend of Haneen, and commits to taking on the role of Gertrude (and, for a time, Ophelia). Mariam’s frankness, her infectious zeal for her work and her earnest belief ‘in a real conduit between art and politics’ make her perhaps the most engaging character in the book. She softens Sonia, and their kinship becomes a gateway to the latter’s broader catharsis. As Sonia’s investment in the play deepens, so does her political consciousness, and the tensions in her personal life begin to ease. 

Mariam, Sonia, and the otherwise all-male cast of Palestinian actors overcome numerous obstacles to realise their adaptation. They face challenges typical of any professional creative industry: securing project funding, pleasing stakeholders, taming the competing egos of artists and harnessing talent effectively. Here, however, they are complicated by the apartheid conditions from which the play seeks to emerge. The sinister pervasiveness of everyday restrictions and their impact on the play are palpable from start to finish. Mariam’s brother Salim, a ‘big deal’ politician in one of the ‘major parties’, comes under scrutiny for his role in fundraising for the production in ’48; car journeys to and from rehearsals are constantly prolonged and diverted by Israeli checkpoints; and in the days leading up to opening night, the army confiscates the set, in part because of the dangerous pursuit of an Israeli informant among them. Against all odds, the company manages to put on a spectacular but modest series of performances that bring the novel to a close. 

Enter Ghost unfolds gracefully in a series of carefully interwoven thoughts, memories and performances. Sonia’s narration, which commands much of the novel, moves in waves that push forward into her present-day interactions before receding into recollections of the past—mostly her own, with some accounts of those around her. These sections progress slowly, laden as they are with tales of loss, of Sonia’s failed marriage and pregnancy, and of the wider intergenerational challenges for Palestinians at home and in the diaspora. They are propelled by Hammad’s prose, which strikes a balance between steady control and organic fluidity. Her generous and varied use of lists aids in this: 

A little of politics, a little of cooking, variations on a certain recipe, we make it differently in the north, in Ramallah they cut it finely, a little of the neighbourhood, the new high rises. Once I’d assimilated their changed appearances, my aunt and uncle became once more those figures who had dominated my childhood, and whose tensions with my parents had seemed a natural part of the family’s fabric rather than something that would cause it to rip. 

Sonia’s inner workings are periodically interrupted by shifts in form. As the story progresses, interactions, especially those involving the cast of Hamlet, are increasingly presented in the style of a play text. Dialogue in and out of rehearsals is almost always arranged as a script, and Mariam’s motley crew of actors are mapped out in a witty character list:

AMIN, Horatio. Twenty-five years old, from Balata refugee camp in Nablus. His family fled Jaffa in 1948. He is short and athletic and still looks like a teenager. Blue eyes, cappuccino-brown skin, lovely curls. Speaks English with a twang that suggests a childhood diet of American TV. […] His casting as Horatio is perfect. He is the most resistant to Mariam’s authority, and often sulks when she gives him notes, although his sulks are usually overridden by his desire to prove himself. 

The lens is still Sonia’s; she seems to digest her surroundings through her craft best. But the reader is turned outwards, from confidante to spectator—a welcome relief from the burden of the characters’ hauntings. Even at the level of the printed page, the blank spaces that pad the dialogue offer a spaciousness that contrasts with the confinement characteristic of the novel’s two main settings—the occupied territories and Sonia’s mind. 

Of course, this skilful use of the play format also attunes us to the nuances of the drama, drawing our attention to the Shakespearean production that is consuming the lives of the characters we have come to know most intimately. Hammad, through Mariam, continues the long-standing and growing tradition among writers and theatre practitioners in the Global South of using Shakespeare’s plays as a point of departure for resistance and creative censure of unjust regimes. Hammad situates them both within this tradition, and gestures towards its genealogies in the Arab world. Shortly after Sonia arrives in Haifa, Mariam takes the Nasir sisters to see a production of Syrian writer Muhammad al-Maghut’s al-Muharej, or ‘The Jester’, which engages with Shakespeare’s Othello satirically to condemn the British and their colonial stereotyping. The novel tells us there is a precedent for this kind of storytelling here. 

Mariam is a strategic director. She leans on Shakespeare’s cultural currency to see her project to fruition, just as she casts her celebrity pop star cousin Wael Hejazi as Hamlet to generate interest. She is adamant about shaking off the ‘ghosts’ of Hamlet’s past and Shakespeare’s imperialist baggage, knocking both off their pedestals. ‘I don’t want you to bow down to some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare, no’, Mariam instructs. The group are given license to repurpose: ‘as Amin says, Fuck Shakespeare. We’re free to play’. But she is also careful to ensure that her team teases out the resonances of the original play with Palestinian experiences. 

Hamlet proves to be a perfect choice for their purposes. This becomes clear on opening night, when Mariam’s rendering of Hamlet’s soliloquy at the end of Act 2, Scene 2 is interrupted by the ghoulish entrance of a group of Israeli soldiers. All breath is held, but Mariam deftly adapts to the presence of her unexpected extras: 

MARIAM: I have heard that criminals 

At this point, she actually half-gestured at the soldiers, which made my stomach drop.

sitting in a theatre
have been so struck by the skill of the scene in their souls
that they have straightaway 
declared their offences.
For murder, though it lacks tongue, yet it speaks sometimes
with an extraordinary, ­miraculous— 

In the way they unfold, the Hamlet performances highlight the powerful capacity of the stage, and art in general, as mechanisms of resistance.

And just as the productions blur the line between art and reality, so too does Enter Ghost. Indeed, the story comes to us at a time when the force of the Israeli occupation in Palestine, propped up by Western leaders, is agonisingly immediate. In their everyday comings and goings, the characters never lose sight of the atrocities being inflicted on Palestinians, even those incidents far removed from their vicinity. Televisions broadcasting the news appear throughout the narrative—sometimes in focus, sometimes in the background—where they serve as a constant reminder of the relentless violence of the Israeli apartheid regime. These scenes are familiar to those of us who, over the past year and a half, have followed with varying degrees of attention the latest outbreaks of unfathomable brutality enacted against Palestinians on our screens, large and small. In its preoccupation with questions of spectatorship, the novel asks us to question our positions as witnesses to injustice. 

Given that it takes its title from what is one of the most celebrated and well-known tragedies ever written in the English language (whether you like it or not), you wouldn’t be wrong in thinking that Enter Ghost is a tale of woe. It is, to be sure, heavyhearted. But it is also much more than that. Hammad’s novel is a powerful portrait of community resilience, recovery and hope in the face of overwhelming uncertainty.

• Hassana Moosa is a writer, teacher and researcher at the University of Cape Town. Her work explores literary and cultural histories of race, as well as race in Shakespeare’s plays. She is an editor and contributor on the project and digital publication Medieval and Early Modern Orients, and an editor at The Sundial.