Everything Come Alive
Hasib Hourani on Isabella Hammad
Last year, I wrote a review with a central question: how does one write a marginalised self while still appealing to the masses? I didn’t end up with an answer. Before that I had written another review of another novel, also by an Arab author in the diaspora, and which also left me wondering about how we write ourselves. I can’t stop thinking about the tools we’ve inherited to write our identities and experiences in English. How do we justly write ourselves into this language? Is it at all possible?
Isabella Hammad takes on this possibility in her latest novel, Enter Ghost. The book has consequently become my somewhat guide. It follows thirty-something actor and theatre-maker Sonia, who has travelled back to Palestine from London to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa and teaches at an Israeli university. While in Palestine, Sonia ends up becoming involved in a West Bank production of Hamlet directed by Mariam, a family friend she hasn’t seen since they were children.
The day before I started reading Enter Ghost, I attended a film screening of Salt of This Sea and cried on the way home. At home, I ate dinner really late and cried some more. This sadness was actually embarrassment. Embarrassment at how specific scenes from the film were replicas of my interactions with Israelis while in Palestine: clerks on King George St., militia at Al-Aqsa, birthright guides in Jaffa. Like maybe the reason we have so many tropes in our diasporic media is because we’ve been intentionally subjected to the same colonially-fabricated experiences. Are there other realities? Enter Ghost opens with an altercation at the Palestine border that mirrors one I’ve experienced in the past. But the similarity between my life and Hammad’s fictive rendition ends there. Although there are references throughout the novel to distinct cutlery and trinkets that speak to my mind’s nostalgia, Enter Ghost is so dense with specificity that it would be difficult to read Sonia’s life as anything but Sonia’s—a testament to the detail and foresight finessed into the story.
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Hammad establishes her authorial intent as soon as the novel begins. The first conversation we encounter between Sonia and her father is during a video call when she’s just arrived in Palestine. It’s ordinary dialogue that reads as somewhat stilted, leaving me wondering what language they’re communicating in. It’s only when the call finishes and Sonia’s father says, ‘Bye, my life’ that I can confirm that the chat was in Arabic, because that is what ‘hayati حياتي’ literally means and what Sonia’s father must have said. It’s a sly wink on Hammad’s part—those who get it feel gratified by it, while those who don’t aren’t snubbed of a pleasant read.
This is one example of many: Hammad has come up with her own system for signalling cultural specificity. Her exposition is written with Levantine readers in mind. This is then concluded with a contextualising word or clause for general readers. I know exactly where Hammad’s images exist in space and time—they call to mind details from my own living room, or that of my parents’, or family friends’, or grandmother’s. When Sonia recalls childhood summers in her grandparents’ home in Palestine, she thinks back to ‘the smell of overripe fruit’, ‘fallen plums’, ‘wet tiles of the bathroom’, ‘arches of the windows’ and ‘one of the blue bath towels, which shrank every year until they were too indecent to wear in the corridor’. Hammad is adept at using universal visual aids (fruit, architecture, a cotton towel) that ring specific to the Levant, prompting recognition and nostalgia without the use of a single Arabism. There are no smells of spices or vibrant fabrics in Enter Ghost. At the end of Sonia’s recollection, she conjures the image of their grandfather reading ‘a big book with tiny letters’ (duh), thinking to herself, ‘They always said Jiddo was where Haneen got her brains.’ The flashback ends at this point, moving on to Sonia’s reflections on puberty and politics.
Here, the word ‘Jiddo’ has been set up without associations to the aforementioned orientalist smells and colours—tired ones that Arabs are so often anchored to in western literature and media. Throughout Enter Ghost, Hammad indicates characters’ code-switching between Arabic and English with a simple ‘switched into Arabic’, ‘shifting into Arabic’ or ‘in a mixture of Arabic and English’; this swiftness indicates the non-event in which polylinguists switch between languages. If ever the explanation is more expansive, it’s because the context warrants it so. At one point in the novel, Ibrahim, a local Palestinian character, peppers Arabic ligaments (‘shame’, ‘usually’, ‘they say’, ‘someone’) through his English speech. Hammad calls overtly to this but it’s understood that he uses this hybrid in this particular moment to harmonise his stream of consciousness in conversation with others also fluent in both languages.
In 2019, Viet Thanh Nguyen tweeted, ‘Writers from a minority, write as if you are the majority’. His Twitter account has since been deleted, but in an interview the following year, he reiterated his stance, urging minoritised writers not to explain, translate or apologise. Although this is sound advice, it’s precarious to do well. To put simply, diaspora writers don’t have the privilege of writing ‘like’ the majority for fear of being misunderstood. As many of us can attest, what is immediately understood by us may not translate in the same way or even make sense at all. But Hammad—and most likely her editor—artfully circumvents this dilemma by slipping on hypothetical outside eyes, negotiating each instance in which something potentially construed as unclear should either be emphasised or simply hinted at. It’s an admirable dance: Hammad extends trust towards foreign readers without sacrificing cultural specificity. In this way, there are no prerequisites for keeping up with her threefold intricacy of culture, geopolitics and language.
My favourite example of Hammad’s expert pacing is at Uncle Jad’s house, when his wife, Sonia’s Aunty Rima, asks, ‘No children?’. Sonia’s reply is a frank ‘No’ and the subject pivots to Mariam’s production of Hamlet. When Sonia leaves after a quick lunch with them, the narrative shifts to Sonia contemplating on her past relationships. It is only here, halfway through the novel and catalysed by Rima’s question, that we learn how Sonia’s marriage was undone. Hammad writes her protagonist’s elaborate personal history with such restraint that it's actively gratifying when the pieces finally come together. Character background is revealed in a way that is simultaneously surprising and organic. Hammad doesn’t spoon-feed details to readers; you have to reach this point to discover why Sonia is who she is, and what catharsis she might be searching for.
In an Asian writers’ workshop that I am a part of, we wonder how to insert other languages when writing in English without it coming across as stilted or self-conscious. We linger on this topic until the hour is up. How many times can we have this discussion? I suppose the thing is that it’s never the same one twice, especially when we inhabit so many languages and so many geographies. When does it stop being trite? I say before the session ends that we should host this conversation as a panel and someone disagrees. It’s not for public consumption, they say; it should remain between us until we figure it out. I think they’re right. How many times can I write a version of this review? They’re different each time but this is the last one, I hope. They have inadvertently become a three-act conversation with myself to try and answer this unrelenting question in my writer’s mind.
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Hammad’s erudition is multilayered: Enter Ghost is also a meta-narrative about theatre. Complications with the production’s funding and execution speak to the logistical barriers of creating art during occupation. Art will not liberate Palestine. Hammad knows this. To write a book that frames theatre as a radical form of resistance would be naïve. But the success of Mariam’s Palestinian Hamlet requires that the cast and crew move with autonomy, a property incongruous with the occupation. In Enter Ghost, theatre becomes a vessel through which Palestinians—from both the West Bank and ‘48—directly interact with the animosity of the Israeli state. Wael, who plays Hamlet, channels an altercation with the IOF to amplify the character’s viciousness. A resistance operation at Al-Aqsa triggers the tightening of checkpoints Palestine-wide and characters show up late to rehearsals.
When we first encounter Hammad’s usage of script as form, it is to establish a memory early in the novel, where Sonia listens to a recorded interview between Jad and her grandmother Aida. Taken during the Second Intifada, the recording is a speculative interview on whether Aida will move to the hypothetical Palestinian state and what will happen to her soul. Of course, there’s nothing particularly exceptional about a transcript, but the form returns, more elaborate and self-aware a few chapters later, when Sonia meets with the cast of Hamlet for their first reading of the play. While initially Hammad’s choice to indicate a vessel for memory, the script has now metastasised, taking over the prose and used to narrate the story itself. As characters begin reading from the script (which is conducted entirely in classical Arabic and slightly tweaked for the characters’ Palestinian context) other questions come up. They suggest that Hamlet is a martyr and he is fighting for national liberation. ‘But which nation is Hamlet liberating?’ someone asks. This is where Hammad’s exceptional skill in marrying theme, form, and subject matter comes through most clearly.
The script format in Enter Ghost only ever lasts a few pages at a time before the traditional prose resumes. Yet each time the script returns, it has matured once more. This is a refreshing and apt breaking of the fourth wall—Hammad materialises this concept literally in Enter Ghost when the stage directions’ initial passive voice briefly falls away to foreground the first person ‘I’, acknowledging a sentience in the script. This ‘I’ happens once more in this iteration and then never again. After this, the script shows the actors rehearsing a scene between Gertrude and Hamlet. Rather than conversing with Hamlet, Sonia is performing into the ether. Wael-as-Hamlet has been asked to simply watch as Sonia-as-Gertrude speaks into the void. We are presented only with Gertrude’s lines and the parts where Hamlet is supposed to reply are blank. In doing this, the character of Hamlet turns into a ghost on the page. The pinnacle of the form coming alive, however, occurs at the end of the book, when the lines in Hamlet are used to directly dispute IOF soldiers.
While discussing the play’s relationship to national liberation, the conversation snags on the character of Gertrude. One of the actors suggests that Gertrude was raped by Claudius and another replies, ‘maybe rape is too far. But remember ightisab means rape but it also means usurping. Like, yaghtasib al-ard.’ They resume rehearsing the scene and the lines are transliterated with the English translation displayed beneath in italics:
WAEL (clears his throat) Ah—akun am la akun? Thalek huwa as-su’al.
(shall I be or not be? That is the question.)
Here, Hammad primes readers into understanding both the delicacy of translating literature and the necessity of parallel text. The transliterations in this iteration of the script format are not without reason. It is an invitation for readers—if they’re able—to closely assess the text along with the actors, identifying any discrepancies.
In Enter Ghost, Hammad plays with form so sparingly that when it does happen, we can acknowledge its value. A less skilled author may use the script format as an easy way out of narrative difficulties or lean on it as a way to ham-fistedly signal novelty, but Hammad’s usage is deft and purposeful. Each variation in script—the transliteration, the imposed ‘I’, the blank lines—occurs only once. The experimentation in form relies wholly on the context of the scene. Another example of this is the presentation of a road sign in Hebrew, Arabic and English
Aדרך זו מובילה לשטח
בשליטת הרשות הפלסטינית
הכניסה לישראלים אסורה,
מסכנת את חייכם
ומהווה עבירה פליליתهذه الطريق تؤدي الى منطقة (أ)
التابعة للسلطة الفلسطينية
الدخول للمواطنين الاسرائليين
ممنوعة وخطرة على حياتهم
وتشكل مخالفة جنائية في حقهم
This Road leads to Area “A”
Under The Palestinian Authority
The Entrance For Israeli
Citizens Is Forbidden,
Dangerous To Your Lives
And Is Against The Israeli Law
Reading this, I wondered why it was necessary. Even if translated signs are a common sighting, it didn’t seem relevant to the story. But Sonia goes on to read the different versions aloud and notes that ‘dangerous to your lives’ in English is written as ‘dangerous to their lives’ [emphasis mine] in Arabic, demonstrating an intended audience for each translation. It is absolutely necessary that we see the road sign as parallel text. Each literary device Hammad uses is a microcosm of something much larger, speaking either to the occupation or the interpersonal dynamics between Sonia and the other characters.
What is most stunning about Enter Ghost is the eerie omnipresence of spirit teased out through anthropomorphic elements. It’s a subtle detail that starts off strong and frequent then recedes slightly, allowing other forms, like the script, to contribute to the text’s consciousness as well. We see this in descriptions like ‘the water drank the stones’; ‘the kettle clicked off and breathed up the tiles’; ‘the sea gasped on the shore’; ‘the waves varicose with foam’; ‘the sun, rising and stretching in my room, scratched my eyes’. This airtight viscerality breathes the book alive, affecting the earth and elements to become combative and therefore active participants in the Palestinian fight against an unnatural occupation. Just as it is with the script, we watch glass, water and dirt react to and interact with the landscape of their own volition. Even a nylon bag is characterised as animate, ‘crackling’ and ‘wilting’ in the wind. Hammad makes every detail heavy with consciousness. If sand can breathe then a mirror-reflection can course with blood and spirit. A five-hundred-year-old script can oppose fascist militia.
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Hasib Hourani lives and works on unceded Wurundjeri Country. He is currently completing his debut book of poetry, which will be published by Giramondo in 2024.