Enter Ghost: from one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists

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BOGAEV: Yeah. Okay, let’s talk about ghosts. So, many of your characters, not just Sonia, are haunted by generations past and the ghosts of their ancestors. That’s inevitable given the history and the present-day reality of Palestine. Hammad writes, “Our play needed the protests, but the protests did not need our play” (p. 274). Do you agree? Why do you think they carry on with the play nonetheless? HAMMAD: Right, which is a very cynical thing to feel. But, in some way, sometimes that can feel true. I don’t think it’s always true, but sometimes that can feel true. What are the ethics of representation? That question, what does it mean to represent suffering? Does it incite the reader or the watcher to action? Or is it—does something else happen? If the younger generation are female, the older family members are predominantly men, reflecting on the armed struggles of the last fifty years. A divided region and divided families as Uncle and Sonia’s father no longer speak. HAMMAD: I love that. I mean, I think that that’s true. I think that, I mean… maybe in the way that I was moved by Hamlet, struggling inside the narrative framework that Shakespeare has put on, I’m somehow moved by the metafictional, I think. I find it moving because of what it suggests about fate and fatedness.

An unforgettable Palestinian story of artistry under occupation, from the winner of the Betty Trask Award HAMMAD: That’s great to hear. That was kind of one of the aims, in a way, was to release the narrative voice from being inside Sonia’s perspective.Yeah, I mean, I kind of looked at a variety of Arabic translations of Shakespeare, of Hamlet specifically, to try and get a sense of the way he’d been received in the Arab world. My whole life I'd been aware of Haneen's stronger moral compass; it made me afraid to confide in her until the very last moment, until I absolutely needed to. I also wanted to resist her, the way a child resists a parent and at the same time absorbs their wisdom; I wanted to sulk in her second bedroom and feel better with the secret muffled gladness that someone was holding me to account." There is so much to be said about this book: beautifully written, poignant yet forceful, thoughtful and thought provoking, but above all challenging, challenging the reader to respond to the question facing the characters in the novel: how to live under occupation while preserving your dignity and humanity? Hammad answers this question through taking us into the hearts and minds of the characters in the novel and through that into the heart and mind of Palestine." —Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

Hammad is a pretty flawless writer who, despite her harrowing and often intellectually complex subject matter, produces easily readable, human, generous work. Young adults and mature intellectual readers alike will get behind Sonia’s struggles with relationships, work, family and self-image, which are instantly recognisable and perfectly parsed.”— Times (UK) What strikes me the most--and really, what impressed me the most--about Enter Ghost is its writing. Everything that works about this novel works because its writing does, and everything I can say about its writing I can also say of it as a novel more broadly. Hammad's writing, here, is incisive, measured, restrained. More to the point, it is distinctly unsentimental and yet always sympathetic. It's a very sensitive novel in the way it's attuned to the nuances of its characters, especially its narrator, Sonia; it gives you such a strong sense of the fine gradations of these characters' reactions, thoughts, and feelings. That is, it's a precisely written novel because it is a sensitively written one, and it's a sensitively written novel because it is a precisely written one. It pays attention to the details, gives them the space to matter, so that the more you read the novel the more those details get added to each other, and the more richly layered the story becomes. Enter Ghost is, on its surface, the story of Sonia Nasir, a London actress taking the summer off and visiting her sister Haneen who lives in the family’s ancestral city of Haifa. So much is wrapped up in that sentence. And so much lives beyond the surface. Sonia is escaping a love affair and seeking a closer relationship with her older sister, who teaches at an Israeli university. Once she arrives in Israel, she regains a fuller awareness of being Palestinian.BOGAEV: So how does this come down to you? I mean, were there epiphanies for you about politics or political activism during the writing of this book? BOGAEV: Yeah, and another line about this that really kind of hits hard, Sonia has what she describes as a, “Horrible, useless revelation, which was that in some way the meaning of our Hamlet depended on this suffering” that is going on around them, just art as the ultimate exploitation. Maybe the rehearsals themselves could have been more interesting if the people taking part were fleshed out, but they are not. Early on the author uses actual character introductions in a way that seems a cop-out at actually ‘showing/establishing’ their personalities and personal histories in a more natural way over the course of the narrative. It did not help that Sonia fails to really see most of them as people, especially the two younger men, for who she has some motherly feelings, and she uses to make points about the male ego. It’s a pity that they are not given more of a voice but flattened to fit Sonia and even Mariam's discourses and theories on male youth, masculinity, and rivalries.

Enter Priest, & c. in procession; the Corpse of OPHELIA, LAERTES and Mourners following; KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, their trains, & c The queen, the courtiers: who is this they follow? That novel won a slew of prizes, and Granta included Hammad in its decennial Best of Young British Novelists list earlier this year. I guess that’s a preoccupation of mine and a kind of source of anguish, in certain ways, to be candid about it. Whether or not I can be useful, it’s something that plagues me. But I don’t think that I came to any conclusions, unfortunately. Enter Ghostis a novel to savour rather than steam through — not least because it feels completely different to anything else being written right now in English, a heartfelt meditation on the relationship between art and politics. The story unfurls with a slow delicacy and Hammad sustains tension without resorting to cheap suspense… When you surrender to her writing, everything else falls away.”— Sunday Times (UK)

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Enter Ghost is a masterful, deeply convincing portrait of the all-too-real consequences of political theater—in both senses. A moving and important novel that presses upon the urgent question of how we ought to live in the midst of the rubble (and ongoing chaos) of political crisis." —Namwali Serpell, author of The Furrows I wish that the author had committed more fully to making Sonia into more of a mystifying and detached figure, but it seemed that she did not fully want to commit to making her into a flawed, destructive even, person. Ironically, her attempts at making us feel bad for Sonia, by showing us that her family left her out of the loop and those times shitty men treated her badly (who could have predicted that), only succeeded in making her into a bland shade of 'unlikeable'. I was professionally skilled at holding two things in my mind at once and choosing which to look at as felt convenient. And not only which to look at, but which to actually believe." Sonia’s fellow actors read Hamlet as an allegory for the Palestinian struggle and while she resists their interpretation, she uncovers ghosts of her own—repressed memories, a family history of resistance, and a newly discovered commitment to the Palestinian cause. Despite the novel’s contemporary setting and political themes, Hammad never lets her characters’ trenchant views overwhelm the complex beauty of her storytelling.

HAMMAD: I don’t know that I—not consciously. But, then, I did subsequently reread Beloved by Toni Morrison. I realized that that’s—you know, there are certain books you read when you’re young, when you’re a teenager, usually, that, I feel, start to constitute your areas of your brain. I think that was one of those books.Whether it is nobler of the soul that a man should suffer the slings of outrageous fortune and her arrows) Outstanding. Next-level. Aesthetically, intellectually, emotionally and culturally satisfying... Isabella Hammad is incapable of striking a false note. She immerses her heroine in volatile territory with the accuracy, compassion and coolness of a surgical knife sliding into a diseased body. The result is a stunning beauty - an eye-opening, uplifting novel that grants its vulnerable cast and their endeavors a rare and graceful dignity. Leila Aboulela, author of Minaret What moves Sonia from being “engaged with the political climate by default” (p. 40) to being more actively involved? Discuss the demonstration Sonia and Haneen go to in Jerusalem. In what ways is this form of political protest connected to their production of Hamlet, and in what ways does it feel different?