In Enter Ghost (2023), Isabella Hammad’s Mariam — a local theatre director in Palestine — says about Hamlet,
"[A]ny Hamlet in London is haunted by all the ghosts of the Old Hamlets… Wael here is haunted by other things, by things he can’t even express yet, maybe… So I don’t want you to bow down to some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare… We’re free to play.”
Mariam is perhaps echoing notable Shakespeare critic Marjorie Garber — “Every age creates its own Shakespeare” — but Hamlet in Palestine rendered by Hammad’s brilliant second novel — nominated for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2024 — is as radical as it is nuanced.
Enter Ghost tells the story of theatre actor Sonia Nasir, who returns to her hometown in Palestine, after many years of being away in London. She is visiting her sister Haneen in Haifa, where she meets Mariam and joins a production of Hamlet in Arabic in the West Bank.
Theatre and Theatricality
Many threads lead to this central motif — Hamlet in Palestine.
The most obvious one is the metaphor of theatre and play-acting. Hammad makes a conscious choice of merging form and content — also found in the twentieth-century Theatre of the Absurd — by presenting many scenes where the actors are talking to each other in the format of play scripts.
In an interview with LitHub, Hammad explains her choice. She says,
“There’s one practical reason which is that it allows me to get a lot of voices into the room very quickly… so that you feel the partiality of the first-person narrator [Sonia] quite concretely, that she’s just one of many.”
And,
“I think the initial impulse came from wanting to mine the theatrical metaphor in every possible way. I was trying to explore approaches to describing and portraying military occupation, and aspects of the occupation that are quite theatrical.”
One of these theatrical aspects of occupation is the checkpoint.
In the novel, Sonia describes a scene where their acting group — “One foreign national with an Arab name, two Palestinian citizens of Israel and one West Bank resident with a temporary permit” — are passing a checkpoint —
“Near the windowless tower, a shabby Israeli flag roils on the wind… somehow eternal and careless, marks of the ragged outposts of empire.”
Lessons in Feeling
Play-acting, then, is political — but it is also personal. Hammad’s novel provides lessons in feeling through acting. Sonia explains, quoting a movement director who had once trained her —
“[E]very body moves differently from the next person’s body when their mind goes through something… if you make a straight line from emotion to movement — your emotion, your movement — then the audience will not only read you, they will feel you” (original emphasis).
Lessons — teaching and learning — are inherent to the production of the play in the novel, but, for Sonia, acting in Hamlet in Palestine also means confronting her relationship with ‘home’ and her sister, Haneen. At one point, Sonia says,
“I named my emotions: guilt, sadness, discomfort, fear, longing.”
The lessons in feeling reach a crescendo in the scene that inspires the novel’s title. Mariam asks Sonia to play Gertrude without Hamlet’s dialogue being spoken, in the scene just after Hamlet kills Polonius till the stage instruction of ‘Enter Ghost’. Sonia does it brilliantly and says,
“I wept properly and continued to hear, instead of Wael’s actual spoken lines, the ghosts of the lines that had come to life in my head.”
A Case For Many Hamlets
If Hamlet is, as Harold Bloom writes, an instance of “how meaning gets started, rather than repeated, but also of how new modes of consciousness come into being,” then, it is important to make a case for many Hamlets, as Mariam does in the lines quoted in the beginning.
Hamlet was first performed in Arabic in Gaza in 1911, Hammad notes in ‘The Revolutionary Power of Palestinian Theater’. Enter Ghost refers to different versions of Hamlet.
For instance, Amin — one of the actors in the novel — recalls a version in Arabic that has a happy ending, where the ghost returns and gives the throne to Hamlet. It prompts Amin to ask — in an attempt to make meaning — does catharsis still count, if it’s happy?
In The Theatre of the Absurd (1961), Martin Esslin notes,
“Libraries have been filled with attempts to reduce the meaning of a play like Hamlet… yet the play itself remains the clearest and most concise statement of its meaning and message, precisely because its uncertainties and irreducible ambiguities are an essential element of its total impact.”
One cannot miss the contradiction in Esslin’s words — Hamlet’s clearest and most concise meaning lies in its uncertainties and ambiguities, allowing myriad interpretations.
When Mariam asks Sonia what she likes about acting, she wants to say “the occasional glimmers of something that looked like meaning”, but, eventually, she has a “horrible, useless revelation” —
“Our play needed the protests, but the protests did not need our play.”
On the role of art, therefore, Hammad’s Enter Ghost — like all great books — provides no simple answers.
Also read:
A thought that I had but that did not make it to the review — I really loved Hammad's use of clever little bits of language like, "The kettle clicked off and breathed up the tiles", and "I stood for a moment in the empty room, hearing the faint mosquito call of the filaments in the light bulbs..."