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

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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. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

BOGAEV: Well, this might be a great point for you to do a reading about acting. It’s right at the beginning of your book, and it really kind of set the stage for me with your main characters. Because that’s, kind of, one of the elements or kind of features of having a first-person narration is that you can start to feel a little trapped inside the eye. This was a valve, to get out of the eye and make Sonia just one of many, one of the troupe and to equalize all the voices in the room. One of the many ghosts in your book is a young boy from Bethlehem, Rashid, who goes on a hunger strike. Sonia sees him when she’s a teenager. She’s on a trip with her sister, Haneen. It’s her first real experience of the Intifada.BOGAEV: Well, it’s interesting because you have ghosts going both ways in time. I mean, the ghosts are previous generations, but also the modern generations haunt the previous ones as well. Sonia’s father refers to what’s going on as a zombie apocalypse in Palestine. The Palestinians who never left. Isabella Hammad is the award winning writer of The Parisian. Enter Ghost is her second novel and a contemporary story focusing upon Palestine - the daily lives of Palestinians under occupation. ISABELLA HAMMAD: Yes, exactly. I was on a residency and just writing and writing, and I kind of came upon her. Enter KING CLAUDIUS, QUEEN GERTRUDE, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN KING CLAUDIUS There's matter in these sighs, these profound heaves: Hammad’s characters contend with displacement, ancestral home, authenticity, and the shimmering possibility of finding yourself in unlikely places. Sisterhood, soul-searching, and Shakespeare—what more could you ask for?”— Literary Hub, Most Anticipated Books of 2023

Why do you think the author made the choice to write specific sections of the novel in the format of a script? Why do you think Hammad chose the scenes she chose, and how do they compare or relate to other theatrical scenes in the book being acted out by Mariam’s company? A magnificent, deeply imagined story... A thought-provoking, engrossing story about the connections to be found in art, politics and family life. Sunday Times HAMMAD: Yeah, I mean, interestingly, Hamlet itself—this was something I discovered through the work of a scholar called Margaret Litvin. Hamlet itself as a play, rather than some of the other plays like Othello or The Tempest, has been less subject to a post-colonial, kind of, revisionism. And, more, it has a specific tradition in the Middle East of actually… he’s a kind of ally. Hamlet becomes an ally for revolution. He becomes a kind of revolutionary figure. He’s sort of interestingly claimed by the Arab theatrical tradition, in a way that’s sort of in support of anti-colonial struggle, which I also thought was very interesting. The glimpses into their theatrical production and theatre, in general, tended to be more interesting but were more often than not ruined b Sonia's obnoxious explanations and truisms. A lot of the dialogues were stilted, and even if the characters now and again do say something that is 'convincing', they remain thinly rendered figures. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.In a way, what I was trying to deal with was, the kind of later question of the efficacy of that use of art or that use of theater. Is it useful? Is it actually an effective mode of resisting? Or, is this a sort of 1970s idea of what we might do with our art in context of oppression? Moving, deftly written, and with a layered, distinct sense of its narrator's interiority, Enter Ghost is an excellent novel from an author whose future books I already can't wait to read. BOGAEV: That is lovely. Thank you. It’s wonderful to hear the Arabic and then the translation of the Arabic, which I think is very specific translation that you chose. HAMMAD: Yes, exactly. Yes. But, also, Gertrude doesn’t say very much. She has almost no lines. She’s also this object of projection, as mothers often are anyway. The figure of a mother is often an object of projection. But it allows for all of that kind of ambiguity, in a sense, about whether or not, the degree to which she knows or doesn’t know.

They, after a period of military rule, became citizens of the Israeli state. And they still had their home, amazingly, in Haifa, which is very unusual. So, that population, they haunt the Israelis in a sense as a reminder of the ethnic cleansing of 1948. For British-Palestinian author Isabella Hammad and her second novel Enter Ghost – a homecoming tale with a production of Hamlet on the West Bank at its crux – such image-making was never far from mind. In one indelible passage, the novel’s protagonist Sonia admits to being “haunted” by the thought of playing Ophelia, a role “trailing significations… like flower petals.” Did the author feel similarly apprehensive about embedding a Shakespearean work and its attendant images within her own?I think this is one of those moments, because an anagnorisis is always a coming to know something you sort of already knew on some level but refuse to look at. Which is itself very psychoanalytic. You’re kind of avoiding—On some level you know but you’re denying it, and then you turn to face it. And that experience changes you. The story revolves around three women: Sonia and her sister Haneen, and Mariam. If I had a criticism it would be to observe that the three share many character traits. They are all strong willed, forthright women living life on their terms whose men friends are largely peripheral to their lives. Sonia represents the outside world coming into immediate, close proximity with the region for the first time. Sonia has been disappointed by the men in her life, and its not hard to see in her a metaphor for Palestine. Her body has been subject to a forced purge and the divided (uterum septum) reproductive body that reveals itself has yet to achieve fulfilment. Sonia’s stage persona, Gertrude, is also potentially representative of nationhood. Haneen and Mariam are respectively respected as a teacher and drama teacher. Women with agency in what might be regarded as a man’s world. 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)

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? Epic… Because the book takes place in the complicated time and spaces that it does, the narrative grapples with sociopolitical concerns as well as it does the intimate, human ones. It sweeps you along.”— Vanity FairVery early on Sonia makes a move on of the actors in a way that was cringe and pathetic, but not in a funny or relatable way, but I later on came to understand that Sonia really thinks she is an intriguing figure ("I had a marketably unusual appearance, or so they said"). Being in Sonia’s head was a tiresome affair as I felt mostly annoyed by her self-pitying, her dull observations and assumptions about other people, as well as her painfully cliched love life. Then, I hit upon Hamlet and it seemed actually a bit more natural as an option. I was really interested in the fact that during the, I think it was the First Intifada, Hamlet was banned in Israeli prisons. Because the, “To be or not to be,” speech was seen as a call to arms or militant resistance. “To take arms against a sea of troubles. And by opposing, end them.” And that was very kind of provocative to my imagination. So, I ran with it. Discuss the representation of mothers and motherhood throughout the book, from the hunger striker’s mother, to Mariam, to Sonia and Haneen’s own mother and grandmother. Do these women have anything in common? How does Sonia’s role as Gertrude to Wael’s Hamlet allow her to inhabit the role of motherhood? HAMMAD: Well, actually, I started thinking about doing Macbeth. I don’t know why I thought of Macbeth. I think I like—I also like Macbeth as a play.