ENTER GHOST: REVIEW

Ghosts, present and past, abound in this tender yet defiant work about intergenerational memory and sagas of exile and displacement. The novel seems to argue that real growth and connection, both personal and political, cannot begin until everyone’s ghosts have emerged from their hiding. Art is, if nothing else, a powerful tool for coaxing them out! (Review by Dee Stead)

 

The play’s the thing wherein I’ll catch the conscience of the King.” Hamlet

Isabella Hammad started writing Enter Ghost, her second novel, in 2017, and it hit our bookshelves in the first trimester of 2023, an almost uncanny timing in the light of current events.

The pre-history of the story is spread thinly throughout the novel, but a brief synopsis might be of use to readers. Palestinians Nabil and Marie Nasir take their baby daughter, Haneen, to live in the UK in the early 1970s. Their second daughter, Sonia, is born shortly thereafter.

Sonia is the only one in their family who has a British passport, the others all have Israeli passports. The sisters are raised in England and attend a Catholic English school. Haneen studies languages and sociology at University and Sonia pursues the arts, becoming a successful actress on London’s West End. They have returned over the years as a family, every summer, to the family home in Haifa, where their grandparents have been living since before the 1948 Nakba event, when thousands of Palestinians were displaced, evicted from their homes and lands to open territory for the newly established State of Israel.

Sonia and Haneen speak fluent Arabic, but only Haneen speaks Hebrew. As a result of a harrowing incident that took place in 1987 at the time of the first Intifada (uprising/protest) in the West Bank when the girls were still in their teens, Sonia vows never to return to Israel, while Haneen becomes politicised and aware, returning to live in Haifa and teaching at Tel Aviv University. Their father remains in London but never discusses his early life with Sonia.

We now fast-forward to the opening scene of the novel, circa 2017, a first-person narrative, with Sonia as the protagonist. She has had a rough time in London, concentrating on her acting career, which has resulted in several successful productions, but not enough to bolster her confidence and satisfy her ego. She has been married for a decade, but this relationship faltered and died in the wake of a disastrous physical condition which necessitated an abortion of her three-month foetus and major surgery.

She has entered into a failed love affair with a producer, which has given her hope, both for a happy love-life and for a shot-in-the-arm for her stage career. Desperate for a change and some sea and sun, she flies to Israel to spend time with her sister in Haifa, hoping to recover her spirits and return to London, rejuvenated.

In all the years she has been away from Haifa, Sonia has given very little, if any, thought to the situation in her “homeland”. She finds Haneen stressed and pre-occupied, discovers that the old family home has been sold, her aunts, uncles and cousins have all been relocated, and even Haifa feels uncomfortably unfamiliar.

Enter: Mariam. Haneen’s friend, a theatrical director, bohemian, straight-talking, politically connected, and determined to direct a production, in classic Arabic language, with an Arabic cast, of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank! Against her will and her instincts, but overwhelmed by Mariam’s charismatic energy and optimism, Sonia agrees to play Gertrude for Mariam’s production.  We meet the cast of Hamlet, a motley collection of fascinatingly diverse men, some from the West Bank, some from Haifa, and rehearsals begin in the garden of Mariam’s ramshackle but warm and welcoming little house in Ramallah in the West Bank.

Sonia discovers that “making art” under occupation involves both funding and checkpoint challenges, there are arrests and interrogations of company members, and, against a backdrop of mass protests, there is the ever-looming question of whether the Israelis will ever even allow the performances to happen! Upon arriving in Ramallah for the first read-through Sonia’s first impression is that it “does not look particularly war-torn - it also felt remarkably familiar” and she is struck by the seeming normality of life on occupied land.

As the rehearsal period unfolds and we draw closer to each member of the cast of Hamlet, the window of our separation from them widens, and we see the life lived by the Palestinians and their exhausting day-to-day struggles become clear. As Mariam says to Sonia, “If we let disaster stand in our way, we will never do anything. Every day here is a disaster.”

An interesting departure from the first-person narrative aspect of this bold and evocative novel, lies in Mariam’s rehearsal technique – which Hammad translates into scripted episodes. We see some of the dialogue of the characters in rehearsal as actual scenes in a play. This has allowed Hammad to navigate beyond the first-person voice; sometimes Sonia is silent, a listener, and other characters dominate the scene which she observes. Removing the narrative voice altogether, allows the dialogue to live on the page and gather the many voices of the cast in a different and economical way. I found Mariam’s rehearsal tricks and techniques interesting and inspirational.

In a tense and brilliantly-described scenario, Sonia and Haneen travel to Jerusalem to participate in a peaceful demonstration against the increased security that has been set up around the Al-Aqsa Mosque after a violent incident. As the evening prayers end, the soldiers fire teargas canisters into the crowd of demonstrators, and chaos ensues. As the sisters flee this assault together, Sonia recognises at last what she and Haneen have in common, and their bond is re-cemented at last.

Ghosts, present and past, abound in this tender yet defiant work about intergenerational memory and sagas of exile and displacement. The novel seems to argue that real growth and connection, both personal and political, cannot begin until everyone’s ghosts have emerged from their hiding. Art is, if nothing else, a powerful tool for coaxing them out!

 

DISCLAIMER: In the light of the countries’ current political state, the reviewer will not comment on any specifics regarding the existing tensions. I will, however, state that I wish for peace for everyone involved. – Dee Stead