The narrator of Hammad’s new novel, Enter Ghost, is Sonia, a British Palestinian actress who visits her sister in Israel to recover from the end of a relationship. Despite wanting to take a break from the stage, Sonia gets roped into playing Gertrude in a production of Hamlet being mounted in the West Bank. She’s been hearing about it or watching it in the abstract on TV. This is a pivotal moment in the book for both these sisters when they’re very young. It’s a really moving scene. Maybe you could tell me about writing this scene and what you were exploring in it about memory. And turning points for these women. I’ve been acting for twenty years,’ I said. Mariam looked at me serenely. My answer was incomplete, and she would wait for me to finish it. I didn’t know this woman. There was no need to answer truthfully. And it was true that there had been times in my life when I felt my work had saved me, transcending its function as a trade in a way that seemed, embarrassingly, to concern my soul. I didn’t know if that was what I liked about acting, but the occasional glimmers of something that looked like meaning had obviously played a role in keeping me going. There was no way I could say this aloud, although I suspected it was the sort of thing she was after. I could tell she had an American style ease with matters of the heart. Or maybe I should say a thespian’s ease. Something which, presumably, I myself had once possessed and lost somewhere along the way. But, also, theater is just… it’s a business and it involves funding and innovation and butts-in-seats. Mariam is very much torn between her idealism and just, you know, being a theater runner. 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.

Captivating . . . A deeply moving narrative that illuminates the lived realities of Palestinians in the West Bank, skillfully interweaving themes of resilience, the struggle for self-discovery, and the complex performance of identity in everyday life.”— Harper’s Bazaar She’s Palestinian, but she’s acting in London. She’s kind of the heir of two literary and political traditions, and seeing the sort of crossover.I was fortunate to read an ARC of Enter Ghost. The short of it is it's very good. I understood Sonia, who reminded me of so many friends and acquaintances I felt almost invasive, like I'd stepped into a therapy session or read their diaries, and the same applied many of the characters around her. I appreciated the story Isabella Hammad's pulled from the maelstrom of Palestine and Israel. She's told her story with beautiful prose that's consciously different to what she's done elsewhere. Enter Ghost is moving and memorable. Though scenes meander a little, I loved where it goes and how it goes there. (I suspect I'll be thinking of it on Fridays.) Hammad writes, “We were enacting a Palestinian cliché: coming to see the house the family had lost. Although, as Mariam pointed out, my case did not quite fit that mould” (p.185). What does the sale of Sonia’s grandparents’ house bring up for her? HAMMAD: Wael is a pop star. He is a cousin of Mariam’s and he is a refugee who lives in the West Bank. He’s been cast as Hamlet despite the fact that he has no experience of acting. Largely, because Mariam is hoping to draw a big crowd, and Wael can draw a big crowd. So, this is Wael during the discussion after reading the “To be or not to be” speech. ISABELLA HAMMAD: Yes, exactly. I was on a residency and just writing and writing, and I kind of came upon her.

The tradition, you know—after 1948—the tradition of theater in Palestine was a political tradition, as with all the arts. They were committed, dealing with the context of the new Israeli state and being colonized, and articulating positions of resistance against that colonization. HAMMAD: I mean, teenager, maybe. So, teenager. But then, you know, I studied at university and I found it really hard to study Shakespeare academically. Discuss the company’s final performance at the end of the novel. Why do you think they decided to undertake this particular performance despite all of the known risks? What final lines from Shakespeare conclude the book and why do you think the author made this choice? The story feels drawn out and the prose at times tries to be oblique and complex but succeeds only in unnecessarily over-elaborate.A stirring novel and a tribute to those Palestinians who have attempted, and attempt, to make art despite the forces ranged against them. Times Literary Supplement I mainly relied on my memory of studying Hamlet as a schoolchild, which made a great impression on me as a schoolchild. I guess, I was probably about 16 or 17 when I studied it. I really loved the play. That’s sort of what happens to Sonia when she finds out what happened to Rashid. Now I’m giving away the end, the plot. But, she sort of… she kind of realizes that she had… you know, the way in which she had run away from it. It’s a sort of understanding of her own obligations as well, as a Palestinian. A confronting of her own ambivalence, political ambivalence. 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, also is another, you know… that the future generations might continue to do some haunting. And, that haunting itself might be, kind of, a political act, I think, is quite interesting. Ghosts always suggest something that needs to be done. Something that’s not complete, something that’s unfinished. Enter HAMLET and HORATIO, at a distance First Clown Cudgel thy brains no more about it, for your dull 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.That’s kind of why I was sort of brought up catharsis a couple of times in the novel. Because obviously, catharsis, when you have a kind of cathartic experience at the end of a play in that old model, you’re released of those uncomfortable emotions that might urge you to act. So, what does it mean if you don’t have catharsis? Obviously, Bertolt Brecht was somebody who deliberately tried to explore not giving an audience catharsis as a way to try and make them change the conditions in which they live.