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

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Enter Ghost takes you deep inside the protagonist’s experience while opening a wider window on to life for Palestinians and their exhausting day-to-day struggles. Hammad explores this setting with intelligence and a fine-grained specificity… A richly layered novel.”— The Guardian

It’s interesting in the sections in which the actors are rehearsing, you change your style. And you write them like a script, like scenes from a play. It’s a lot of fun. And it gave me a whole different view of your protagonist, Sonia, because we’re seeing her from above, instead of being inside her brain. What prompted that? 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. HAMMAD: Yeah, yeah, there is. I think it’s an Egyptian version from the 19th century that gives it a happy ending where he becomes king and is happily ever after. 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 Old Drift Feels completely different to anything else being written right now in English, a heartfelt meditation on the relationship between art and politics. Sunday TimesEnter POLONIUS, ROSENCRANTZ, and GUILDENSTERN How now, my lord! I will the king hear this piece of work? I was thirsty as well, and I needed the loo. And in this state of physical discomfort, something strange happened. My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream, and my perspective had been breached, I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situated fragilely in time and space, this summer, this side of the wall. Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway. Everything had been decided in advance. We were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out into the audience, dismantle our illusions and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of fate and state.”

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) 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. How was each sister impacted by the experience of meeting Rashid, the hunger striker? Why do you think that Haneen withheld information about Rashid’s fate from Sonia, and why was Sonia so upset by this when she found out? What does this conflict reveal to us about Sonia and Haneen’s relationship? LAERTES wounds HAMLET; then in scuffling, they change rapiers, and HAMLET wounds LAERTES KING CLAUDIUS Part them; they are incensed. 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.Until then, they’re only in Haifa and they’re seeing—they’re witnessing the intifada and the uprising through the television screen. They’re sort of in a political environment as children, but they’re not directly witnessing it. This is the, kind of, first instance of them properly witnessing it. 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

If you could set it up for us and tell us a little bit about some of the characters named Mariam and Haneen, as mentioned. Despite the novel’s contemporary setting and political themes, Hammad never lets her character’s trenchant views overwhelm the complex beauty of her storytelling. Here’s Isabella Hammad in conversation with Barbara Bogaev.

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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. Palestinian actress Sonia Nasir finds herself immersed in an essential drama, with repercussions extending beyond the stages she is accustomed to, upon a visit to her older sister, Haneen, in Israel. The women’s paternal grandparents maintained their home in Haifa in 1948, giving the family a foothold both inside Israel and in the West Bank. Haneen and Sonia grew up in London, but their annual childhood summer visits provided them with familiarity and comfort in the Arab world and knowledge of life in the Israeli state. Sonia, who still lives in London, attempts to heal psychic wounds resulting from the unpleasant end of a love affair by paying a long-delayed visit to her sister. A politically aware academic, Haneen has been living in Haifa and working at a university in Tel Aviv. Sonia has not returned to Haifa since before the second intifada and must absorb the cultural, political, and familial changes that have occurred since. Almost immediately upon her arrival, she becomes involved in a production of Hamlet put on by a Palestinian theater company, directed by her sister’s energetic and passionate friend Mariam Mansour. The production is politically charged, employs classical Arabic, and challenges Sonia personally and professionally. When Sonia eventually agrees to undertake the role of Gertrude, she becomes immersed in macro and micro aspects of the production and develops varying degrees of closeness with the rest of the cast, Palestinian theater veterans all (except for the pop star slated for the lead role to attract attention to the production). A thorough and thoughtful exploration of the role of art in the political arena unfolds as Sonia and the troupe work through rehearsals toward performing a tragedy with contemporary resonance. HAMMAD: I actually… I mean, I think that many of Shakespeare’s plays are perfect for modern day Middle Eastern contexts, in a sense, because of the political dynamics. There are lots of potential resonances, more than, you might say, in Western democracies.