Staging resistance

Isabella Hammad's latest novel Enter Ghost follows Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian actress born in London, as she returns to Haifa, place of childhood summers, to visit her sister Haneen. At this year's Festivaletteratura, the author spoke to journalist Veronica Fernandes about the novel's central themes of identity, memory, resistance and the complicated meaning of returning home.

Sonia arrives feeling lost, emotionally disoriented, in a dark place. Her return triggers a journey of self-discovery when she joins a production of Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the West Bank. Enter Ghost evokes Shakespeare’s ghosts, but also the ghosts of memory, displacement and diaspora. The novel was seeded in 2017 after Hammad witnessed several protests in Jerusalem. She became interested in the theatrical dimensions of political resistance, exploring the power of performance as a form of expression, remembrance and survival. References to initiatives such as the Freedom Theatre demonstrate how art can be a tool of resistance, while also spotlighting the pressures placed on Palestinian artists.

Hammad discusses how writing itself became a form of acting. She initially wrote the novel in the third person but struggled to connect with Sonia. Moving to the first person allowed her to enter the character more fully, to “get into her skin.” The process reflects the novel’s larger concern with inhabiting other lives and confronting one’s own identity.

Enter Ghost, Hammad claims, is not only political. It is also a story of sisterhood and motherhood, not in its literal sense, but in the forms of care, protection and solidarity that emerge between its female characters. Hammad resists reducing Palestinian identity to victimhood. Palestinians, she suggests, should not have to prove their humanity through suffering. Enter Ghost instead illustrates the complexity of Palestinian lives, and on the possibility of finding oneself by returning to what has been left behind.