Enter Ghost – Isabella Hammad

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Actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her sister after a relationship breakdown. She is persuaded to perform in an Arabic version of Hamlet amid the violence, highlighting the connection between performance and political protest. At the same time Sonia is navigating ghosts of her own and the country’s, and reuniting herself with Palestine, its past, present and future.

Now the thing about Hamlet specifically is that anyone who plays Hamlet in London, Sonia can back me up here, any Hamlet in London is haunted by all the ghosts of the Old Hamlets, I mean of all the famous actors in the tradition. That’s not meant o pressure you, Wael; in fact, the opposite. Because Wael here is haunted by other things, by things he can’t even express yet, maybe. We are all haunted by a mixture of traditions, events, memories. So I don’t want you to bow down to some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare, no as Amin says, Fuck Shakespeare. We’re free to play.

● I found this a captivating story of the beauty of art vs the horrors of war, especially the importance of art, of freedom and expression. Hammad has conveyed how crucial art is to convey political objection when outspoken political statements come at great risk to one’s safety. The characters’ ability and right to act and put on a performance in war-torn Palestine felt like much more than just putting on a play.

The main character Sonia has a see-saw personality. She begins as indecisive and aloof and needing to be led, but by the end she becomes more seen and I was engrossed in her journey. I also enjoyed the author’s diverse presentation of information. The prose and script narrative methods would pull me in close to confide in me, then hold me at arm’s length and let me observe, making me feel like an active participant in the story. – Rachel

● I struggled to engage with Enter Ghost and felt like I was viewing this story through a hazy filter, or somehow was being kept at arm’s length by the author. Perhaps this sense of confusion and nonchalance was deliberate by the author, to help convey the state of the character’s situations but it made for a challenging read for me. – Suzy

Published 2023
Grove Atlantic
336 pages