4 min readNov 29, 2023 09:00 AM IST
First published on: Nov 29, 2023 at 09:00 AM IST
The centrepiece of Palestinian writer Isabella Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost, is an Arabic adaptation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, performed in the West Bank. Sonia, an actor who’s returned from London after a bitter love affair, finds herself entangled in the Ramallah production after meeting her sister in Haifa. Hammad’s novel spans generations of the conflict, from the 1948 Nakba to the 1993 Oslo Accords to present-day.
In conversation with critic Girish Shahane at last month’s Tata literature festival, Hammad said she was drawn to writing about theatre in Palestine because she found “certain elements of the [Israel-Palestine] conflict quite theatrical,” it being about the “performance and control of bodies and space.” She also cited inspiration in the 2014 documentary Arna’s Children, about a theatre centre for children in the West Bank.
Hammad picked Hamlet for her fictional adaptation because of its “ghostly presences”, saying, “the ghost of his father sends Hamlet to [discover who killed him]. Most ghostly presences in this novel are also exhortations to action — they linger because something needs to be done. In the Palestinian context, the strongest ghosts are the ghosts of the previous generation, who exhort the next generation to act. Palestinians haunt the Israelis, there’s a persistent presence in the personal stories of the characters.”
Hammad picked Hamlet for her fictional adaptation because of its “ghostly presences”
Sonia portrays Hamlet’s mother Gertrude, who doesn’t have many lines in the original play, which allowed Hammad to reinterpret it from the perspective of mothers. “Sonia is not a mother but she’s playing the role of one. I was thinking of the role of women in the Palestinian struggle and the iconography of women — as the mother of the fighter or martyr. I also explored how women interact with these paradigms, and how such women mother each other. That maybe motherhood is transferable, that there are ways of being a mother without raising a child,” she said.
Hammad drew from conversations with actors and critics to depict Palestine’s theatre in the 1970s and 80s, which was “very lively and burst into amazing activity, when art-making was very close to the revolution, not only in theatrical production but the visual arts as well.” She referred to 20th century German playwright Bertolt Brecht’s theory of alienation, which advocates leaving a viewer dissatisfied with a story’s ending to provoke protest out of them, as opposed to the typically cathartic narrative, which allows for a release of negative emotions.
“It made me think of the role of theatre in Ancient Greece, whether it was to siphon off subversive energies in the population so they become relatively docile and subject to political organisation,” she said. Shahane recalled a line from the novel about how the “play needed the protest but the protest did not need [the] play.” He also recalled a public performance by artist Nikhil Chopra in Kashmir which attracted crowds after local law enforcement tried to stop it, referring to Hammad’s fictional director Mariam who wants to evoke theatre’s potential to “rouse a revolution” in the audience.
“The word is out about Palestine. More people know about it and it’s getting harder to cover up what’s been happening,” said Hammad, on resistance to Israeli occupation. “At the same time, there’s a [political] push rightward everywhere. One needs to fight for progressive values locally, and then insist that the Palestinian cause is part of that.”
Hammad drew from conversations with actors and critics to depict Palestine’s theatre in the 1970s and 80s 
Hammad picked Hamlet for her fictional adaptation because of its “ghostly presences”
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