While we weren’t able to hold our January Reader’s Circle meeting due to unforeseeable events, we (Zack and Courtney) wanted to share our thoughts on the book we’d chosen, Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad.

Enter Ghost tells the story of a British-Palestinian actress returning to Palestine to visit her sister. The actress, Sonia Nasir, is at a difficult point in her life, having just ended a disastrous love affair with a married British director, and she soon finds herself roped into playing Queen Gertrude in a local production of Hamlet. As she rehearses with a small troupe of dedicated, idiosyncratic performers, Sonia works through her feelings about her place in the world as a Palestinian living abroad, processing her own complicated history with the land and its politics, and deciding what she owes to both.

Speaking for myself, I really enjoyed this one. I wasn’t sure what to expect going in, as I’d never read anything  by this author before, and (much to my chagrin) I haven’t read a lot of fiction centered around modern Palestine. The book doesn’t spend much time teaching you about the history of the era, but that’s to good effect; it’s not meant as a lesson, but as a way of building empathy for a situation that many of us will never experience first hand.

The prose is fluid and gorgeous throughout, and Hammad has a terrific sense of pacing. As Sonia switches focus from the present to the past, there’s little sense of lost momentum, which supports the idea that the two are impossible to entirely separate; as Hamlet struggles with his father’s ghost, Sonia struggles with her own history, and her place in that history. There’s a tremendous amount of tension running in waves throughout the novel, but even at its darkest, there’s a vibrant feeling of hope and community to keep things from being entirely bleak. 

Courtney, what did you take from this one? 

It was an exquisitely written book, in my opinion, capturing the nuances and complexities of ancestral trauma, political violence, and the clash of cultures in a war-torn region of the world. 

I appreciated how the author provided a window into the lived experience, albeit fictionalized, of a Palestinian woman living in diaspora, struggling to integrate the metaphorical ghosts of her childhood. One of the most haunting and heartbreaking scenes occurred early in the book, as Hammad’s narrator, Sonia, recounted her youthful exposure to violence and martyrdom amongst Palestinian activists and protesters (namely a young man dying of the long-term effects of a hunger strike).

In spite of the inherently political nature of such a book – remember, the personal is always political! – I was grateful that Hammad avoided adopting a preachy or proselytizing tone, which could be offputting and alienating for many potential readers.

Regardless of where your personal opinion stands on the ongoing crisis in Palestine/Israel, this book offers a profound and poignant insider’s view to the experiences of Palestinians from the 1940s to the present day. Finally, given current world events, reading books written by a wide range of folks living in this tumultuous region of the Middle East humanizes all of them, both Palestinians and Israelis alike.