Enter Ghost book review: Hamlet in Palestine

Enter Ghost is told from the point of view of Sonia, a British-Palestinian actor in her late 30s, who finds herself roped into playing Gertrude in an Arabic production of Hamlet to be staged in the West Bank. (Representational image by Omer Faruk Yildiz via Pexels)

After she staged Beckett’s Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo in 1993, Susan Sontag wrote that in that city, as anywhere else, “there are more than a few people who feel strengthened and consoled by having their sense of reality affirmed and transfigured by art”.

To provide strength and consolation is certainly one role of art in a beleaguered time, as the people of Palestine must know. There is a rich tradition of Palestinian theatre, shaped by the weight of current circumstances. Many classic plays have also been adapted to highlight their contemporary resonance and relevance.

Shakespeare, in particular, has been performed many times over the years. Director and actor Amir Nizar Zuabi has written that for him, Shakespeare was Palestinian, as much for the rhythm of his lines as for the way he blends “injustice with humour, anger with grace, compassion with clairvoyance, comedy with tragedy”.

One such Shakespearean production is at the heart of Isabella Hammad’s new novel, Enter Ghost. Hammad, recently recognized by Granta magazine as one of the 20 best British novelists under 40, had earlier written The Parisian, a work of historical fiction that traces the life and travels of a native of Nablus in the decades after World War I. Her new work is squarely set in the present day.

Enter Ghost is told from the point of view of Sonia, a British-Palestinian actor in her late 30s, who travels from London to visit her sister Haneen in Haifa. The two share a prickly bond and Sonia, recovering from a break-up with a theatre director, hopes that the trip will help her heal as well as renew ties with the past.

Before long, she finds herself roped into playing Gertrude in an Arabic production of Hamlet to be staged in the West Bank. Much of the book deals with Sonia’s relationship with Miriam, the talented, driven director, and with the rest of the cast and crew. They are an eclectic lot, some with experience and some without. All of them, in their own ways, are struggling to come to terms with life under Israeli restrictions.

The novel's depiction of preparations and rehearsals is a microcosm of a larger reality of overlapping hierarchies. On an everyday level, people are frequently delayed at checkpoints, have to grapple with power cuts, and deal with deprivation. Then, there are official questions raised about sources of funding, and suspicions about collaborators within the theatre group itself.

Such circumstances lead to febrile yet close connections. As one of the characters puts it, “when calamity strikes and puts normal life under strain, feelings that have been stifled by everyday evasion can break free and make it easy to talk where before it felt impossible”.

The environment, feels Sonia, reveals something about the larger world as well. She recalls her sister once comparing Palestine “to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath.”

Hammad’s prose is remarkable for the way it weaves together a tapestry of past and present without sinking under the weight of Sonia’s recollections and regrets. Her role in the play apart, she is haunted by unfinished business: the nature of her break-up with the London director; her memories of childhood trips from Haifa; her London-based father’s relationship with the rest of the family in Palestine; and the ups and downs of her relationship with Haneen.

“I was professionally skilled,” she thinks at one point, “at holding two things in my mind at once and choosing which to look at as felt convenient”. The way out that she is offered is to drop convenience and arrive at a closer connection with how the conditions of the land have influenced her life. Her art points to a way to do this.

The rehearsals continue in the teeth of further setbacks. There are departures and arrivals, as well as increased official pressure to stall the production. All of this occurs against the backdrop of unrest on the streets caused by Israeli security measures around Al-Aqsa.

Jonathan Cape, 336 pages, Rs 699.

Underneath these goings-on is the question: what is the point of theatre in such an environment? “I don’t believe in theatre as therapy,” says one of the actors during a rehearsal. “What do you believe in, then?” is the rejoinder. “Theatre as freedom fighting?”

Nothing, Sonia reflects on another occasion, is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. Miriam, meanwhile, is aware of the risk that “art might deaden resistance, by softening suffering’s blows through representing it”.

Shakespeare’s play is itself analysed by them for the ways in which it fits their situation. Is Hamlet like a Palestinian martyr? Does Gertrude symbolise Palestine? How can their performance shrug off “some grand idea of a far-off English Shakespeare”?

It is a sign of Hammad’s skill that these and other issues don’t come across as polemical but as a natural part of the lives and perceptions she writes about. This means Enter Ghost is that rare breed among today’s novels: it tackles geopolitical concerns while being firmly planted on the ground that the characters inhabit.