Shakespeare in the West Bank

Norm Diamond

Enter Ghost
By Isabella Hammad
Grove Atlantic, 2024, 336 pages, $18 paperback.

“I EXPECTED THEM to interrogate me at the airport and they did.”

That is the strong opening line to a new novel by Isabella Hammad. The line immediately situates us, knowing the author is Palestinian, in a larger and fraught context. The “they” referred to as the interrogators must be Israeli officials, and the Palestinian protagonist is seeking to enter or re-enter Israel.

The novel’s name is Enter Ghost. “Enter ghost,” too, is the stage direction in Shakespeare’s Hamlet each time the dead king appears. There’s to be a play within the novel, just as there’s a play within the play in Hamlet.

In the novel a Palestinian theatre troupe seeks to mount a production of Hamlet in the West Bank — something that the Israeli occupation authorities actually prohibit.

Is the woman entering Israel a ghost? And even as a real live person, to whom might she be a ghost? Will this be the play, as Hamlet says, “to catch the conscience of a king”? Or will Israeli authorities seek to block the production? And can they?

Our immediate question is why choose Hamlet to perform for a Palestinian audience? Are the audience members not only the fictional occupants of the West Bank who might attend the play, but also the readers of Hammad’s novel?

Some of those are questions for the reader to answer — and read this excellent novel is something I hope you do.

Enter Ghost, good as it is in plot, in character development, in psychological insight, is also a way of alerting its readers to the “slings and arrows” — to quote Hamlet —the “slings and arrows” of daily life for Palestinians in Israel and the West Bank.

Those daily hardships and humiliations are not often told in the West, in the fairy tale version we’re fed of Israel as a democracy supposedly for all its inhabitants and the general silence about the additional territory it controls.

The novel might say to its readers, as Shakespeare did:

let us once again assail your ears,
That are so fortified against our story.

Something Rotten in the State

The actors in Enter Ghost glom onto the famous line in Hamlet: Something is rotten in the state of Denmark, but in place of this mythical “Denmark” they hear what theatregoers in many countries for many centuries have heard, their own country, or the country that rules over them, in this case Israel.

Or, there’s that other reference in Hamlet that resonates with the way Israel presents its policies about Palestinians to the world:

That one may smile, and smile, and be a villain.
At least I’m sure it may be so in Denmark.

But exposure of oppression is insufficient by itself. Shakespeare’s Hamlet is about action and what holds us back from taking action. For a Palestinian audience, these words from Hamlet’s famous “to be or not to be” monologue might resonate:

Whether ‘tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them.

Could presenting Hamlet in the West Bank be a prompt to Palestinian activism? Would the play be perceived that way, as a threat, by Israeli authorities? Would they really shut down Shakespeare?!

On the one hand, Hamlet the character dithers, intellectualizes, forgoes opportunities to act, fulminates but continues to put up with a situation he finds intolerable. As Shakespeare has him reflect:

Thus conscience does make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pitch and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

On the other hand, Hamlet also says:

Now could I drink hot blood,
And do such bitter business as the day
Would quake to look on.

Shakespeare’s play, of course, ends with action, literally “taking arms against a sea of troubles,” but with unforeseen and tragic consequences. Perhaps foreshadowing the ambiguity of Hammad’s ending to her novel. We’ll get to that.

The Struggle

But maybe we’ve not been asking the right question. Maybe the Palestinian intention and the potential Israeli response aren’t focused on Hamlet specifically. Maybe they have more to do with the effort to create an institution, in this case a theatre company, in the West Bank — or even an institution linking Palestinians in the West Bank and inside Israel, or maybe just with the effort to create occasions for Palestinian gatherings.

Israeli rule is partly predicated on keeping Palestinians divided. In the novel, funding for new institutions, even through NGOs, requires an Israeli stamp of approval.

Electricity for the West Bank rehearsal space is selectively granted or withheld by Israeli authorities. And the janitor who opens or blocks access to the space is a Palestinian on the Israeli payroll, lurking for hints of undeclared funding or any political ties.

In that case the very intention of putting on a play, or a few people gathering in a room to contemplate that possibility or to rehearse, is inherently a political act. And that’s an aspect of Palestinian life we learn from the novel: the pervasiveness of politics.

As Sonia, the novel’s protagonist, reminisces:

“We had done the same thing every summer since I was eight: played in the garden, gone to the beach, and watched recorded footage of West Bank confrontations after dinner in the downstairs living room.”

Just a normal part of Palestinian life: the family gathered around the TV watching protests and repression. Family tensions, so common throughout the world that in most places they’re not worth mentioning — spats between spouses, jealousies between in-laws, resentments between siblings — here manifest through people’s relation to the struggle.

Sonia has returned to Israel to take a break from her work as an actor in London and get away from a romantic affair gone bad, also to see her older sister.

It’s the sister who has stayed in Israel and has been more directly involved in the Palestinian struggle, already a tension between the sisters. About her, Sonia says:

“Haneen was doing it for all of us, I was committed to the cause by proxy, I didn’t need actually to visit.”

Sonia says that early in the novel; her perspective will change. An incident from the sisters’ childhood returns to force a mutual accounting.

They were taken by their uncle, a doctor, from Haifa, where they live in Israel, into the West Bank to see a cousin they’d never met. The cousin had been released from an Israeli jail after a group hunger strike.

But unlike the others who’d been jailed for protesting along with him, the cousin continued to refuse food after being freed. His frail appearance and dedication made an impression on the young Sonia, and she just assumed he’d recovered.

Only now, on her return to Palestine as an adult, does she discover that the cousin died soon after their visit because of his continued refusal to eat, and that Haneen had known and never told her. Confronted, Haneen has no explanation. Normal, usually trivial sibling tensions, are here filtered through politics and the relation to struggle.

That early incident had contributed to Haneen’s activist commitment, while it drove Sonia to swear never to return to the West Bank. It also had another kind of resonance as the family debated whether to force feed the cousin to keep him alive. The act of forcing him would have had one kind of significance when done by the family. The same act, but sometimes practiced as we are told by Israeli jailers, would have had another.

Theatre Dynamics

Sonia grows politically in the course of the novel, but in subtle ways. Each encounter with a place or person brings back memories that remind her of her Palestinian roots.

Staying with her sister in Haifa exposes her to the contradictions of Palestinian activism within Israeli society — for instance the criticisms the sister receives from other revolutionaries for holding a job within Israel, a job she holds specifically to try to help fellow Palestinians.

Sonia’s participation in the theatre group, initially reluctant, also exposes her to a microcosm of Palestinian society. The group dynamic,  as well as the prospect of putting on the play under the threat of having it banned or physically repressed, is part of what politicizes her.

The actors come from varied backgrounds, from inside Israel to the West Bank, from owning their own apartment in either place to living in a squalid refugee camp, from having studied abroad to never having gone more than a few miles from their birthplace.

This is a novel for lovers of theatre. We’re taken inside rehearsals and see how the director, notably a woman who herself ends up playing the role of Hamlet, works with the actors to find meaning in their parts.

We hear Sonia’s reflections on how she draws on real pain in her life to perform on stage, and how her lines continue to resonate after the play is over, even taking on new meaning through new experiences.

We learn about the history of earlier Palestinian theatre and its effort to differentiate itself within the more general Arab culture. And we hear about earlier efforts to adapt Shakespeare to the Palestinian cause, to make Othello an anti-British, anti-colonial activist for instance, or even to turn Hamlet’s girlfriend, gentle Ophelia, into a suicide bomber.

Parts of the novel are written in the form of a theatre script, as in this dialogue among members of the cast beginning to find their own contemporary interpretation:

“MAJED: And then is Denmark supposed to be Palestine? Or is Denmark Israel? This time out of joint thing, something rotten in the state, the state of Israel? I’m not being sarcastic by the way these are genuine questions.

MARIAM: I don’t think we need to be so literal– …

GEORGE: What then about the Queen, Gertrude?

MARIAM: What about the Queen?

GEORGE: I think she does symbolize Palestine.

MARIAM: And why do you think that?

GEORGE: Because Gertrude … Gertrude is raped by Claudius.

SONIA: What? Gertrude doesn’t get raped.

MARIAM: Let him finish.

GEORGE: Thank you.

SONIA: But that’s ridiculous.

GEORGE: Gertrude is, you know, the land who gets manhoobi.

MARIAM: Looted.

GEORGE: Like Palestine does, and like Palestine part of her accepts this, part of her betrays the old king, forgets what it used to be like, forgets her loyalty. Like those traitors on the inside, and those people who sold land to the Jews and, you know, these kinds of people, this betrayal is also the story of Palestine. It’s not just we have been oppressed, it’s also we have betrayed ourselves, our brothers.

SONIA: This is a very particular reading of the play.”

Culture and Politics

An underlying question in the novel, then, is about the relationship, or the possible relationship between culture and politics. I was drawn to the novel initially by seeing that the author has a different new book, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, directly addressing that question in the context of the Palestinian struggle.

Enter Ghost is a novel, not an essay. Nevertheless, the question is foremost as the cast prepares to undertake what may be a serious risk to their professional lives and more. At one point Sonia reflects:

“Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. These public developments created a feeling among the cast that we were, in fact, preparing ourselves on a training base for an operation with a transcendental goal, that in combing our translated lines for subtext we were fighting the odds in the name of Palestinian freedom.”

But that understanding of the impact of culture is too one-sided, though in remarkable circumstances it can also be true. In Sonia’s mouth it may also be sarcastic. Here is another passage from Enter Ghost, with a different perspective:

“Mariam believed more sincerely than most London theatre practitioners I know in a real conduit between art and politics.… One night she extemporized upon the broader risk that art might deaden resistance, by softening suffering’s blows through representing it. ‘Listen, you need to understand… that when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet and each film at the cultural centre ends and we applaud as the credits roll with the list of crests of institutional donors like great European aristocratic families of old, and while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in the room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily, and perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of this narcotic and what, if anything could we do about that?’”

But Mariam is not only the devil’s advocate in that passage. She is advocating a strategic thoughtfulness in how the group might avoid the political trap of providing momentary relief. Her character is the driving force behind the play as an act of resistance and possible mobilization.

That mention of the middle classes might be the only explicit recognition of class in Enter Ghost. The novel’s politics are nationalist, not class-based, with little acknowledgement of different interests or perspectives among Palestinians except the difference between those living abroad, those in the West Bank and those in Israel.

This is understandable, of course, to the extent that Israeli imagination conceives of Palestinians, including those in Gaza, as a unity, a problem, a non-people, as ghosts.

For the cast the stakes are heightened when one of them is served an order to show up for interrogation.

“As far as I was concerned, if the Israelis really made an effort to stop us it would not be worth the fight. We were mere human beings, there was only so much we could do. The only person who didn’t look unnerved was Mariam, who stared at her actors as though with the force of her gaze she could make them more sturdy.

“I had a feeling I sometimes get when I drink too much coffee, which was that while standing still, watching Jenan and Wael, another more agitated Sonia was wriggling inside my skin, trying to get out. I was thirsty as well and I needed the loo, and in this state of physical discomfort something strange happened.

“My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream and my perspective had been breached I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situated fragilely in time and place, this summer, this side of the wall.

“Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway, everything had been decided in advance, we were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out into the audience, dismantle our illusions, and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State.”

Enter Ghost

But Sonia does not cower, and neither does the cast. She joins her sister at a tense demonstration at the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem, part of the sibling reconciliation, and the cast moves ahead with the production.

There, too, relationships are transformed as a result of the fraught circumstances. Once hierarchical and director-led, the theatre troupe becomes a democratic collective.

Hammad uses the ghost metaphor throughout. There are ghosts in Sonia’s family, Palestinians haunted by their past. Palestinians themselves are ghosts to Israelis, sometimes invisible presences that won’t disappear and won’t let themselves be disregarded.

Being a ghost, too, is a third alternative, somewhere between Shakespeare’s limited binary, “to be or not to be.” The final words of the novel, as army loudspeakers blare and Israeli soldiers stream toward the stage and the audience tries to flee, the final words are “Enter Ghost.”

July-August 2025, ATC 237