Literature Opinion

Palestinian plight humanised in Shakespearean story

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Isabella Hammad's 'Enter Ghost' has received critical acclaim (Screenshots via YouTube)

What does the Palestinian conflict have in common with the works of William Shakespeare? Rosemary Sorensen reviews a book that merges the two worlds into a touching story.

THERE’S A SCHOOL of thought that considers Shakespeare as heritage art and no longer relevant to contemporary culture. In opposition to that position are those who believe high art must preserve the traditions upon which Western culture is built — and the Bard is right up there with the best of heritage art.

Then, there are those who recognise the exceptional brilliance of Shakespeare and build on that brilliance by adapting his work for contemporary audiences.

When you take the revered, now old-fashioned, infinitely rich language of, say, Hamlet and translate it into another language, the play is changed. But, as Enter Ghost, by Isabella Hammad shows, that transfer can also pull the deep, powerful meanings within the play up to the surface, where they glitter like cut glass.

Enter Ghost is set in Israel and the West Bank-occupied territory of Palestine. Written before the 7 October Hamas attacks on Israel, the story about an attempt by a theatre group to stage an Arabic production of Hamlet now becomes urgently relevant, as it describes the lives of Palestinians under brutal Israeli control since 1948.

But it’s a novel and therefore has all the character development, plotting structure, all the drama and personality of literature. It strikes like a gong the resonant balance between polemical reportage and the aesthetics of art. Shakespeare knew all about that, too.

Hammad’s central character has a Palestinian father and dual British Israeli citizenship, like Hammad herself. Sonia is an actor, distanced from the Palestinian struggle for many years until she goes to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa. There she meets a friend of Haneen, the theatre director Mariam who lives in the West Bank.

Three women, very different, but all of whom belong to a people obliterated by the Zionist campaign to occupy Palestine. How do you live in such a place? How do you not go mad?

By bringing Sonia back from London, where she has had an okay career (and not-okay love affairs with bullying men), Hammad focuses down from the general awfulness of life under a vicious occupation to the day-to-day practical difficulty, the constant fear and anxiety. The thousand ways that Palestinians are humiliated and brutalised are embedded into the story.

Sonia wants to lie on the beach at Haifa and lick her wounds from the unpleasant end of her affair with a theatre director, so she resists the request for her to join the cast of Hamlet. But then, seduced by both Mariam’s pragmatism (when it comes to coping with life in the West Bank) and idealism (about the power of theatre), she agrees to play Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude, in this ambitious production.

Being part of that project, she not only is forced to deal with the checkpoints, the interrogations and the constant presence of danger from heavily armed soldiers, but also to re-discover the intensely real value of theatre, how it can work as a force for social resilience.

This is where real life meets art — to all those interpretations of one of Shakespeare’s most complex, unfathomable, magnificently drawn characters is now added an attractive, adored young Palestinian pop star, who is cast in the role, partly as a drawcard (like casting Mel Gibson or David Tennant).

Enter Ghost’s Wael struggles to capture Hamlet – his cruelty towards Ophelia, his taunting of Gertrude, his haunted grief for his murdered father, his murderous rage that eventually defines the tragedy of the play – until Mariam comes up with a way to make it all real for him and for the others in the cast. She asks Wael to play the part as if he were an Israeli checkpoint soldier. And there it is, the cruelty, the taunting, the inchoate grief, the rage — and the madness that leads to murder.

And while they work artistically to make this production relevant for their audience, they do so against the backdrop of the ongoing persecution of Palestinians and the years of bloody attacks and reprisals. As Haneen and Sonia gradually become aware of how they each dealt with their experience, as children, of the loss of the family home and their rights and freedoms, the character Hamlet in their play also gradually transforms into a symbol of that experience.

The play becomes a defiant act, its words resonating with meaning aimed not only at the audience that gathers in the open air to witness this defiance but also at the Israeli soldiers who turn up in trucks to stand menacingly at the rear of the audience, listening as Hamlet delivers his speech to the apparition of his father’s ghost: “Do not look upon me, lest with this act that breaks the heart you alter my stern deeds. What I’ve decided to do will drain of its proper colour, it will be made of tears instead of blood.”

The novel ends with the play’s performance, triumphant for those who have taken part and those who have watched, but, in a moment of terrible ambiguity, it seems that the defiance is doomed. Prescient ending to a book that has, through story, taken us into Palestine to see and hear people who are not just statistics, but flesh and blood.

Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad is available from Penguin Publishing here.

Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival. You can follow Rosemary on Twitter/X @sorensen_rose.

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