Enter Ghost: on return, resistance and performing Palestine
Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost places Shakespeare’s Hamlet against the realities of Palestinian life under occupation. Through Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian actress returning to Haifa and joining an Arabic production in Ramallah, the novel explores exile, memory, identity and resistance. Theatre becomes neither salvation nor spectacle, but a fragile act of solidarity in a world shaped by surveillance, checkpoints and uncertainty.
Isabella Hammad sets Shakespeare’s play inside a story about Palestinian survival in Enter Ghost, her acclaimed second novel. The story follows Sonia Nasir, a British-Palestinian-Dutch actress in her late thirties, as she leaves behind a stalled career and a failed marriage in London to visit her older sister Haneen in Haifa. She is invited to join a production of Hamlet staged entirely in Arabic, in Ramallah in Occupied Palestine’s West Bank where the constant threat of arrest makes even rehear...
