Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad
A woman leaves her home in London to return to her homeland of Palestine in Isabella Hammad's complex, tender meditation on art, family, and resistance
If where a home is can be taken to be a question of location – of broad proximities and unbroken intervals – then what home means relies greatly upon the given answer. In Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost, personal drama (a brittle dalliance severed, a burgeoning acting career stalled) compels our protagonist, Sonia Nasir, to leave London and return to her familial homeland of Palestine. Subsequently, it is a literal drama, a dual part in a production of Hamlet on the West Bank, which keeps her in place.
Mostly. Sonia is, at first, reluctant to participate, attributing her refusal to a rusty tongue and a longing for rest, but the pull of old memories arising unbidden alongside new connections catalyse her decision to stay. Hammad sketches Sonia’s immersion into a life lived between Haifa and Ramallah with immense skill and glorious restraint. Things unsaid between Sonia and her older sister, Haneen, hang heavy like muddy brushstrokes; texts sent by Sonia to her castmates are a crosshatch.
The rehearsal scenes at the theatre – which find Sonia voicing both Gertrude and Ophelia in Arabic, receiving directorial notes in English, anticipating reprisal from Israeli authorities, and settling debts with the Palestinian Authority – index the complex palette, the light and shade, of her surroundings. Of this "tiny place occup[ying] such a large space in the global mind". Of a home found fully realised despite the efforts of occupation forces – with meaning derived both from acts of "dangerous joy" and spectral despair – situated somewhere between now, then, never and forever.