50 pages • 1 hour read
Isabella HammadEnter Ghost
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2023A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
Palestinian Identity and Resistance
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of pregnancy loss and wartime violence.
In Enter Ghost, protagonist Sonia Nasir and those around her engage in various ways with their Palestinian identity and their engagement with the resistance to Israeli occupation and oppression. Their experiences in the novel show the diverse Palestinian identities and modes of resistance, even within families.
The Nasir family alone exemplifies the heterogeny of Palestinian identity and resistance. Sonia’s father, Nabil, grew up in Haifa, Israel. As a young man, he attended university in Beirut, where he was active in the resistance (although his mode of engagement remains unspecified). When an Israeli sniper killed his friend, Nabil spent a year living with the friend’s family in a refugee camp before moving to Europe. His experiences traumatized him, and he grew to believe the dream of Palestinian nationhood was dead. Sonia’s maternal grandfather was a Palestinian refugee from Tiberius, but her mother, who grew up in Europe, “seemed to waver between identifying as part of it and removing herself from the whole thing” (58). For most of her life, Sonia took after her mother, distancing herself from her Palestinian identity and the conflict. In contrast, Haneen and Sonia’s Uncle Jad made a point to stay in Israel-Palestine and remain engaged in the Palestinian resistance. Despite their common identity as Palestinians, religions, languages, and geographies divide the family. Nabil is Muslim, whereas Haneen and Sonia are Christians. Sonia’s mother doesn’t have a strong grasp of Arabic, “so we were often translating for her” (58). Haneen lives in Haifa, Israel, whereas Uncle Jad lives outside Ramallah, in the occupied West Bank, and Sonia and Nabil live in London. This variety of experiences paints a picture of the varied experiences and challenges of Palestinian identity and resistance.
Throughout the novel, Sonia gradually comes to terms with her Palestinian identity and her role in the resistance through participating in the production of Hamlet in the West Bank. In London, Sonia was so distanced from her Palestinian background that her lover, Harold, assumed she was Lebanese. However, throughout her summer in Haifa and Ramallah, she builds connections with other Palestinians and begins to reflect more on her family history and her experience of the conflict. This greater engagement with her identity leads to her greater determination to be part of the Palestinian resistance. The novel shows this not only in her participation in the play but also in deciding to take part in a protest against the closure of the al-Aqsa mosque by Israeli authorities. She is naïve at first about the importance of this protest and is disappointed when Ibrahim later tells her the mosque was reopened not due to the protest but because of a deal the Israelis made with the Jordanians. However, this does not deter her, and she agrees to take part in the dangerous performance of Hamlet near the checkpoint, which ends the novel. Although she is not taking part in paramilitary actions like Ibrahim did in his youth, she finds her role in the resistance through the theater.
The Relationship Between Theater and Politics
A key question that runs through Enter Ghost is about the relationship between theater and politics. This is a perennially debated subject in the performing arts dating back to ancient Greece (Belcher, David. “For Early Democracy, Theater Was a Catalyst.” The New York Times, 6 Oct. 2022). Against the fraught and often violent backdrop of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank, this debate is particularly pressing and pertinent for Palestinian individuals, especially to the characters Sonia and Mariam.
In the abstract, a production of Hamlet does not seem to have a particular political resonance. However, within the Palestinian context, it has political resonances. Notably, it is a play that was banned in the West Bank during the First Intifada (1987-1993) for seemingly encouraging armed resistance. Additionally, the plot of Hamlet involves a play within a play that seeks to stir the conscience of murderers. Even before the play is staged, it causes political controversy that leads to Mariam’s brother, who was helping secure funding for the production, being banned from the Knesset, the Israeli parliament, and held for questioning. Mariam heightens the political stakes by initially building the set near the West Bank border wall. This frightens the Israeli military so much that they block it off; Sonia notes, “The stage was just like another home they were raiding” (289). Finally, they drive its political valance home by staging the play dressed in Israeli uniforms near the border checkpoint, which leads to the military raid on which the book ends. As a result, the novel underscores that the relationship between theater and politics is salient.
Despite its relevance, this does not stop Sonia and Mariam from worrying about the insufficiency of theater as a political action. Mariam wonders aloud if the theater is not, in fact, a form of entertainment that cauterizes and appeases political grievance rather than catalyzing action “because despair has been relieved, momentarily” (150). She talks nostalgically about “the old days […] when Mustafa al-Kurd used to perform [and] the audience would leave the auditorium and immediately go out into the streets and demonstrate” (151). By mentioning al-Kurd, a famous oud musician and revolutionary, Miriam considers theater’s ability to inspire audience members into direct action. Although Sonia knows Mariam is exaggerating her self-doubt, Sonia does recognize that “our play needed the protests, but the protests did not need our play” (274). With this comment, Sonia asserts that theater alone is not enough to create political change. However, it can be a space for political expression under oppressive regimes, including within the context of Miriam’s production of Hamlet in the novel.
The Challenge of Intimacy in Relationships
The characters in Enter Ghost, and especially the protagonist, Sonia, struggle with intimacy in their romantic and familial relationships. They withhold their emotions, argue, and end up somewhat estranged from one another. This challenge of intimacy is a way that the intensity of the Israel-Palestine conflict affects interpersonal relationships.
A key character trait of Sonia is her inability to form stable relationships with others. In part, this is due to her drive to be subsumed into the roles she performs as an actor rather than embodying her identity and Palestinian background. The novel establishes this dynamic early in her life. As a young university student, Sonia gets pregnant by another student actor, Aidan. She decides to have an abortion but then distances herself from him, justifying her actions in retrospect by saying, “My embarrassment turned into resentment” (122). She explains, “I grasped onto this distance like it was a solid thing” (122). She later goes on to marry a quiet and withholding man, Marco. Following their pregnancy loss, they grow estranged from one another. Sonia once again avoids confronting the issue in their relationship, and they divorce. At the opening of the novel, Sonia is recovering from another failed relationship with an emotionally withholding man, her director, Harold Marshall. She stayed with him even though when they were dating, “the days felt emptier than usual” (32). When Sonia meets Ibrahim in the Ramallah, she is unsure about his advances. They go on a date, but then she pushes him away when he asks for more, even as she recognizes her romantic feelings toward him. Sonia resists being intimate in relationships and seeks to hide herself in her theatrical roles to avoid confronting the uncomfortable or complex aspects of her identity.
The author mirrors this alienation in the strained relationships of the Nasir family. Sonia’s father and uncle are estranged for unspecified reasons that likely relate to their differing levels of engagement with the Palestinian resistance over time. Likewise, Sonia and her sister, Haneen, have a strained relationship. Haneen threw herself into the Israel-Palestine conflict, supporting Palestinian resistance from a young age, while Sonia distanced herself from it. Throughout the novel, Sonia becomes more engaged with Haneen, who reckons with her growing sense of burnout. Although Sonia intended to spend the summer in Haifa to have more time with Sonia, they spent most of the summer apart. However, the novel offers hope for their growing intimacy. By the end of the novel, the sisters apologize to one another for their alienation and somewhat reconcile. This shows that the challenges of intimacy, while intense, can be overcome with mutual consideration and patience, even against the backdrop of an ongoing political conflict.
