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.
Background
Historical-Geographical Context: Israel’s Establishment, Expansion, and Occupation of Palestinian Territories
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of wartime violence.
Enter Ghost takes place in Israel and the West Bank and explores different forms of Palestinian identity. The country of Israel was established in 1948. Various characters in the novel refer to the territory within those original borders by the shorthand “’48” or as being “inside.” Israel is bordered by Egypt to the south, Jordan to the east, Syria to the northeast, and Lebanon to the northwest. The establishment of those borders of the Jewish state resulted in the expulsion of approximately 750,000 Arabs from the territory, often under threat of violence by Zionist paramilitary groups like the Haganah. This event is known as the Nakba or “catastrophe.” After May 1948, the West Bank to the east of Israel and Gaza to the west of Israel were held by Jordan and Egypt, respectively. After the 1967 Six-Day War, Israel occupied these territories as well as the Golan Heights in the northwesternmost tip of the country bordering Syria. Both the West Bank and Gaza are divided from Israeli territory by a large cement separation barrier and are discontinuous with each other. About a quarter of the West Bank is known as Area B, where Israel controls all movement of goods and people, but the Palestinian Authority has some governmental role. Area C, most of the rest of the West Bank, is entirely under Israeli control. A small part of the West Bank and most of Gaza is known as Area A and is nominally under entirely Palestinian control.
Growing up, the protagonist, Sonia Nasir, and her sister, Haneen, spent every summer at their grandparents’ home in Haifa. Haifa is a port city in the north of Israel. In the novel, they travel to Ramallah in the West Bank. Ramallah is a large city in the central area of the West Bank, which is about a two-hour drive from Haifa, depending on the length of the wait at the Israeli-run checkpoint. The play takes place in Bethlehem, an hour’s drive south of Ramallah in the West Bank. The sisters also visit Jerusalem, which is about an hour’s drive south of Ramallah. Israel controls Jerusalem, although East Jerusalem is considered part of the Israeli-occupied West Bank. The Old City of Jerusalem is where the Wailing Wall or wall of the Second Temple, the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, and the Dome of the Rock, part of the al-Aqsa mosque, are located.
Literary Context: Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Palestinian Theatre
Enter Ghost describes the rehearsal and staging of Shakespeare’s Hamlet (1609) in the West Bank. Hamlet is a complex play about a troubled Danish prince, Hamlet, that deals with themes of death and the unknown as well as the interaction between language, lies, and theater. The play has long been a source of interest and inspiration for Palestinian people. As Enter Ghost’s author Isabella Hammad notes in her article “The Revolutionary Power of Palestinian Theater,” Hamlet was first performed in Arabic in Gaza in 1911. Later, during the First Intifada, a series of Palestinian protests against Israeli occupation from 1987-1993, Hamlet was banned in the West Bank “because certain lines in the ‘To be or not to be speech’—including ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles / And by opposing end them’—were considered an incitement to violence” (Hammad, Isabella. “The Revolutionary Power of Palestinian Theater.” LitHub, 4 Apr. 2023). As a result, Mariam’s decision to stage Hamlet in the West Bank is particularly contentious and controversial, as shown in the novel.
Much of the Palestinian theater history and current events described in the novel are accurate and based on real events. For instance, one of the cast members, Faris, describes seeing an experimental play called Al-Atmeh, “Darkness,” that subtly criticized the occupation, which indeed took place in 1972. The implicit danger of directing and performing theater in the West Bank is an underlying tension in Enter Ghost. For instance, Israeli soldiers take over the original stage and fire at them when they perform near a barrier wall. These moments in the novel are based on real events, such as the multiple raids by Israeli forces on the Freedom Theatre in the Jenin Refugee Camp in the West Bank that resulted in destruction, vandalism, and the arrest of actors (Frayer, Lauren. “How a West Bank Palestinian Theater Went From Symbol of Hope to Casualty of War.” NPR, 28 Jan. 2024).
