Enter Ghost

“‘It’s easier for you, you just denied everything.’

‘What have I denied?’

‘This is real life, Sonia. This is not some play.’”

Enter Ghost analyzes The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. Haneen accuses her actor sister, Sonia, of conflating politics and real life with a play. However, Sonia recognizes that even though art bleeds into politics and vice versa, there is a distinction between the two.

“The oblivion I was asking for but did not understand persisted on the horizon of our affair like a summer thundercloud, and in the nights I ran through its long shadow as though I might reach it, while it remained there, taunting me from a distance, unbroken rain.”

At the beginning of the novel, Sonia is coming to terms with her desire for oblivion. As a working actor, she finds this empty state on the stage. However, her alienation from her identity results in a lack of understanding of herself and her relationships, as described here. In this quote, she uses the metaphor of “a summer thundercloud” to describe this desire for oblivion.

“Escape was never really an escape, that was the problem. You only stumbled from one thing into another.”

The structure of Enter Ghost is anti-utopian, wherein things do not cleanly resolve, and events recur in cycles. Upon her arrival in Haifa, Sonia begins to come to terms with this dynamic. As she notes in this quote, there is no “escape” from these repetitions and incomplete solutions. By describing the nature of “stumbling from one thing into another,” she describes the persistent nature of living under Israeli occupation.

“Everything I’d tried to build had collapsed. Since arriving here, however, the nearest I’d come to any feeling of retrieval was this being close to a certain violence that was still anyway largely mediated by screens and closed military zones. No past continuous self showed any sign of emerging.”

In this quote, Sonia expresses disappointment that her homecoming to Haifa has not been as immediately revelatory of her relationship with her past self as she had hoped. Even her initial engagements with the Israeli occupation and violence are “mediated by screens and closed military zones.” Soon, however, her time in the West Bank will cause her to see its violence up close.

“Some distance away, two green Israeli army vehicles were creeping downhill into a valley.

‘Leaving,’ said Uncle Jad, ‘don’t worry,’ as the jeeps disappeared behind a wrecked wall.

Only two hours had passed since we left the house. How close we had been, all along, to this.”

This quote uses imagery to evoke the persistent threat of impending danger. The “two green Israeli army vehicles” that were “creeping downhill into a valley” depict an ominous presence moving out of sight. Uncle Jad’s comment, “Leaving […] don’t worry,” highlights the inherent fear Palestinians experience when Israeli vehicles and soldiers are coming toward them. The phrase “how close we had been, all along” further underscores Sonia’s growing awareness of Palestinian vulnerability and the violence within the occupied West Bank, a two-hour drive away from Haifa, where she spent her summers growing up.

“If Israel was ‘the inside’ then that made this, the West Bank, an outside, a borderland, a neither here nor there. And yet as Jad’s car descended the road to Bethlehem, opening on the righthand side a vista of terraced fields, how much it felt like exiting through the mirror and entering the real, going deeper and deeper into the heartland.”

In this quote, Hammad reverses the usual comparison between inside/outside and real/unreal. In Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There by Lewis Carroll (1871), Alice goes through the mirror (looking-glass) into a fantasy world of the absurd. Here, Sonia does the opposite: She goes through the mirror into “the real,” going increasingly deeper.

“GEORGE. Gertrude is, you know, the land who gets manhoobi.

MARIAM. Looted.

GEORGE. Like Palestine does, and like Palestine part of her accepts this, part of her betrays the old king, forgets what it used to be like, forgets her loyalty. Like those traitors on the inside, and those people who sold land to the Jews and, you know, these kinds of people, this betrayal is also the story of Palestine. It’s not just we have been oppressed, it’s also we have betrayed ourselves, our brothers.”

The author writes portions of Enter Ghost that refer to the troupe’s rehearsals and performances of Hamlet in script format. These are moments where the author abandons Sonia’s first-person perspective and makes possible a greater understanding of the other characters. In this quote, George draws immediate connections between the plot of Hamlet, where the king’s brother betrays him, and the experiences of the Palestinian resistance. This quote highlights that while Israeli occupation has systematically and structurally oppressed Palestine, its residents have also acted in bad faith toward each other, evidenced here by “we have also betrayed ourselves, our brothers.” George saying “this betrayal is the story of Palestine” establishes its pervasive, fundamental nature. This comment highlights The Relationship Between Theater and Politics.

“While I was doing it, I felt sick at myself for telling this story. A small and shameful part of me wanted the others to be impressed. I was the centre of this event, the centre of the play; being the centre was addictive. Someone else’s suffering; my own ends.”

Sonia struggles with a lack of connection to her Palestinian Identity and Resistance. As a young person, even though she feels disconnected from the struggle, she leverages her experience of seeing Rashid dying of starvation to gain the approval and interest of her peers. She feels guilty both for not having a personal experience of struggle that is often seen as a defining aspect of Palestinian identity and for also using “someone else’s suffering” for her benefit.

“Everything seemed provisional, everything was a proposition; life was exciting because we were approaching it, we were in a constant state of arrival.”

Sonia describes her life as “light” compared to that of Mariam and others. She does not have a fixed identity, a dedicated cause, or a concrete sense of her role in the world. This dynamic is present in her marriage with Marco, as described in this quote, where everything was “provisional;” they were never obligated to commit to anything, not even each other. By describing the relationship as “a constant state of arrival,” Sonia emphasizes how it was neither grounded nor stable.

“Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.”

Palestine is, as noted elsewhere in the text, a “tiny place [that] occupies […] such a large space in the global mind” (165). Part of the reason for this outsized importance is that it “reveal[s] something about the whole world.” In her view, it is a place that reveals the “wire and currents” of global systems of colonialism, violence, and oppression that are usually hidden beneath the surface.  Palestine, as Haneen argues, peels back what is insidious underneath.

“‘You mean pretend the future is brighter than it is.’



‘But it is bright, Sonia! It can be, that’s the point, for him at least even if not for us, even if you don’t feel it, or I don’t feel it. If you don’t feel it, lie! There can be possibilities, maybe not here, maybe not…Though, I want him to stay here. I don’t want him to be one of those kids who leave because they can. But I’m not bringing him up hopeless, either.’”

Director Mariam Mansour is a source of hope and optimism for the future in the novel. In this quote, Sonia questions her commitment to “the dream” of a bright future for Palestine. Mariam explains that she is determined to create a better future for her son, Emil, and to pass on that hope to him. Her desire to have Emil stay in Palestine emphasizes both her commitment to work toward improvement in her home environment and the material conditions that cause individuals with the means to leave.

“Nothing is more flattering to an artist than the illusion that he is a secret revolutionary. These public developments created a feeling among the cast that we were, in fact, preparing ourselves on a training base for an operation with a transcendental goal, that in combing our translated lines for subtext we were fighting the odds in the name of Palestinian freedom.”

This quote addresses one perspective on the question of The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. Sonia’s tone is sardonic when she notes that the actors embrace feeling like “secret revolutionar[ies].” Despite her skepticism, she is unable to deny that the controversy about their play and its funding has bonded the cast and made their work feel more immediately politically relevant.

“[A]ddressing me in the mirror she went on to explain her theory, which she presented as truth, that when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet and each film at the cultural centre ends and we applaud as the credits roll with the list of crests of institutional donors like great European aristocratic families of old, and while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in the room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community’s resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily, and perhaps our Hamlet would be just another version of this narcotic and what, if anything, could we do about that?”

In this long sentence, which mirrors the diction of a breathless rant or speech, Mariam lays out the argument against the notion that theater has a bearing on politics. She posits that theater, especially bourgeois, foreign-funded theater, serves more as a temporary salve that diminishes revolutionary action rather than inspiring it. She describes this kind of cultural production as a form of embalming, suggesting that the works are moribund and inert. While Sonia recognizes that “she didn’t really think art was bad for resistance” (151), Mariam is simply looking for Sonia to argue against this stance.

“Near the windowless tower, a shabby Israeli flag roils on the wind, looking not at all like those forlorn fraying Palestinian flags that, once illegal but now par for the course, adorn electricity pylons across Ramallah, but rather somehow eternal and careless, a mark of the ragged outposts of empire.”

This quote compares the two flags flying near the checkpoint between Israel and the West Bank. She describes the “shabby” Israeli flag as “a mark of the ragged outposts of empire” while the Palestinian flags are “forlorn” and “fraying.” The author depicts this scene as tired and worn-down, much like those subject to the occupation itself. Previously, it was illegal to fly the Palestinian flag, which this quote emphasizes. However, it is now “par for the course,” a physical display of Palestinian Identity and Resistance.

“‘Sometimes a play is like an operation from the old days.’ He continued to grin, now I was the one being teased; he gulped some beer and set the glass down clumsily so that the table rocked on the uneven paving stones. ‘You plan it, there’s a script, but you never totally know how it’s going to go. It’s there, it’s gone. It’s like a firework.’

‘It’s like a play until it’s not like a play,’ I said.

He wiggled his eyebrows.

‘Until someone gets hurt,’ I said.”

In this quote, Ibrahim compares a theater performance to his work doing operations for the Palestinian resistance during the Second Intifada. In particular, he compares a play to the meticulous planning of an operation, one that can nevertheless have unexpected outcomes. The simile of “it’s like a firework” reinforces its ephemeral nature—there then gone, regardless of lengthy planning. This is another dimension of The Relationship Between Theater and Politics the novel shows. By this point in the novel, Sonia has started to come to grips with the distinction between a play and reality, and she clarifies the higher stakes of armed confrontation. The dialogue's interplay, particularly the shift from lighthearted teasing to a somber emphasis on the potential harm, underscores the violence of living under occupation.

“I’d had the sense that there were times, during the years under military rule, when they wondered whether it was a mistake to have stayed. Whether they should have left with the others and found another life, in exile, and let their house keys, carried with them, lose their function and turn into symbols. In the end, of course, they were glad. They did not have their country but at least they still had their home.”

In this quote, Sonia reflects on her family’s experience during the Nakba and its aftermath. She references the “keys” that “los[t] their function and turn[ed] into symbols.” This is a reference to how the Palestinian resistance uses keys, as in the keys to the houses they were expelled from in 1948, as a symbol of their exile, as seen in the work she sees in Bethlehem.

“Forget about it, my love. Palestine is gone. We lost her a long time ago.”

Sonia’s father was once active in the Palestinian resistance. Now much older, he has given up on the dream of Palestinian nationhood. This line of dialogue is representative of his exhaustion and hopelessness about the possibility of change in Israel-Palestine. His matter-of-fact statement depicts his lack of hope, which he straightforwardly tells Sonia.

“My viewpoint switched, and as though I were in a dream and my perspective had been breached I moved like a surveillance drone and saw our project from above, situated fragilely in time and place, this summer, this side of the wall. Accompanying this vision was a fear, almost a premonition, that it was all foretold anyway, everything had been decided in advance, we were only acting parts that had been given to us, and now some inexorable machinery was being set in motion that would sooner or later throw our efforts out into the audience, dismantle our illusions, and leave us cowering before the faceless gods of Fate and State.”

Throughout the novel, Sonia experiences a dual perspective while onstage, wherein she has both her perspective and the perspective of the audience or an outside observer. In this instance, she compares her third-person perspective to “a surveillance drone” (like those Israeli security forces use). She reflects that the play will be at the mercy of “the faceless gods of Fate and State,” the State in question being Israel. This insight foreshadows how the Israeli security forces will raid the final performance of Hamlet.

“I hadn’t realised quite how much the play meant to me. I was no different from Amin and the others, I was relying on its structure to hold me. And when I say the play, I think what I mean is Mariam.”

Toward the end of the novel, Sonia shows growth by recognizing how she has become embedded within her Palestinian Identity and Resistance. At the outset, she was floating, uncommitted, and “light.” Shortly before opening night, she recognizes how much she cares about the work and performing her role in the Palestinian community in Miriam’s play.  By describing her reliance on the play’s structure to hold her, Sonia underscores how fundamental it has been to support her while in Palestine. Clarifying that she means Mariam also underscores the central role she has had on Sonia.

“I think that, sometimes, when calamity strikes and puts normal life under strain, feelings that have been stifled by everyday evasion can break free and make it easy to talk where before it felt impossible. Clouds, parted, dissolve. I wondered if this was always happening in Palestine, where calamity was always so close. Or whether it was different for those who, living here, endured it without respite, for whom constant calamity was itself the condition of normal life.”

At the beginning of the novel, Sonia compares her desire for oblivion to a thundercloud. Here, she evokes the possibility that living on the edge of violence in Palestine is where “clouds, parted, dissolve” because destruction is always so close. This demonstrates that Sonia is beginning to feel that, instead of evading relationships, she is growing more comfortable with The Challenge of Intimacy in Relationships. This is due to becoming more embedded in the Palestinian community, a place where being obvious is incongruent with “the condition of normal life.”

“Green fields folded past, and I had a horrible, useless revelation, which was that in some way the meaning of our Hamlet depended on this suffering. The context gave our Hamlet its force. I knew Mariam had already had this revelation. Our play needed the protests, but the protests did not need our play.”

Following the tear gas attacks on the protests at al-Aqsa mosque, Sonia and Haneen drive back to Haifa from Jerusalem. During their drive, Sonia recognizes the limits of The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. Her dark thoughts and the harrowing events she just left behind contrast sharply with the pastoral image of the “green fields fold[ing] past” her car window.

“I thought about Wael pretending to be one, and wondered if there was something especially subversive about that here, in a military state, where the soldier is a sacred figure, an image in their ideology as olive trees are in ours. When they look at their soldiers, they see sons and daughters. When we look at their soldiers, our hearts also beat harder, although it is for different reasons.”

In this quote, Sonia reflects on the exercise where Wael pretended to be an Israeli soldier at a checkpoint. She recognizes that his roleplay as an Israeli soldier is “especially subversive;” this foreshadows how using Israeli military fatigues as costumes in their final performance of Hamlet provokes military violence against them. She juxtaposes the Israeli sacred figure, a soldier, with Palestine’s olive tree, which is native to the land and sacred to its economy and people. She also compares their differing reactions to soldiers to further emphasize their distinctions. By comparing Israelis seeing their sons and daughters in the soldiers with the very different reaction of the Palestinians, Sonia underscores the constant state of fear for those living under occupation.

“Their curiosity was so outsized it was like they’d never seen a theatre before—until the first one descended the stairs and kicked over one of the mock­up tables, and then the stage was just like another home they were raiding.”

The Israeli military often raids homes in the occupied Palestinian territories. In this quote, Sonia describes their stage set as “just another home” that the Israeli military is raiding. This interaction between the Israeli military and the theater set emphasizes The Relationship Between Theater and Politics in the West Bank.