The Ghost of the absent king is a presence; the once denied Ghost gets affirmed by Hamlet. […] In that sense once a marginal being (absence) now occupies a central place. And the incumbent king, once a center and a dominant figure in Denmark and this play, later becomes a marginal and absent figure, who ends up with a despicable death. This is a reversal of the absence and presence, and of the marginal and the central. The Ghost, thus, subverts the traditional hierarchy and threatens the established order. (Koo 2012, p. 917)
In “The Ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet: A Deconstructive Reading,” Youngwhoe Koo (2012) offers an interesting reading of Shakespeare’s Hamlet that focuses on the significance of the ghost in the play. Koo contends that in Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the ghost is “a traditional marker of absence,” a (non)being which initiates the whole actions of the play (p. 929). As the above quotation indicates, the ghost challenges the established sociopolitical order in Denmark because it resurrects a figure that has been deemed non-existent. Hence, the ghost’s presence instils fear in the people who see it since it defies their attempts to forget the past and begin a new life under a new king. By the same token, in Palestinian-British novelist Isabella Hammad’s Enter Ghost (2023), a novel that appropriates Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the London-based protagonist Sonia returns to her family’s house in Haifa only to be perceived as a ghost whose presence, according to her father, threatens the existence of the Israeli owner of the house who bought it years ago from Sonia’s kinsfolks. Disappointed and frustrated, Sonia vents her anger at her father, whose retreat to Britain has encouraged Uncle Jad to sell the house and move to Ramallah. Thus, as a descendant of Palestinian people who were forced to leave their lands after the 1948 war, Sonia, like King Hamlet’s ghost, is a spectre whose presence opens the annals of the past and threatens a seemingly stable sociopolitical order.
As the above paragraph shows, in addition to the fact that Hammad’s novel narrates the story of a Palestinian troupe who try to perform Hamlet in Ramallah, there are thematic links between Hammad’s novel Enter Ghost and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In fact, Hammad’s novel appropriates the motif of the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet as well as other themes, motifs, and tropes such as spying, betrayal, revenge, disorder, and wars to explore the damaging effects of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict on Palestinians. As the title of the novel suggests, the ghost motif plays a key role in Hammad’s narrative as Sonia, who returns to Palestine presumably for a short vacation, visits her grandparents’ house in Haifa only to discover that her relatives, i.e. Uncle Jad and Aunt Rima, have sold the family’s house in Haifa to a Jewish family and re-located to Ramallah. At the same time, as Sonia, who is a professional theatre actress, agrees to join a Haifa-based acting troupe to stage Hamlet in the West Bank, she becomes aware of the hardships that Palestinians undergo as they uneasily shuttle between Haifa and Ramallah.
Enter Ghost is not the only contemporary Palestinian diasporic novel that tackles the theme of return. It participates in a broader literary tradition that seeks to reimagine homecoming as a complex and contested process. Hala Alyan’s Salt Houses (2017), for instance, offers an exploration of displacement and belonging that is similar to Hammad’s narrative of return. Aladylah (2019) and Awad (2020) agree that Salt Houses transforms the Palestinian notion of return from a political act into an emotional process. The novel shows that the Palestinian return is not always about going back physically, but about reclaiming belonging across generations and geographies. Similarly, Enter Ghost redefines return as a form of resistance and self-realization that bridges memory, art, and homeland.
While the title of the novel invokes associations with Hamlet’s ghost, especially that the novel narrates the story of a Palestinian theatre troupe that performs Shakespeare’s Hamlet in the Palestinian territories, the ghost acquires political, historical, and cultural significations within the context of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict after the establishment of Israel in 1948. At one point in the novel, Sonia’s father insists that for the Israelis, Palestinians are ghosts who remind the Israelis of how their presence in Palestine has come at the cost of the dispersal of the Palestinians since 1948. Sonia’s father’s words came as a comment on how the Israeli owner of Sonia’s family’s house in Haifa has reacted with hostility upon seeing Sonia and her fellow Palestinian friends near the house. Thus, the family’s house becomes a central motif in the novel that stands for loss and dislocation. At the same time, since the house is located in Haifa, Hammad’s novel seems to allude to a famous Palestinian novella titled “Returning to Haifa” (1969) by Ghassan Kanafani which revolves around a Palestinian couple’s return to Haifa right after Israel opened Mandelbaum’s Gate that used to separate the Palestinian lands lost in 1948 and those lost after the June War of 1967.
Overall, one may argue that by appropriating Shakespeare’s Hamlet, the novel invites us to look at the play from a new perspective in the light of the difficulties that the Palestinian troupe faces while attempting to stage the play. A Hamlet-inspired theme is also reflected in the relationship between Sonia’s father and his brother-in-law, Uncle Jad. As young people, they competed with each other to prove their patriotism; as old people, Uncle Jad takes his brother-in-law’s share in the family’s house and eventually sells it to an Israeli family, an act of betrayal in the Palestinian context, pretty much as King Claudius betrays his brother by killing him, marrying Gertrude, and usurping the throne. King Claudius’s act of betrayal results in disorder and unrest in Denmark, and it leads to the eventual loss of the Danish throne to Fortinbras, the Norwegian prince. Therefore, the house is a site over which Hammad’s appropriation of both Shakespeare’s Hamlet and Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa” converge. As a Palestinian-British novelist who draws on both Western and Arab literary and cultural heritages, Hammad merges the two texts to represent, on the one hand, Palestinian people’s suffering on daily basis at the hands of the Israelis, and, on the other hand, depict the centrality of the house in the development of the plot, unveiling the precarious position that Palestinian citizens in Israel inhabit.
Enter Ghost tells the story of Sonia, a Palestinian-British actress who returns to Haifa after the failure of her marriage in London. Her return journey is a token of her internal struggle to reconnect with her ancestral land and reclaim her lost identity. In Haifa, she reunites with her older sister, Haneen, a university professor involved in Palestinian politics. However, she confesses that the main purpose of her return is to revisit her family’s house in Haifa, which, to her surprise, has been sold by her relatives to an Israeli family. The turning point of Sonia’s visit occurs when she meets Mariam, a Palestinian director, who invites her to perform Gertrude in a Palestinian production of Hamlet in the West Bank.
While working with the theatrical troupe to stage the play, Sonia increasingly finds herself engaged with the political and social dynamics shaping contemporary Palestinian life. Thus, her return turns into a journey of political and cultural awakening. She realizes the harsh reality of being a Palestinian living in a place marked by surveillance, military checkpoints, and travel restrictions. As she rehearses with the diverse troupe of Palestinian actors, she lives a first-hand experience of the obstacles and risks of producing art under the constraints of the Israeli authority as well as the layered struggles of identity, heritage, familial bonds, and sense of home. Sonia’s political awareness deepens as she experiences the realities of Israeli-imposed segregation, epitomized by the separation wall that physically and symbolically divides the 1948 territories from the West Bank. Furthermore, her interaction with Palestinians who live on both sides, whether as citizens within Israel or under occupation in the West Bank, serves as a narrative device to introduce the reader to the diverse yet intersecting realities faced by Palestinians. Through these encounters, the novel sheds light on the fragmentation, marginalization, and resilience that characterize contemporary Palestinian life.
The meaning of the play and its relevance to contemporary Palestinian life are major topics for discussion during the rehearsals. Mariam, the Haifa-based director, leads a discussion among the cast on the meaning of the play. Amin, for instance, thinks that the play is about war, revenge, and death, while Majed believes that it is about “family drama” (p. 80). Ibrahim states that it is about free will and proposes that Hamlet is a martyr. As if on cue, Wael indicates that if Hamlet is a (Palestinian) martyr, then Hamlet is a play about national liberation, while George states that Queen Gertrude symbolizes Palestine because “Gertrude is raped by Claudius” (p. 82). He elaborates: Gertrude is […] the land who gets manhoobi [looted]. […] 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, […] 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. (Hammad 2023, p. 82)
Wael’s suggestion and George’s words link Hamlet to the Palestinian issue by highlighting themes of national liberation, betrayal, and international and external pressures.
Yet, Sonia does not seem to agree with George’s point of view, but Mariam tries to find a middle ground: “Well hold on, maybe rape is too far. But remember ightisab means rape but it also means usurping. Like, yaghtasib al-ard” (Hammad 2023, p. 83). Gradually, the discussion shifts to interpreting the significance of the ghost. When Mariam focuses on Hamlet’s meditation on death as “[t]hat unknown region from behind whose borders [. . .] [a] traveller does not return,” Sonia immediately notes that King Hamlet returns from that region in the shape of a ghost. She insists: “The Ghost. Someone did return. He’s saying, it’s a choice between life and death. But really, what Mariam is pointing out is – there’s a third way. You can be a ghost” (p. 84). Sonia’s remark connects the novel itself to how King Hamlet’s ghost can be understood within a Palestinian context, whereby its return can be equated with the return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their lands, haunting the Israelis and reminding them of past events. Hence, we will review in this section how King Hamlet’s ghost has been interpreted by different critics according to varying sociopolitical, historical and cultural contexts.
To start with, Kristian Smidt (1996) argues that because King Hamlet’s ghost speaks pedantically and stays so long on the stage, it “becomes too solid flesh” (pp. 429–430). Similarly, Rogers (1972) argues that “the attempt to explain away the ghost as an externalization of Hamlet’s mental state is obviously absurd” (p. 13). Rogers maintains that it is quite impossible to dispose of King Hamlet’s ghost by any theory of hallucination (p. 15). Likewise, John Jump (1970) insists that “the ghost of Hamlet’s father has, at least in Act I, some kind of objective reality” (pp. 339–340). Apparently, Smidt, Rogers, and Jump agree that the ghost cannot be entirely dismissed as Hamlet’s own hallucinations. However, in Shakespeare on Page & Stage: Selected Essays, Stanley Wells (2016) argues that by the time the ghost makes its final appearance in the Closet scene, it “becom[es] internalized” (p. 267). In this context, Robert N. Watson (1990) argues for modern audiences, “these ghostly visitations […] make our lives into meaningful plots that motivate our actions and allow us to perform something complete and significant” (p. 200). Watson concludes: “By the time Hamlet completes his revenge, he seems no longer to be working at the behest of the ghost, but on behalf of an unfathomable need to achieve shape and purpose in his own foreshortened lifetime” (p. 218). Hence, both Wells and Watson agree that the ghost represents Hamlet’s internal thoughts and views. As the above survey shows, there is disagreement among researchers and critics on how to interpret King Hamlet’s ghost.
Arab playwrights who have adapted and appropriated Hamlet over the past year have also taken different positions on how to interpret King Hamlet’s Ghost. Critics like Al-Shetawi (1999), Bessami and Abu Amrieh (2022a, 2022b), Bedjaoui and Abu Amrieh (2022), and Khouli et al. (2024) have all explored how Arab playwrights appropriate Shakespearean motifs and tropes like the ghost, revenge, betrayal … etc. to comment on sociopolitical, cultural, and historical circumstances and conditions in the Arab World. Yet, the most elaborate discussion of the ghost motif in Arab adaptations and appropriations of Hamlet is by Margaret Litvin (2011) in her seminal book Hamlet’s Arab Journey: Shakespeare’s Prince and Nasser’s Ghost. Litvin argues that Hamlet was mainly understood in the Arab World as a political play and has been appropriated as such. As her book’s subtitle indicates, the dead Pan-Arabist Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser has come to represent King Hamlet’s Ghost since his socialist policies were immediately revoked by his successor, president Anwar Sadat. In her examination of six Arab Hamlet offshoot plays performed between 1976 and 2002, Litvin argues that in these plays, “the ghost of Nasserism, discredited but not replaced, settles into the role of Hamlet’s father’s ghost” (p. 12). Seen from this angle, Litvin concludes that in these plays, Nasser “play[s] Hamlet’s father’s ghost: awe-inspiring, betrayed, succeeded by men of lesser talent, and continuing to haunt the Arab political imagination” (p. 56).
Furthermore, a significant body of contemporary scholarship addresses the enduring afterlives of Shakespeare in modern Arabic thought and literature. It often focuses on how the Western canon is appropriated to articulate local political and existential realities. Most specifically and in the context of the Palestinian experience, the recent works of Hamamra and other critics collectively focus on the intertextual engagement with Shakespeare’s major tragedies by key Palestinian figures such as Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, and Mourid Barghouti (Hamamra and Abusamra 2021; Hamamra and Qabaha 2022; Hamamra et al. 2023). Specifically, the analysis of Said’s use of Hamlet illuminates themes of displacement in his memoir Out of the Place (Hamamra and Abusamra 2021), Darwish’s invocation of Romeo and Juliet is shown to explore the “otherness of the proper name” in his poetry (Hamamra and Qabaha 2022), and Barghouti’s appropriation of Hamlet in I Saw Ramallah criticizes the post-return reality of exile (Hamamra et al. 2023). Also, Refaat Alareer’s poem “If I Must Die” presents a key intertextual moment with Western texts as it engages with Claude McKay’s Shakespearean sonnet “If We Must Die” (Hussein 2025). These articles show how Shakespearean intertextuality serves as a platform for cultural translation, political opposition, and ethical reflection. These dimensions parallel Hammad’s creative engagement and appropriation of Shakespeare in Enter Ghost. Thus, her narrative can be firmly positioned within this critical field, and the current analysis of the novel can establish a clear pattern of how the Western canon is actively modified to articulate Arab, and most specifically, Palestinian experience.
Considering Sonia’s comments on the significance of the return of the ghost and Litvin’s illuminating remarks, Hammad’s novel offers a peculiar interpretation of the ghost that takes into account the return of Palestinian refugees and their descendants to their own usurped lands. In this sense, Hammad’s novel, as an appropriation of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, addresses the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. In an interview, Hammad clarifies that she has chosen Shakespeare “because even though obviously he’s an English playwright, he’s also global in a certain way” (Between the Covers Isabella Hammad Interview – Tin House 2023). The universality of Shakespeare’s works makes readers more engaged with Hammad’s narrative since they are familiar with Hamlet’s quest for revenge for his murdered father. Moreover, the novel’s title, Enter Ghost, draws readers to wonder about the connection between the ghost of late King Hamlet and Palestinian refugees. Thus, Hammad uses Hamlet to expand the readership of her novel and, at the same time, foreground the suffering of the Palestinians under the Israeli occupation. For instance, Hammad sheds light on how the Israeli separation wall divides Palestinian villages and towns and blocks the movement of Palestinians even within areas that are practically under the Palestinian National Authority’s control (Hammad 2023, pp. 152–157).
In addition, the novel shows how Palestinians are unable to visit each other due to the strict Israeli laws that forbid those from the West Bank from entering the 1948 territories. Over time, this division has forced an “us” versus “them” dichotomy among Palestinians. Sonia reflects on the consequences of this division when she listens to Uncle Jad and her grandmother’s recorded interview. She also attributes the expansion of this gap between Palestinians to the PLO (The Palestinian Liberation Organization) leaders’ ignorance of Arabs in 1948 territories who “had not mentioned the fate of Palestinians with Israeli citizenship. It looked like the Palestinian State they were fighting for would not include us” (Hammad 2023, p. 41). This practically means that there are cracks in the national bond among the Palestinians just as Claudius’s usurpation of the Danish throne has caused unrest, turmoil, and divided loyalties among the Danish people. By having a theatrical group whose members are a combination of players from ‘the 1948 territories’ and ‘the 1967 territories,’ Mariam openly tells Sonia that she intends “to fight [Israeli policies of] divide and conquer” (Hammad 2023, p. 28). Accordingly, Mariam tries to unite both sides of Palestine in her theatrical performance. In this sense, Sonia’s return to Haifa and her desire to see the family house is a ghost-like visitation that opens the past for scrutiny.
Haifa is one of five cities in Israel that are referred to as “mixed-cities,” i. e. cities where Arabs and Jews live together under one municipal authority. It used to be co-inhabited by Arabs and Jews during the British Mandate. Both communities grew rapidly between the two world wars, with Jewish immigrants arriving in numbers from Eastern Europe and, since the 1930s, from Germany (Rabinowitz 2007, p. 55). On the eve of the 1948 war, as Rabinowitz explains, Haifa had a population of some 140,000, split almost down the middle between Jews and Palestinians (p. 55). However, Yara Hawari (2019) argues that because Haifa was “a cosmopolitan cultural hub” that reflected the urban Palestinian landscape, the Israelis, even before the Nakba, were determined to “inflict ‘urbicide’” on Haifa and to crush its political and intellectual elites” (p. 106). Hence, the city was indeed cleansed of its Palestinian population, and by early 1948, the city’s urban elite had collapsed, following an extensive shelling campaign by the Israeli forces (p. 106).
Thus, after 1948 war, Arabs were forced to leave their houses and depart to neighbouring countries. Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa,” for instance, depicts how Said and Safiyya were forced to leave their house on April 21st, 1948. According to Rabinowitz: The disappearance of Haifa’s Palestinian population took place in three stages. One was between December 1947 and April 1948, when some 20,000 Palestinians, mainly of the middle classes, gradually left the town, under pressure […]. The second is the fateful days of April 21st and 22nd 1948 and the night between them, in which 15,000 additional Palestinians were uprooted […]. The third is the period between April 22nd and the early days of May, in which most of the remaining 30,000 Palestinians were nudged, ushered and chased away. […] By mid May Haifa had only some 4,000 Palestinians left in it […]. Many of those remaining were now displaced, having been removed from their original homes and concentrated by the authorities in Wadi Nisnas downtown. (p. 57)
As Falah et al. (2000) explain, after 1948 war, “[t]he properties left behind by Arabs were transferred to state ownership and, in urban areas and vacated Palestinian cities, the state authorised a semi-official public housing agency called Amidar to administer those properties” (p. 776). In general, most of the vacated houses were sold to non-Arabs. According to Diab et al. (2021), Jews represent 70–90 percent of the total population of all mixed cities, and Arabs’ residential segregation is between 40 and 60 (pp. 1804–1805).
While Diab, Shdema, and Schnell note that most Arabs in mixed cities live in marginalised ethnic enclaves (p. 1805), a phenomenon that is often analyzed in terms of “intersecting oppressions” which limit economic agency and resistance (Hyasat and Ibrahim 2025), Falah et al. (2000) argue that “the perception of positive co-existence is significantly higher in Haifa than in any other ‘mixed’ cities” (p. 793). Yet, Falah, Hoy, and Sarker maintain that beside the historical events that led to the creation of mixed cities, it is also crucial to take into account how the urban context, i. e. municipal services, ownership of houses, and neighborhood conditions, is crucial in forming the perception of positive co-existence among Arabs and Jews (pp. 792). However, Hawari contends that in modern-day Haifa, the Palestinian citizens of Israel continue to live separate and unequal lives from those of their Jewish counterparts (p. 108). For Hawari, it is in these “mixed cities” that Israel reduces the Palestinian residents to an emblematic tool through which it can demonstrate to the international community a façade of diversity and plurality (p. 110).
Hammad’s novel vividly shows how Haifa is a segregated city. For instance, when Sonia and Ibrahim go for a drink at night, Ibrahim explains that this street is “a centre of Arab nightlife in the city, hosting a handful of café-cum--bars in which everyone seemed to know each other” (p. 84). Ibrahim’s emphasis on the fact that bar-goers are Arabs who know each other suggests that Arabs and Jews occupy separate spaces in the city. Rather than reflecting a shared public environment, the bar appears to serve as an informal place where Palestinians gather among themselves. This can highlight the broader patterns of social and spatial segregation that persist despite narratives of coexistence. Hammad’s critique of the illusion of coexistence in the so-called “mixed city” of Haifa is further highlighted in Sonia’s conversation with Uncle Jad, who has sold her grandparents’ house in Haifa and moved to Ramallah. He tells Sonia that his decision to move to Ramallah stems from his desire “‘to be with only Arabs’” (Hammad 2023, p. 115). His remark exposes the psychological and social toll that such coexistence may entail for Palestinians in Israel. This also implies that Haifa is marked by alienation or a lack of cultural belonging. The desire to live “‘with only Arabs’” can be viewed as Uncle Jad’s response to the systematic exclusion and marginalization that he and other Palestinians experience in Israel’s “mixed-cities”. As Nimmer Sultany (2017) argues, the Israeli legal system “effectively created a hierarchy among Israeli citizens. […], it generally advanced, justified, and perpetuated a separate and inferior status for the Palestinian citizens in Israel” (p. 191). Thus, Uncle Jad’s reply reveals the subtle sociopolitical fractures that run deep beneath a façade of coexistence in Haifa. As Hawari argues: In Haifa, urban planning is used to assert the dominance of the Jewish community, and it is certainly no coincidence that most of Haifa’s Israeli Jews live on the more desirable slopes of the mountain, whilst most of the Arab neighbourhoods are down near the port, including Wadi Salib, Abbas, and Wadi Nisnas. (p. 116)
As Sonia visits more public spaces in Haifa, she gradually realizes that this segregation is carefully planned and executed.
Sonia’s return to Haifa takes a decisive turn when she visits her family’s house, where she discovers to her chagrin that Uncle Jad sold the house to a Jewish family and relocated to Ramallah. This episode is extremely important in the novel because, on the one hand, it is reminiscent of the main episode in Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa,” and, on the other hand, this episode links the idea of Palestinian people’s return to their cities to King Hamlet’s ghost’s return to demand justice. Thus, in this episode, the family’s house is the place where Hammad’s appropriation of both Kanafani’s novella and Shakespeare’s tragedy converges. In other words, in this episode, aesthetic and thematic ends come together. At one point, Sonia remembers a story her grandmother witnessed about a lost child during the 1948 melee. The story indeed resembles that of the Palestinian couple’s loss of their baby in Kanafani’s novella, of which Sonia is aware. Kanafani’s novella “Returning to Haifa,” which revolves around a Palestinian couple’s return to Haifa right after Israel opened Mandelbaum’s Gate that used to separate the Palestinian lands lost in 1948 and those lost after the 1967 War.
As the couple walks inside what used to be their house, the Jewish woman abruptly says, “‘I have been expecting you for a long time’” (Kanafani 2000, p. 163). Therefore, the house in Kanafani’s novella occupies a central position in the plot. Similarly, in Hammad’s novel, the family’s house is also important because it is the site where Sonia and her Palestinian friends are seen, as Sonia’s father explains to her later, as ghosts by the Israeli owner of the house. Still, one can discern a major difference between the two houses. The house in Kanafani’s novella was usurped from the Palestinian couple, while in Hammad’s novel, the house was sold by those who inherited it to an Israeli family. In fact, Hammad’s opening scene echoes Kanafani’s view of the Palestinians as oppressed people. The novel opens with Sonia declaring that she has already anticipated her inspection by the Israeli authorities upon her arrival at the airport: “as I expected them to interrogate me at the airport and they did” (Hammad 2023, p. 1).
Once she arrives in Haifa, Sonia is keen to visit the family’s house. Sonia vividly describes the house: Across the road, a house stood in the dull green of a street lamp, flickering in the rain. Alone in a recess, with a freshly pebbled path. A column of arched windows down the centre, the lowest of which was the entryway, a small portico before the door. Two rows of balconies with white railings of curled iron. I stood on the second balcony in my mind and held the railing, the iron black and rough under my fingers. (p. 28)
At this stage, Sonia does not know that the house was sold by Uncle Jad years ago to an Israeli family. For Sonia, the family’s house is connected to her childhood memories. Therefore, she is enraged when she realizes that the house was sold.
Interestingly, Sonia’s reflection on her “lost” family house and the emotions it stirs in her echoes Said’s description of his lost house and the memories it brings back: Suddenly, the house loomed up, the very house he had first lived in, then kept alive in his memory for so long. Here it was again, its front balcony bearing its coat of yellow paint. Instantly he imagined that Safiyya, young again with her hair in a long braid, was about to lean over the balcony toward him. There was a new clothesline attached to two pegs on the balcony; new bits of washing, red and white, hung on the line. (Kanafani 2000, p. 161)
The two quotations underscore Sonia’s and Said’s shared sense of displacement and loss. In addition, the two characters’ words clearly reflect a strong connection between place and memory.
Upon her arrival at the threshold of the family’s house, Salim, Mariam’s brother and a Knesset member, reminds Sonia that her “‘relatives did sell it […]. So it’s not really like – ’” to which Sonia replies, “‘I know, I know, it’s not like – ’” (Hammad 2023, p. 187). The dashes at the end of Salim’s and Sonia’s statements indicate a common agreement or belief in something that both characters share. Within the fictional world that Hammad creates, it is likely that both characters are aware that this situation is different from the one portrayed in Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa.”
In fact, while Sonia, Mariam, and Salim are watching the house from outside, a man opens the front door and steps outside. Sonia narrates: “We fell into a creaturely silence, and I looked into Salim’s eyes and he looked into mine as the man opened the gate, then closed it behind him. I waited for him to walk past so I could get a good look. He didn’t walk past. I turned round” (p. 210). Apparently, the man does not want the three Palestinians to even have a peek inside the house, and this is why he shuts the door behind him. As Rabinowitz argues, the Israelis, “have been conditioned to conceptualize their own collective project as aimed primarily to prevent Palestinian return” (p. 62). Rabinowitz notes that there is “a troubling sensation” among the Israelis that “the [Israeli] nation will be penetrated” if Palestinians should be allowed to return” (p. 62). Thus, under the assumption of preserving the current demographic balance, Palestinian people’s appearance in front of an Israeli person’s house is unwelcome because they stand for a past that the Israelis want to keep suppressed. Seen from this angle, a returning Palestinian is, like King Hamlet’s ghost, a spectre whose presence threatens sociopolitical and demographic stabilities.
When the man begins to speak to Salim in Hebrew, Sonia notes that “[t]he man’s response to Salim’s response involved a slightly raised voice and raised eyebrows” (Hammad 2023, p. 210, emphasis added). Apparently, the man demands that they should leave the place immediately: Okay, we’re leaving,’ said Mariam in English to me. ‘We have to go.’ ‘Take your friends,’ said the man, waving at me with an eerie smile, also in English. ‘This is not a bar.’ ‘I know it’s not,’ I said. ‘It’s my house.’ ‘It’s what?’ ‘This is my family’s house. My dad grew up here.’ ‘Okay.’ His expression was blank. ‘I just …’ I began, conscious that Salim, an important politician who repeatedly featured in the news, was standing right behind me. ‘I just felt nostalgic. That’s all.’ ‘Well, that’s very nice. But you can keep your nostalgia quiet. Thank you.’ We watched him re-enter his house, and shut the door. (p. 188)
It is evident from the man’s unwelcoming response that he has encountered disagreeable individuals who, like ghosts, bring up terrible memories. The man’s hostility can be explained by drawing on Rabinowitz’s argument that “[t]he fear of the returning Palestinian is thus couched in demographic discourse that is as much about symbols, meaning and identity as it is about real numbers or competition for political and cultural dominance” (p. 63). As a result, Palestinian return, Rabinowitz explains, is made “unthinkable, unspeakable obscenity” (p. 63).
The Israeli man’s advice to Sonia to keep her nostalgia quiet reflects Israeli people’s attempt to silence Palestinians and erase their history. As Rabinowitz puts it, negating Palestinian people’s return is not merely a political project, but it also “a trajectory which involves identity and can be reflected in socialized individual memory as well” (p. 63). The Palestinians, Rabinowitz notes, “were successfully erased from recollection even in those who clearly saw and recognized their presence prior to the war” (p. 63). Thus, the Israeli man tries to negate Sonia’s ancestors’ presence in Haifa by simply ending the conversation and closing the door behind himself. To borrow Hawari’s words, as a settler colonial project, Zionism aims at obscuring “memories of Indigenous urban life […] from the hegemonic historical narrative” (p. 107). At the same time, the man’s behaviour stems from what Yosef Jabareen (2017) calls Israel’s “obsessive territoriality” which he describes as a continuous and never completed quest for territory and spatial control aimed at “the prevention of Palestinian refugees from returning to their homes […] and the confiscation of the vast majority of lands privately owned by Palestinians citizens of Israel” (p. 238, italics in original). This “‘obsessive territoriality,’” Jabareen insists, is the product of Israel’s national planning, legal system, and geopolitical agenda (p. 261). While it is true that the Israeli owner of the house bought it from Uncle Jad, he feels that the Palestinians are intruding on his space and his hostility reflects his categorical rejection to allow the three Palestinians to have a glimpse at what used to be their houses, let alone returning to them.
At the same time, this episode is also important because Mariam and Salim are ostensibly Israeli citizens, but they are intimidated by the Jewish man. According to Diab et al. (2021), the Arabs “are marginalised and discriminated against in light of Israel’s self-designation as a Jewish State, the Israeli-Palestinian national conflict, substantial cultural and religious differences and discriminating policies” (p. 1804). Apparently, the way the Jewish man aggressively orders Sonia, Mariam and Salim to leave shows that the discourse of “mixed cities” is defective. According to Hawari, Israel uses “[t]he narrative of continuous historical co-existence and a mixed present-day reality in Haifa […] to support Israel’s self-image as a pluralist and democratic society” (p. 117). As Hawari puts it, “mixed cities” are spaces “in which both Palestinian Arabs and Israeli Jews live mostly separately and with vastly different experiences” (p. 118).
Trying to console Sonia, Mariam says: “‘He was just being an ass, telling us to get away from his property’” (Hammad 2023, p. 211). However, Mariam’s silence at Sonia’s comment that “‘If it was anywhere else, any other country, […] it just wouldn’t be such a big deal’” (p. 189) reflects her helplessness. Amal Jamal (2017) explains that Israel employs repressive forms and other means of power practices and procedures to transform the Palestinian community residing within its borders “from an indigenous people that can collectively assert the Palestinian national claim of injustice into a marginal social group that enjoys ineffective civic rights” (pp. 159–160). Implementing these practices, Jamal concludes, “have led to the construction of a kind of hollow citizenship for Arabs in Israel” (p. 161). Similarly, Nimer Sultany (2017) argues that “Israeli law effectively created a hierarchy among Israeli citizens. […] [I]t generally advanced, justified, and perpetuated a separate and inferior status for the Palestinian citizens in Israel” (p. 191). As Sultany puts it, “Israeli legal structures have facilitated the dispossession of Palestinian land, the establishment of inferior and differentiated citizenship, and the segregation of Arabs from Jews in housing and education” (192). Thus, in the light of Jamal’s and Sultany’s arguments, the episode where Sonia, Mariam and Salim are ordered to leave the area near what used to be Sonia’s family’s house, which is now owned by a Jewish inhabitant, is a central episode in the novel since Mariam’s silence reflects how Palestinian citizens of Israel, to use Jamal’s words once again, have practically a hollow citizenship with no “substantive meaning” (p. 184).
Once denied even a glance into the house, Sonia speaks to her London-based father about the episode. He explains: ‘He [the Jewish man] was scared of you. You’re like a ghost to him.’ ‘Me?’ ‘We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die. Even now we’ve lost nearly everything.’ His laugh deepened. ‘Zombie apocalypse.’ (p. 211)
Sonia’s father’s observations explain why the Israeli owner of the house is scared to see her outside what once belonged to her family because, as a descendant of Palestinian refugees, Sonia, from the Jewish man’s point of view, looks like a ghost who threatens to destabilize the current order. At the same time, Sonia’s father’s comments help understand the link between Hammad’s novel and Shakespeare’s Hamlet since the existence of both Sonia and King Hamlet’s ghost endangers to open interred memories and past events. To clarify this point further, we wish to draw on arguments by David J. McDonald (1978) and Youngwhoe Koo (2012) on the signification of King Hamlet’s ghost.
McDonald (1978) describes King Hamlet’s ghost as “the presence of an absence” and “the presence of a void” (p. 39). He maintains that “[t]he Ghost is there and should not be there. A ghost should not be perceived. By entering and being seen, this non presence presents the watch with a new order of Being-a ‘mythic’ order, a seen unseen world, the presence of absence” (p. 39). Because, McDonald asserts, the ghost enters from and into a space of absence, darkness, and silence, the watchmen “are surrounded by the presence of absence […]. They fear the nothingness they have seen, the visibility of the void in the presence of the Ghost” (pp. 39–40). Similarly, Koo (2012) argues that since King Hamlet’s ghost sets the whole action in motion, it is “both a being of presence and a being of an absence” (p. 915). Koo maintains: As a subversive force, the Ghost may become a threat to the order of Denmark. But the order has been already dismantled even before the Ghost appears. […] The Ghost, which has a disrupted nature, is a rupture […] that disrupts the traditional order. (pp. 917–918)
McDonald’s and Koo’s arguments help us understand the reaction of the Israeli owner of Sonia’s family’s house. Just like King Hamlet’s ghost, Sonia, as a descendant of Palestinian refugees whose lands were seized by the Israelis after the 1948 Nakba, is a subversive force whose presence represents a threat to Israel’s established order. Yet, just as the order in Denmark has already been dismantled even before the ghost appears, as Koo explains, the order in Palestine has already collapsed with the establishment of Israel in 1948 and the expulsion of Palestinians. Thus, like King Hamlet’s ghost, Sonia is a presence of absence who refuses to be written off the narrative. Just as King Hamlet’s ghost “represents past but continuously demands to remember, which means it even tries to control the future of Hamlet” (p. 256), Palestinian refugees assert their presence through the return of their children to their lands.
In fact, the ghost in Palestinian literature plays a significant role as it symbolizes the haunting presence of those who were either killed or displaced by Israelis. The ghost represents the unresolved traumas and persistent memories that haunt both the victims and the perpetrators. It serves as a reminder of the duty to confront the historical injustice inflicted on the victims. It also mirrors the psychological toll on those complicit in violence. The ghost motif is heavily present in the works of the renowned Palestinian poet, Mahmoud Drawish. In his poetic prose book, In the Presence of Absence (2011), he emphasizes that the physically absent Palestinians are spectrally present to haunt their murderers: We, who have no existence in “the Promised Land,” became the ghost of the murdered who haunted the killer in both wakefulness and sleep, and the realm in-between, leaving him troubled and despondent. The insomniac screams: Have they not died yet? No, because the ghost reaches the age of being weaned, then comes adulthood, resistance, and return. (Darwish 2011, p. 54)
Darwish blatantly declares that the absence of the Palestinians has become a haunting presence to indicate that the murderer cannot erase their existence or history by killing or expelling them. Darwish’s words also consolidate his belief that Palestinians, as ghosts, will always haunt the Israelis to remind them of their past. Furthermore, Darwish affirms that the Israelis are defenseless against the haunting ghosts of the Palestinians: “Airplanes pursue the ghost in the air. Tanks pursue the ghost on land. Submarines pursue the ghost in the sea. The ghost grows up and occupies the killer’s consciousness until it drives him insane” (p. 54). According to Ball (2014), “the ghosts that rise from Darwish’s text are […] the specters of Palestine’s deeply traumatic history and traumatised national consciousness, which surface as a dialectical interplay between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence” (p. 2). Therefore, the ghosts that Darwish alludes to play a significant role in maintaining the presence of the absent Palestinians.
Thus, Sonia’s return to Palestine represents Darwish’s invincible ghost. Her arrival in Haifa and insistence on revisiting her family’s house metaphorically affirm that the specters of the Palestinians will tirelessly haunt the Israelis. This episode, when read in the light of Sonia’s father’s explanation, connects Hammad’s novel to both Kanafani’s novella and Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In fact, the title of the novel is mainly derived from the episode. It is not a coincidence then that the hardcover edition published by Jonathan Cape portrays yellowish crowded buildings that uncannily seem to be haunted by ghosts. Thus, Sonia’s return to Haifa challenges Israeli attempts to erase traces of Palestinian presence in Haifa and other cities that were occupied in 1948. According to Hawari: Jewish Israeli spatial hegemony […] was codified into the Israeli legal system through various mechanisms, including the Orwellian “present absentee” status to appropriate land from internally-displaced Palestinians. This […] de-Palestinization of the landscape […] was carried out not only to change the physical landscape, but also to change the cognitive landscape of memories where Palestine was being kept alive. (p. 116)
Thus, Sonia’s return to Haifa disrupts Israeli attempts to bury the past and impose a new reality in which Palestinian people’s presence is denied, and their traces are wholly erased.
Hammad deploys the motif of the ghost to represent the traumatic past of the Palestinians who lost their lands. Just like the ghost of the late King Hamlet, who appears to unveil to his son the bitter truth of the past, Sonia metaphorically embodies the bitter past of the Palestinians that haunts the Israelis. For the Israelis, Palestinian people’s return, to borrow Frosh’s words (2013), is also a traumatic experience that “plague[s]” them (p. 38). Frosh likens a traumatic event to “a ghost from individual history […], haunting us because of events that took place in earlier times. (p. 38). Frosh’s description of what haunts an individual fits what the Israelis feel about their long-term encounter with the Palestinians. The Palestinian exodus in 1948 marks a triumphant beginning for Israeli dominance; yet, it is also a traumatic, unforgettable incident for the Palestinians. In fact, Majed, one of the actors in the Palestinian adaptation of Hamlet, contrary to other actors’ interpretations, equates Denmark to Israel: “‘This time out of joint thing, something rotten in the state – the state of Israel?’” (p.82). Seen from Majed’s point of view, uprooting the Palestinians in 1948 is the rotten thing in the state of Israel. Thus, Palestinians who try to return to their lost territories can be viewed as ghosts of the past that haunt the Israelis and remind them of the expulsion of the Palestinians in 1948. In this sense, the Israeli man’s hostility towards Sonia indicates that Sonia is like the ghost of the past, which the Israelis attempt to avoid seeing. As a Palestinian returning to her ancestors’ house, Sonia is paradoxically an absent and present threat that haunts the current occupant of the house. Just like King Hamlet’s ghost, she both exists and does not exist. Hence, the Israeli owner of the house feels frightened at seeing Sonia because her return to Palestine destabilizes the Israeli narrative that Palestine is a land without people given to people without a land.
Sonia’s return to Haifa as a specter from the past exacerbates the Israeli man’s anxieties and worries about the present and the future. That is, Palestinians have always been perceived as haunting ghosts who reside in the Israelis’ unconscious. As for the Israelis, they live in a state where, to use Froth’s words: The present cannot exist on its own, as a separate point in time uninformed by past and future: it is always transient, in process, so always saturated with the sounds and sights of memory and expectation. This means that without a certain degree and kind of haunting, there is no possibility of a present. (Frosh 2013, p. 41).
Seen from this perspective, Hammad’s narrative not only adapts the motif of Hamlet’s ghost to explore the politics of the return of the Palestinians but also to project the Israelis’ constant concerns about the present and the future since their memories are still alive and will never fade away.
In Hammad’s Enter Ghost, the reader enters a narrative that depicts contemporary Palestinian people’s awe and struggles. Yet, the narrative is haunted by the ghosts of the past. Sonia, a Palestinian-British actress, returns to what used to be her family’s house in Haifa only to discover that it was sold by her remaining relatives to an Israeli family. At the same time, Sonia is drawn by Mariam to play a part in a Palestinian adaptation of Hamlet in which Palestinians from the pre-Nakba territories and the West Bank participate. As Sonia becomes more involved in the performance, the reader also becomes more aware of Palestinian people’s anguish and agonies. At the same time, Haifa, as a “mixed city,” takes a central stage in the narrative. Hammad’s representation of Sonia’s return raises questions about the return of refugees to their lands. As Hawari argues, the fear of the “return of the refugees and the recollection of Indigenous life before 1948 […] drives the continuous marginalization and attempted erasure of Palestinian memories” (pp. 117–118). Hence, Sonia is, to use Koo’s words one final time, like King Hamlet’s Ghost, “both present and absent. It is […] between presence and absence” (922).
Seen from this angle, Hammad draws on the well-established Arab Hamlet tradition to reflect Palestinian people’s sufferings and griefs. Litvin’s words on how Arab playwrights have found similarities between the ghosts of King Hamlet and Nasser, “whose moral demands could neither be fulfilled nor ignored” (p.157), show how Shakespeare’s Hamlet has been interpreted predominantly politically in the Arab World. Hammad’s Enter Ghost is no exception. As the novelist portrays the confrontation between Sonia and the Israeli owner of what used to be her family’s house, the reader is reminded of Kanafani’s “Returning to Haifa.” In this sense, Hammad comments on the hollowness of the Israeli claim that “mixed cities” like Haifa are spaces of coexistence between the Palestinian Arab and Jewish communities. Hammad points out that in practice, political, social, and spatial segregation persists. The final episode in the novel, where the troupe’s performance near a checkpoint in the West Bank city of Bethlehem is disrupted by Israeli armed forces, speaks volumes for Palestinian people’s anguishes: We stand at the rear of the stage and see George frozen in his mock-up uniform. The whites of his eyes glow back at us, then he turns his head and carries on saying his lines, loudly. […] Doom crashes into my chest as the soldiers come streaming around the corner. One of them fires a shot. A few stones hurtle through the air. Tear gas expands like dry ice. […] The recording of Majed’s voice begins to boom. Mark me, I am thy father’s spirit. Enter Ghost. (Hammad 2023, pp.318-319)
The quotation implies that as long as Palestine is occupied and refugees are not allowed to return to their houses, Palestinian artists will continue to relate their narratives and challenge Israeli attempts to silence them. Indeed, they are the ghosts of the past, present, and future that demand to be listened to. Like King Hamlet’s ghost, Majed, whose recorded voice begins to boom, is an absent presence who, as a ghost, will keep haunting the Israelis.