Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian writer voted one of the Granta Best Young British Authors in 2023. She has published two novels, The Parisian and Enter Ghost, neither of which I have read, but on the strength of her latest, essay-length book I’ll be seeking them out.
Recognising the Stranger began as a lecture Hammad delivered at Columbia University just days before Hamas attacked Israel on 7 October 2023. It opens with a homage to Edward Said, the renowned Palestinian writer and academic for whom the lecture is named. With its focus on narrative fiction, this is a necessarily literary essay; yet, like Said’s writing, it is also steely in resolve. Said wrote that texts are worldly events, as are “the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” For many, that made him as much a political as a literary inspiration.
While constructing her talk, Hammad revisited Said’s 1974 book, Beginnings, a foundational text of his critical work. On rereading it, she found that she was drawn more to the middle of texts than to their opening passages. On the basis of this realisation she went on to re-examine examples of Aristotle’s anagnorisis, that point in a narrative that functions as the clarifying moment for a character: the gestalt or Eureka instant that suddenly illuminates the fulcrum on which the plot swings. Hammad’s aim was to pinpoint these points as they related to “the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.”
The narratives she focuses on are Sophocles’s play Oedipus Rex, said to have been first performed in 429 BCE, and Ghassan Kanafani’s Returning to Haifa, a novel published in 1970. In both, the anagnorisis is the protagonist’s sudden recognition that the person thought to be a stranger is actually a family member. In Oedipus’s case, he discovered that his wife was, as the prophecy held, his own mother. In Kanafani’s novel it is the revelation, among other things, that one’s enemy is one’s own brother.
The story of Oedipus Rex, upon which Sophocles based his play, is one of the Western world’s most powerful myths. Most of us know of it through the Oedipus complex, the name Sigmund Freud gave to the boy child’s erotic fixation on the parent of the opposite sex — a stage of infancy that males may never grow out of, lingering in their unconscious and blighting their emotional lives until analysis frees them. Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas haven’t the hold on us they once had, yet the Oedipus myth still retains its power.
In Sophocles’s play it is in the plague-ravaged city of Thebes that Oedipus discovers he has murdered his own father and that his wife is his mother. Sophocles appears to have used poetic licence here, substituting the Theban plague for Sparta’s siege of Athens. The myth, then, may be rooted in historical reality, in this case the Peloponnesian war. But there are other such instances in which children were the foundlings of crises. The Lebensborn, for example, were the Jewish babies given to German couples during the Shoah; many of the children of the disappeared in Chile and Argentina were adopted by military parents. My own novel West Block deals with Australians rushing to adopt Vietnamese babies during the collapse of Saigon, and of course there are our own stolen generations.
And so it is with the Kanafani novel, which draws on the real-life Palestinian babies who ended up in Jewish families after the Nakba. For Hammad, this a resonating metaphor for Palestine’s own story. “Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life,” she writes: “apparent blindness followed by staggering realisation.”
But recognising doesn’t necessarily mean redemption, in literature let alone in life. These pivotal “knowing-again” moments can be tricky. Ghassan Kanafani, a left-aligned Palestinian refugee, was a well-known journalist and writer. In Return to Haifa, published two years before Kanafani was assassinated by Mossad agents, the Palestinian infant left behind after the Nakba has no desire to relinquish his adoptive parents or his Israeli persona — even after the 1967 occupation, when borders are momentarily opened and his birth parents are able to locate him.
Born Khaldun, Dov has grown into a proud, loyal Israeli. His Palestinian brother Khalid, meanwhile, is prey to a paralysing nostalgia brought on by the Nakba’s trauma and the Pan-Arabic nationalism of the time, when irridentist hopes for Palestine had all but evaporated. The motive of the novel, then, is the existentialist one — that the call of blood is negligible compared with acquiring a cause for living, even if it’s the meretricious patriotism Khaldun/Dov represents.
The situation has changed since 1967. Fifty-seven years of brutal occupation later, Palestinians today have a cause, and the watching world, finally, a dawning recognition of their terrible plight. What, then, could be more of an anagnorisis than that fateful October morning in 2023? Unsurprisingly, Recognising the Stranger has an afterword, written in January 2024, by which time Israel had killed 25,000 Palestinians in Gaza. While the lecture itself does occasionally venture into the political realities consequent on the Nakba and the ongoing occupation, it is in the afterword that literary exegeses are swept aside, leaving the pain of the author’s Palestinian heritage nakedly exposed.
The seventh of October 2023, Hammad writes, “resembled an incredibly violent jailbreak.” It also signified “a paradigm shift,” similar to the kind alluded to in the lecture, and here she states unequivocally that “a system in which one population is afforded rights that the other population is denied will be safe for neither.”
Referring to Israel’s grossly disproportionate retribution and the escalating condemnation by various instrumentalities of international law and governance, she is moved to ask what Edward Said might say if he had witnessed it all and seen charges of anti-Semitism used to close down any criticism of Israel, any questioning of its “right of defence.” What would he have said about the draconian measures taken against protesters at Columbia University, where he had spent the better part of his exile?
It is here that I’m reminded how Hammad ends her essay by turning to “Freud and the Non-European,” a lecture of Said’s that became his last book. There he examined Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, which raised questions in his mind about the response of the founder of psychoanalysis to Zionism’s ethno-nationalism. Like other prominent twentieth-century Jews — Hannah Arendt and Albert Einstein, for instance — Freud was suspicious of Zionism, and Said took comfort from that very non-Zionist Jewishness — its “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character” — and the importance of what it bequeathed to the world.
Thus the lecture Hammad delivered in his honour ends with these thought-provoking words:
Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honouring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.
Needless to say, I have often thought that about myself. After all, the word “cosmopolitan” was once a dog-whistling reference to Jews (though it hasn’t been applied in that way, as far as I’m aware, to Palestinians).
If she wasn’t specifically writing about being Palestinian, Hammad might have been thinking about what it is that makes us writers. Or, more importantly, what makes a human being — what we Jews of the diaspora still call a mensch. Able to stand back, and then go forward, recognising that the stranger is as human as oneself — is an imperative for states as well as individuals. That we haven’t got there yet is the great tragedy of our time. •
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative
By Isabella Hammad | Fern Press/Penguin | $22.99 | 84 pages
