The Year in Review: Isabella Hammad’s Powerful Treatise on Palestine

‘The novels I’m interested in may conclude, but they don’t usually answer the questions that they have posed,’ writes the novelist Isabella Hammad in her wide-ranging essay ‘On Palestine and Narrative’. First delivered as the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University on 28 September 2023, Hammad’s text was published in book form earlier this year by Fern Press, expanded to include an afterword by the author on the Qassam Brigades attack on Israel – which took place on 7 October 2023, only a week after the lecture was given – and the subsequent continuous bombardment of Gaza, which has resulted in the deaths of tens of thousands of citizens. Hammad packs a multitude of questions into the slim, 80-page volume: What use is fiction, or literary criticism, in this conflict and in others around the world? At a time when ‘the novel’ is increasingly commodified, can it serve a political purpose beyond didactic moral instruction? Do writers need a clear sense of intention for their stories? And what are the limits of narrative or argument in changing the worldviews of people who do not wish to be challenged?

In a bid to answer these questions, Hammad takes as her starting point the notion advanced by literary scholar Frank Kermode in The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (1967) that ‘fictions are for finding things out’ and that they ‘change as the needs of sense-making change’. Hammad follows Edward Said in using literary analysis to explore the widespread refusal to recognize Palestinian humanity – a refusal that has been central in manufacturing consent for their subjugation, and how it might be broken. She examines in depth Aristotle’s concept from Poetics (c.335 BCE) of anagnorisis – ‘the moment when the truth of the matter dawns on a character’, jolting them into ‘a movement from ignorance to knowledge’ – referencing the films The Third Man (1949) and The Empire Strikes Back (1980) to illustrate the concept. The crucial point comes out in its application to Sophocles’s play Oedipus the King (c.429 BCE): it seems hard to believe that Oedipus didn’t realize he had fulfilled the prophecy that he would kill his father and marry his mother before the shepherd told him so – until, that is, you realize that he needed a particular kind of testimony to read the situation properly and believe the evidence of his own eyes.

Hammad also analyzes Ghassan Kanafani’s novel Returning to Haifa (1969), about a Palestinian couple who return to the home they lost in the Nakba of 1948, where they track down and are reunited with the son they were forced to leave behind. Adopted and raised by the Israeli family who occupied the house, the son rejects and reproaches his birth parents when they reveal the truth. Kinship, Kanafani suggests, is not enough: bonds of personal and political identity must be imprinted with intention and will. This idea underpins the behaviour of the Israeli state in conscripting its citizens into the military occupation, in suppressing Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, in conducting propaganda offensives in Europe and North America and in insisting that – as former Israeli prime minister Golda Meir said in a 1969 interview with The Sunday Times – ‘There was no such thing as Palestinians.’

The imbalance this sets up is extraordinary: Palestinians have to build empathy, person-by-person, by taking individuals to the West Bank – despite the fact that outsiders are not allowed into Gaza. As Hammad points out, anagnorisis narratives often focus on Israelis, especially soldiers. The pressure to write stories that will educate and enlighten others is placed on Palestinian authors. Hammad explains how this has shaped her own fiction in a striking section that details her efforts to get past the ‘corrosive’ personal nostalgia of the older people she interviewed when trying to write an honest, well-researched novel about Palestine before the Nakba, in a bid to form a reliable and relatable story of what was lost, and to explore Said’s idea of Palestinianism as a form of chronic exile.

Having opened with the concept that a ‘turning point’ is often identified only in retrospect, even if an event seems significant when it happens, Hammad writes that ‘the flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it’. The scorched-earth strategy that Israel has pursued, with Anglo-American backing, may have killed thousands of Palestinians but it cannot destroy the idea of Palestine, or of the Palestinian, which will haunt any potential settlement built in Gaza and strengthen the determination of those who survive to return to their homeland. With its exploration of the paradox that a system which affords rights only to one side is ultimately safe for neither, the combination of humanism and criticism in this short book is remarkable, and reminds us not to look away from the situation, as a first step towards answering the searching questions it raises.

Isabella Hammad’s Recognising The Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is published by Fern Press in the UK, Grove Atlantic in the US and Knopf Canada in Canada 

_{Main image: Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (detail), 2024, book cover. Courtesy: Grove Atlantic}