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.
Chapters 1-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 1 Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes depictions of starvation, rape, abortion, pregnancy loss, wartime violence, and death.
Sonia, an actor in her late thirties who lives in London but has family in Isreal and Palestine, is interrogated and strip-searched at the airport before she is allowed to enter Israel. She is there to visit her sister Haneen, who lives in Haifa, a city in Israel. Before going to Haneen’s house, Sonia goes to the seaside city of Akka (Acre) and looks at the ocean.
Sonia thinks about her sister’s visit to London for Christmas earlier that year. Sonia felt they hadn’t spent enough time together during that visit, so her father suggested Sonia visit Haneen in Haifa. She left in June.
Sonia arrives at her sister’s apartment. Haneen tells her she has tickets to see a play called Al-Moharrij, the Jester, that evening.
Sonia describes her career as an actor. She had some middling success that kept her busy. Recently, she had been in a production of Chekhov’s The Seagull (1895), which had inspired her. She ended up having an affair with the director after the show’s run.
Later that evening, Haneen’s friend, Mariam Mansour, comes over to drive them to the play. Mariam asks Sonia what she likes about acting, and Sonia rudely deflects the question. They go to see the play, which is a mediocre parody of and commentary on Shakespeare’s Othello. On the way home, they stop in front of Sonia and Haneen’s grandparents’ former home. Haneen tells Sonia it has been sold to Israelis, and Sonia is upset at the news.
Chapter 2 Summary
At home, Haneen plays a tape she found at their grandparents’ home. It is a recording of their uncle Jad interviewing their grandmother, Teta. Teta says her “soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state” (22). Then, Haneen tells Sonia that the Israeli authorities have suspended Mariam’s brother, Salim, a politician, from the Knesset for unknown charges. People suspect the authorities are investigating him for “communicating with the enemy” (23), but Haneen thinks the charges are untrue and absurd. Haneen is upset because of this and because it has been discovered that there is a Palestinian student living in the faculty building of the Israeli university where she works. As one of only two Arab faculty, Haneen is asked to talk to the student. When she tries to help him, he retorts in Hebrew, “You’re not even Palestinian. You’re an Israeli” (26).
Later, Mariam comes over. She tells them that the Israelis may have suspended her brother for helping her with her stage production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Mariam asks if Sonia wants to be in her play, and Sonia declines, saying she needs a vacation.
Sonia goes to a café and reads an apologetic email from the director, Harold Marshall, with whom she had an affair. She remembers how she felt his attraction during rehearsals and how she fell for him. Later, though, he grew frosty to her. Despite promising her the role of Gertrude in his production of Hamlet, she found the audition “excruciating.”
Outside the café, Sonia asks an Israeli for a cigarette and calls her father. He tells her that he knew her grandparents’ house had been sold. Then, Sonia goes for a swim in the ocean.
Chapter 3 Summary
Sonia reflects on the summer of 1994 when she was 15. Her family spent every summer in Haifa at her grandparents’ house. That summer, the First Intifada was coming to an end, and the family followed the news closely on the television. Sonia listens again to the tape her grandparents made that summer. Her uncle Jad was interested in the relationship between Palestinians who live “inside” (within the 1948 borders of Israel) and those who live in the West Bank, known as the Dafawim. In the recording, Teta says, “We are one family” (42), but this is ambiguous and could refer to the family at the house or the relationship between the two groups.
As this conversation goes on between family members, Sonia hears her voice on the recording asking for a pencil sharpener. Sonia remembers going upstairs to find a sharpener and coming upon her parents fighting in their bedroom. They told her to go to her sister. Sonia lashed out at Haneen, seemingly for no reason, called her a “bitch,” and stormed out of the house. Sonia went to the shore, where an Israeli boy asked her in Hebrew if she had dropped a soda can in the ocean. Sonia was offended by the insinuation that she had littered. Shortly after, Haneen and her cousin, Issa, arrived to take Sonia back home. Haneen told Sonia they were going to the West Bank the next day with their Uncle Jad, a doctor, to visit someone who was sick.
Chapter 4 Summary
Sonia watches videos of Salim Mansour, Mariam’s brother, online, where he argues that Israel is not a democratic country. Haneen is worried about Salim still being suspended, but Sonia is “trying to behave like a person on holiday” (49). She looks for books to read in English and Arabic and tries to distract herself from thinking about Harold and his upcoming production of Hamlet.
Sonia gets used to Haneen’s routine, which includes watching television news about the violence of the Israeli state against Palestinians while grading papers. One night, Sonia is horrified at an image of a Palestinian man who was shot through the neck by an Israeli settler on the television, and she comments she does not understand how Haneen lives in Israel. Haneen admits, “I don’t understand it either” (52). Sonia reflects that she had hoped to feel connected to her younger self since returning to Haifa. Instead, she had simply been tense with her sister and left with a feeling that everything she had built had been destroyed.
A few days later, Sonia gets a call from her Uncle Jad. He invites them to visit him in Ramallah, the capital of the West Bank. She agrees to go. Then, Haneen tells Sonia that Mariam needs someone to read for the part of Gertrude at a table read in the West Bank. Sonia agrees.
The next morning, Sonia reflects on how her father had been politically active as a teenager in the Palestinian resistance but that her mother had always felt uneasy about it. Later, her Uncle Jad became an activist. He encouraged quiet Sonia to speak up more when she was a child.
Sonia remembers the day when she was 15 that Uncle Jad had taken her and Haneen to Bethlehem, a city in the West Bank. They were stopped at an Israeli checkpoint, and the soldier asked for Uncle Jad’s phone number, which rattled him. They went to the home of a woman (referred to as “Um Rashid,” meaning “Rashid’s mother”) whose son refused to eat after he was released from Israeli detention following a hunger strike. Sonia was shocked at his emaciated state. On their way home, Uncle Jad explained that they would force-feed Rashid out of care, whereas the Israelis force-feed those on hunger strike as a symbol of their control over Palestinian lives. At the returning checkpoint, the Israeli soldier barely looked at their passports. Uncle Jad teased Sonia that the soldier thought she was Jewish. Sonia swore never to return to the West Bank.
Chapters 1-4 Analysis
The title of the novel, Enter Ghost, is a reference to stage direction from Hamlet, which is central to the plot of the novel as the work Mariam Mansour is directing in the West Bank and in which Sonia performs as Gertrude. In the play, the Ghost is Hamlet’s father who tells young Hamlet that he was murdered by his brother Claudius and asks Hamlet to avenge his death. This revelation plunges Hamlet into a spiral of despair and hatred. In the book, ghosts are a motif that reflects the theme of The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. A variety of symbolic ghosts who “enter” haunt the stage production. The author continues to develop this motif in later sections of the novel.
The novel has an unusual structure that reflects the central importance of theater to the plot. Most of the text is written in first-person narrative from Sonia’s point of view. The rest of the text is written in script format. The author uses this format to describe rehearsals and the performance of Hamlet. This structure reflects Sonia’s inability to see beyond her point of view and to deeply understand others unless it is in the context of the theater. When on stage and acting, Sonia can get a third-person perspective where she sees herself as she relates to others and the world. Later in the text, she describes these moments as “the double vision of the performing artist” (149). The shift in narrative format from first-person narrative to script mirrors Sonia’s experiences.
Even when discussing her life in narrative form, Sonia focuses on the events in context with the plays in which she is performing. Notably, Sonia often performs as complex characters in thematically intense and often experimental plays. The roles often reflect Sonia’s feelings and experiences. For instance, at the beginning of the novel, Sonia feels inspired by her role as Arkadina in The Seagull by Anton Chekhov. The character of Arkadina is a once-celebrated but aging actor. This is how Sonia feels about her aging; as she gets older, she “worried about losing out on character roles” (8). Indeed, Arkadina is a secondary role for an older woman, similar to the role of Gertrude in Hamlet that Howard, the director in London, and Mariam offer Sonia.
A central question of the novel is The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. On her first night in Haifa, Sonia attends a production of Al-Moharrij (1969), the Jester, which is a satire and commentary on Shakespeare’s Othello by Syrian playwright and poet Muhammad al-Maghut. As Haneen notes drolly, “Apparently it’s famous” (8), which is true. The work has an explicit political message and was written as a response to the 1967 Six-Day War. The staging of the production blends realism with theater and establishes the theme of Palestinian Identity and Resistance. It contains a “broader critique of Arab society and of the propagandist rhetoric of its rulers following their defeat [in the war with Israel]” (Robert Myers and Nada Saab. Modern and Contemporary Political Theater from the Levant. Brill, 2019, p. 108). For this reason, the work was banned in Syria until 1973. Despite its lofty ambitions, Sonia finds the play somewhat lacking in quality. She notes:
It seemed to me that only the first act had been thoroughly rehearsed. As the play went on, energy flagged, and the performers seemed uncertain whether the more political lines should be delivered earnestly or as satire, which mostly resulted in a kind of hammy gravity (16-17).
Mariam later concurs with Sonia’s assessment of the quality by admitting, “It’s a nice group of friends. But it doesn’t make great art, exactly” (18). This exchange raises the point that it is hard to make political theater, or political art more generally, that is simultaneously politically relevant and of high artistic quality, especially in a context where there is a small community with limited resources. Within the novel, the production of Al-Moharrjj serves as a foil to their production of Hamlet. It presents the possible pitfalls of making a production like the one they are attempting, which Mariam hopes will be both politically relevant and artistically excellent. As the narrative continues, it is not clear whether they can achieve this goal with their limited resources and the challenges of working in the context of the Israeli occupation.
