Enter Ghost

In the final chapters of Enter Ghost, the company finally stages its production of Hamlet. The novel focuses on Hamlet’s Hecuba monologue that Mariam performs both in rehearsal and on stage. This is a surprising choice because “To be or not to be” is the most famous monologue from Hamlet. In Act II, Scene 2 of Hamlet, a troupe of actors arrives. Hamlet asks one of them to recite the story of Priam from ancient Greek mythology. Priam was the mythical last king of Troy during the Trojan War. Pyrrhus, son of Achilles, killed him. After his death, Priam’s wife, Hecuba, is distraught. Following this performance, Hamlet decides to have a troupe of actors stage The Murder of Gonzago for the court. He has scenes added to the play that depicts his father’s death. He hopes to use the performance to judge the reactions of his mother, Gertrude, and his uncle, Claudius, to the dramatized murder and thereby “catch the conscience of the king” (his uncle), who he suspects of murdering his father. He explains this decision in the Hecuba monologue at the end of the scene. Hamlet contrasts Hecuba’s distress at the murder of her husband with Gertrude’s muted response to the death of King Hamlet.

In the monologue, Hamlet describes how actors can closely identify with the roles they play such that they “weep” and turn pale in reaction to the emotions elicited by the conflict onstage. He seeks to harness the emotional potential of theater to a social and political end: to determine who killed the king, his father. Likewise, Mariam hopes to engender social and political action through theater with her production of Hamlet in the West Bank; this underscores the theme of The Relationship Between Theater and Politics. The blend of reality and theater reaches its apotheosis when Mariam is performing the Hecuba monologue, and a group of Israeli soldiers arrive. Just as Hamlet sought to provoke the king’s sense of guilt for his crimes with his theatrical performance, Mariam-as-Hamlet indemnifies the Israeli soldiers whose very presence foreshadows the violence later enacted on the theater troupe in the novel. Sonia later reflects, “On balance our performances were probably enhanced by the soldiers” (308). Even though the soldiers’ presence was terrifying, it highlighted the surreal blend of theater and real life that permeated their whole production, the core theme of the monologue in Shakespeare’s work. This blend centers Palestinian Identity and Resistance, a theme that has run throughout both the novel and Mariam and the troupe’s staging of Hamlet.

The ambiguity of Sonia and Ibrahim’s relationship in this section of the novel illustrates the theme of The Challenge of Intimacy in Relationships. Ibrahim is vulnerable with Sonia and says to her on opening night, “I don’t want to pester you about it. But I want to be honest. I haven’t felt this strongly about someone since I met my wife” (299). In the face of this frankness, Sonia retreats and simply replies, “What?” They never discuss this exchange again, but they have moments of fleeting intimacy, as when they hold hands at the wrap party. Every time Ibrahim attempts greater intimacy with Sonia, she retreats but then returns. It is never entirely clear why she rejects attempts at intimacy, and the author does not clarify the status of their relationship by the end of the novel. Since the narrative is told in the first-person, this underscores that Sonia herself does not have insight into why she struggles with intimacy. One possible explanation is that she feels unsettled in her identity and is, therefore, unable to form close connections with others.

Throughout Enter Ghost, Hammad’s depiction of the characters amid the Palestinian-Israeli conflict resists linear, utopian stories of change and transformation. This is emblematic of the nature of Palestinian Identity and Resistance. In a more conventional narrative, an author would follow the violent attack on the stage production of Hamlet by Israeli security forces with a description of what happened to the characters during and after the attack and what effects it had on their lives. However, Hammad puts this explosion of violence at the very end of her narrative and leaves its aftermath in suspense. This is in keeping with the overall plot structure in which plot elements do not cleanly resolve, and progress, and the timeline is nonlinear. This structure is evocative of the Palestine-Israeli conflict itself, which is a series of endlessly unresolved events that have no clean, utopian resolution. At the beginning of the novel, Ibrahim notes that if Hamlet is about national liberation, it is not a very positive representative of that struggle because everyone dies. This foreshadows how there is no happy ending at the end of Enter Ghost and its production of Hamlet.