Early on in Isabella Hammad’s debut novel, The Parisian, the narrator writes about an ancient Ottoman form of timekeeping. The model revolved around the sun. The community would set their clocks to 12 at sunrise and set them back to 12 at sunset. Their sense of time was dictated by the world. They rose with the sun and left with it, too. In Europe, however, the narrator writes, “The trains always ran on time, the streets were paved perpendicular, one did not feel the earth.” How much can we say that we feel?
A student at an over-resourced university, your life has a two-mile radius. But if you can look in the mirror and tell yourself that the world is beautiful, then you do not live in the world.
This is the world: 200,000 people displaced in Palestine. American bombs raining over Lebanon. 42,000 people murdered in Gaza by an Israeli government with the ear of the West. On a Friday morning, two twins, Ayssel and Assar al-Qumsan, are born in Deir al-Balah. The following Tuesday, their father goes out to collect their birth certificates and comes home to find them dead. His two newborns martyred. His wife and her mother, too. “What did my wife do to deserve dying with our children?” he asks the press. “I didn’t even have time to celebrate with them.”
We know this is happening. We open our phones and see it every day. But how long are we able to hold onto it, and what happens after it goes?
In Recognizing the Stranger, Hammad’s new book on Palestine and narrative, the author writes, “We who are not there, witnessing from afar, in what ways are we mutilating ourselves when we dissociate to cope? To remain human at this juncture is to remain in agony. Let us remain there: it is the more honest place from which to speak.” Might not literature, with its ability to transport, help us with this? The Novel sits in direct contention with the way we live. It flattens time and space, allowing us to move through both of them at the turn of a page. It reminds us that our actions where we are will always impact the places where we are not.
Hammad’s work is intertextual. The Parisian follows Midhat’s journey through the Western Canon. Enter Ghost begins with a British production of The Seagull and ends with a Palestinian production of Hamlet. These books exist at the end of a centuries-long conversation that began because someone, somewhere, all those years ago, realized that the way we write about the world might have bearing on the way we live in it. Let Hammad’s words introduce you to the world as it is. Then set your clocks back and begin again.
– Eli Osei
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EO: I thought an interesting place to start would be The Seagull. Konstantin, the young playwright, is interested in the limits of theater. Very early on in that play, he says that we need new forms. New forms or nothing at all. Having written two novels, and working on your third now, have the limits of the novel as we know it inspired you to look for new forms?
IH: I don't feel like Konstantin in the sense that I don't feel close to despair with the form of the novel. I feel that the novel can endlessly renew itself. I think it has more freedom. It could be short, it could be long...I've only written two, and I'm still trying to figure out what I can do with it. Formally, I wrote one novel that was more like a 19th century bildungsroman, and then I tried to explore the meanings of that form in relation to national identities, to play with the idea of a certain kind of realism. What are the political implications of that? And then in the second one I do theatrical stuff, you know — you've read them, you know what I'm talking about. I think every time you write a novel, you feel like you're starting totally fresh. You don't know what you're doing, and you're playing. So I still feel like I'm playing, and everything is always a question, and everything is subject to change. I feel more excited by the possibilities of form in the novel than close to, “it's all shitty and we need to start again.”
EO: Was the novel the first thing you came to? Were you ever interested in exploring different kinds of writing?
IH: I mean, when I was little I wrote some poems, but I don't think they were very good. I like novels. That was the thing that I really liked.
EO: Something else I think is interesting about The Seagull is Konstantin’s questioning of not just how to represent things, but of what to represent. He says that we shouldn't represent life as it is or as it ought to be, but as it appears in dreams. And that's kind of his project. But I'm more interested in the first two categories that he identifies and whether you see your own project fitting into one of them?
IH: I think it's important to bear in mind that when you make a text, it enters the world and then exerts forces upon it. There isn't a document that registers things and records them and doesn't participate in them. It's more of a revolutionary impulse to say you write the world you want. Or you write something into the world. But I also don't think it's a totally conservative impulse to try to register what's in the world. I think that there's a special kind of magic that happens in that.
EO: Hamlet is a play that's been performed thousands of times all over the world. Was the decision to take a very Western play, and transpose it into Palestine, one that was driven by a desire to force people to recognize the parallels, or was it about what, in Recognizing the Stranger, you call “speaking amongst ourselves,” making Hamlet something different and something distinctly Palestinian, which belonged to the actors in the book?
IH: Probably more the latter. Shakespeare is this over-sanctified figure in English literature, but he's also global. There's a Soviet tradition, there are these ways in which the plays have been taken up in other parts of the world, often with postcolonial readings. But in Hamlet it's actually the figure of Hamlet that’s seen as a kind of anti-colonial ally. He's trying to fight against an illegitimate regime. He's a freedom fighter, in a certain way. And the play also has a history in the Egyptian theatrical tradition, coinciding with the rise of Gamal Abdel Nasser. So there were all these histories that I thought would be fun to play with. The impulse was more: “Oh, this will be fun for me,” than me trying to do something specific to my reader. All I had in mind was that a lot of people will kind of know Hamlet, and I wanted the text to be inviting to everybody. Also that Hamlet, in a way, is a cliché of theater. If you had an iconic description of theater, you might have Hamlet holding the skull, or To Be or Not To Be. These things are so well known that they’ve almost lost their original meanings. So that was also something I could play around with, and that seemed fun.
EO: Say the play that they put on was a Palestinian play. How do you think that changes the context of the novel?
IH: The director, Mariam, wants to do this fancy play, and there's a tension there that I thought was quite interesting between high-minded art, and the fact that she wants to have a mass audience, so she gets a pop star to play the main role. And that the play is in classical Arabic, so it's difficult for everybody. Those textures were quite nice to play with. I could have probably achieved that with an Arabic play, or with my own play, but there was something quite particular that I liked with those features. I don't know that, in essence, it would have needed to be that different [with a Palestinian play]. It probably would have been less accessible to a western audience, perhaps, but yeah, I don't know.
EO: Yeah, that's a difficult question to answer, because–
IH: (laughs) What would the novel have been like if you didn’t write it?
EO: (laughs) Talk to me about this completely different novel!
Staying on Hamlet, I’ve been thinking about the line, “What is a man,/ If his chief good and market of his time/ Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more.” and about the kind of games we use to pass time. Often it feels like there's an unreality to our lives. You’re born, you go to school, you start a family, and it feels like that’s the most important thing in the world. But if you look outside of yourself, there are thousands of things, all over the world, that demand more importance, more attention, more care. But it’s incredibly easy to ignore that. And this question is all over the place already, but I'm thinking about the scene in Enter Ghost where Mariam asks Sonia to perform her lines with Wael but without him saying his. So it's just her speaking, and she's kind of speaking to the silence. It’s incredibly powerful to me because with each silence her plea becomes more and more desperate, and the silence feels more excruciating to bear than any kind of response. And I'm wondering, generally, but also in thinking about writing about Palestine, writing in a world where often the response to a plea is silence, where the strength to continue comes from.
IH: I think it comes from people there. It does feel like throwing your fists against a locked door, talking about Palestine these days. And I don't feel very good these days, to put it mildly, but I feel that it's a duty. I think it's a duty to keep talking. You know, we're also talking to each other. It's also about holding hands in the dark. We’re not necessarily trying to find light at the end of the tunnel. It's about being together. I think that that's very important and shouldn't be forgotten—to hold each other up and to keep talking to each other.
But your other question about, basically, the meaning of life: about to be a beast no more. Is there more? Is there anything beyond that? Does man live by bread alone? I've just come back to New York, and it's a different somatic experience being in a city like this, where people are so driven by productivity. It's so hyper-capitalistic. And it's not all bad, obviously, I also want to get stuff done. I mean, you're living in a university environment that's very similar in many ways. It's driven on anxiety. Everyone's on this schedule.They're working, they want to do well. They want to be given a gold star. They want to get this rod through this loop or whatever. But this is also bullshit. And it's hyper-individualized. People don't have time to think outside of the structures that are conditioning their daily life. And what is amazing about the encampments and the protests is that the students are thinking beyond these structures. They’re asking, what does this actually mean? What is this institution that is run like a business, that has a ridiculously large endowment, that is training us in a certain way to want a certain kind of job, to live a certain kind of life, and is feeding into this machine running on debt and on huge amounts of money and on a certain kind of prestige? They’re asking, well, why? And I think that is very powerful and very significant. There aren't that many people asking why, and that's why it's not just about Palestine. Palestine is at the center of a lot of things. It's where a lot of things become clear. Does that sound right to you as somebody who's presumably in this and experiencing this at the moment?
EO: Definitely. I came to Yale without really knowing what Yale is. It was a name to me, a name that I’d expected to find some kind of intellectual utopia behind. Coming here and quickly realizing that wasn't the environment I was in, my initial response was to convince myself that I could separate myself from the institution and what it stood for.
I think the encampment was driven by a desire to ask why. To be continuously questioning, but also to recognize that we're people who tell ourselves that we have principles without being forced to act on them. But what being in a space of privilege demands is taking your principles as far as you possibly can. The encampment was, in part, about acting on principles, and I think that created an environment where a lot of people felt as though, for the first time in a long time, they were living truthfully. Something I was really struck by in The Parisian was the description of Ottoman-era forms of timekeeping. Setting the clock to 12 every time the sun went down. Living in a way that was continually responsive to the world. At school, and generally in life, it feels very hard to continually respond. The encampment felt different. And one of the reasons I was, I am, so excited to talk to you is to figure out how to hold onto that truth.
IH: Mmm. That's amazing. It’s difficult to mark such moments. I mean, this moment is ongoing, so I'm wondering what's going to happen this semester, generally, on different campuses, in response to actual conversations about divestment and also ongoing repression of student action. So it's not like this moment has passed. But what do you do at the moment that can't really be solidified into an institution? It needs to be something organic. It has to do with being together. It's not an individual act. That's the whole point, right? It's about being in relation and constantly fostering those relations, not allowing societies to divide us from one another, which is kind of what they tend to do.
EO: Do you feel as though you have people in your life who are thinking towards the same things as you?
IH: Yeah, I'm in company, for sure. I have friends, and allies, and people whom I will discuss things with. And I think that they're very important, even when you might disagree about something. They’re almost like a super ego sometimes. I think it’s very important to feel like you're not acting alone, to look after those webs of people who sharpen each other's discourse, who help each other to think, who help each other to be brave, to make certain kinds of decisions. That’s the role of community.
EO: I read your email correspondence with Sally Rooney, in which you wrote about the continual need for slow forms. And I really appreciated that. It got me thinking, because a writer I really like is Elif Batuman and she said something on her Substack that confused me a few months ago. She was talking about the Proust and the Dreyfus affair, and she said that Proust saw responsive writing, quick writing that responded to current events, as a distraction from writing the novel that did slow work over time. In thinking about the writing I've read of yours, it feels as though you're doing both. Do you just write what you’re called to write?
IH: Well, I haven’t read this piece, but I feel like it's a little bit of an excuse to say that writers exist outside time in this way. Of course you're working on different time frames. Sometimes you write something that's more responsive, and sometimes you write something that's a work of 15 years, and it's a kind of map of your consciousness over that time. I think that's something great about novels. They display this sediment of time and this sediment of thought, where all these things overlaid and mixed, having been written at different times. I think it's sort of a mystery that such a text then works as a finished thing. But there are also amazing, and very valuable, books that are written in the heat of the moment. So I don't really buy this idea. Etel Adnan’s Sitt Marie-Rose: this is an amazing book. She wrote it in the first year of the so-called civil war in Lebanon, in response to someone being killed. You look at some of the things that are being written by writers in Gaza now—these pieces are being written on their phones. How can you say this isn't invaluable? They're extraordinary, not just for the testimony, but for the way they describe things. There’s extraordinary writing coming out of Gaza right now.
EO: Thinking about recognition and moments of realization, something that my friends and I have been debating recently is whether or not it’s possible to be affected by something, to recognize something and then permanently hold onto that thing. And whether or not there's any benefit in actually doing so. Over the summer, I watched a film called Green Border, which is about the refugee crisis on the Belarus-Poland border and the immigrants whom the two countries pass back and forth. I saw that film, and felt incredibly struck, and for a brief period of time felt as though I’d never forget that feeling, as though I’d be prompted into action. But three months later, I can only return to a weaker version of those feelings, the recognition has kind of left me, and no action has taken place. In Recognizing the Stranger, you say, “an action must follow.” What are the things that prompt you into action?
IH: It's unlikely to be just one film, right? The way that films and books circulate in company with other such artifacts makes it hard to calculate exactly what their effect is. It might affect you when you're in the movie theater. You might leave and feel, “Oh my God, I feel so compelled to act on this film.” But it can't really stand on its own. It has to be in connection with other things, like human relationships. If you knew somebody there, or if you found yourself there, then those circumstances might work upon you and might contribute to you acting. But there's a difference between an individual acting and a state acting, or acting in groups. In the lecture, I wanted to tease those threads out a bit, because I think that sometimes people, when they talk about the power of narratives, fall into cliches. I wrote this novel to give a voice to the voiceless, or whatever. It seems to be neoliberal window dressing, or a kind of over-emphasis on the value of these works of art acting on their own, on an individual reader. And that's not really how it works. Very few people read something, feel moved, and then do something. Maybe there's somebody who does that. But that individual action is one thing in isolation, which doesn't amount to a huge deal.
I think that what's valuable in the novel is this exploration of limit. I think that it's important to be realistic. I think it is also very easy, then, to say that novels are useless, that films are useless, that all they do is make you feel catharsis. Then you go out and you do nothing. And that's the risk, that’s the risk that Brecht talked about, and that Augusto Boal talked about. We know that there's something about releasing those emotions that is a counter-revolutionary force. I just think it's more complicated than that, actually, and that once certain stories are out in the world, they begin to act in ways you can't really predict or control or measure. They become part of something, and sometimes they become valuable much later. I'm sure that among you guys, there were certain texts that were circulating, and you were like, “This is exactly what I need to read right now. This clarifies something for me, this explains something that allows me to access this feeling or this thought, and I can talk about it with my friends. It fortifies us. It allows us to keep going.” The political value of these things is multifarious. It's not time-bound.
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Photo by Patricia Voulgairs