Isabella Hammad

“Extraordinary and amazingly erudite. Hammad shows how art and especially literature can be much, much more revealing than political writing.” — Rashid Khalidi, New York Times bestselling author of The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine

From the award-winning author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost comes an outstanding essay on the Palestinian struggle and the power of narrative

Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University nine days before October 7th, 2023. The text of Hammad’s seminal speech and her afterword, written in the early weeks of 2024, together make up a searing appraisal of the war on Palestine during what seems a turning point in the narrative of human history. Profound and moving, Hammad writes from within the moment, shedding light on the Palestinian struggle for freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is a brilliant melding of literary and cultural analysis by one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists and a foremost writer of fiction in the world today.

On Palestine and Narrative

Recognizing the Stranger

Marion

Do not give in. Be like the Palestinians in Gaza. Look them in the face. Say: that's me!

Mahmoud Darwish tells us: 'Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.' The Israeli government would like to destroy Palestine, but they are mistaken if they think this is really possible. Palestine is in Haifa. Palestine is in Jerusalem. Palestine is in Gaza and Palestine is in the Mediterranean Sea and Palestine is alive in the refugee camps, from Shatila to Yarmouk. Palestine is even alive and well in New York. Do they really believe they can obliterate the Palestinian will to life?

Thinking a lot about what narrative can and can’t do. Grateful to Isabella Hammad for her thinking and connections here.

alexis :)

What in fiction is enjoyable and beautiful is often terrifying in real life. In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing. Such shifts also do not usually come without a fight; not everyone can be unpersuaded of their worldview through argument and appeal, or through narrative. Maggie Nelson, in The Art of Cruelty, punctures the high-minded moralism of art that seeks, through depicting suffering, to move an audience to do something about it. “Having a strong reaction is not the same thing as having an understanding,” she writes, “and neither is the same thing as taking action.” It’s true that emotion and understanding are not the same as action, but you might say that understanding is necessary for someone to act. 

Katherine Kenny

Some of us read them for comfort, or to escape; some to learn about the world; some because it's a rare chance for concentrated solitude, to be neither working nor passively consuming the content of a screen but thinking deeply about experiences other than our own, using some of the tools of our dream life, and listening carefully to the voices of others, in ways that ask for our imaginative participation and that might also shed light upon our own experiences of being alive on this planet. Novels reflect the perpetuation of a human impulse to use and experience narrative form as a way of making sense of the world. 

The word epiphany itself comes from the Koine Greek word epipháneia, meaning manifestation or appearance, derived from the verb phainein, meaning to appear. It is usually applied in ancient Greek contexts to three things: the first is dawn, the second is the appearance of an enemy army, and the third is the manifestation of a deity.

Said asks us to recognise the familiar as stranger. He gestures at a way to dismantle the consoling fictions of fixed identity, which make it easier to herd into groups. This might be easier said than done, but it's provocative - it points out how many narratives of self, when applied to a nation-state, might one day harden into self-centred intolerance. 

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.

Recognizing the Stranger quotes

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