A review by ditten
Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

emotional hopeful informative inspiring reflective fast-paced

5.0

Isabella Hammad's lecture on narrative, recognition, and turning points pertaining to Palestine and its people's strife is incredibly powerful, harrowing, and beautiful.

"The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it."

Hammad gave the speech at the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University on September 28, just nine days before October 7 and the beginning of the Palestinean genocide. 
The book contains her speech, as well as an afterword she wrote about Gaza and the ongoing genocide in January 2024.

As a fan of Said's writing and ideas, I put on this short audiobook hoping for an interesting speech, and Hammad blew my expectations out of the water.

The speech is beautifully written, the content relevant, interesting, enlightening, and poignant, and I found myself tearing up several times.

Hammad gets into narrative, anagnorisis, epiphanies, recognition, humanism, and colonialism, and delivers it eloquently and like a punch to the gut. A must-read!

Important quotes:

"The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterward, but only for repeated shock and the ebb and flow of grief. 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"

"It will be easy to say, in hindsight, what a terrible thing. That was a terrible moment, when the movements of the world were out of my hands. 
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.”"

"It’s one thing to see shifts on an individual level, but quite another to see them on an institutional or governmental one. To induce a person’s change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial."

"Somewhere recently humanity seems to have crossed an invisible line, and on this side naked power combined with the will to profit threaten to overwhelm the collective interests of our species."