Continuing my life goal of reading all the Aspen Words Literary Prize winners, I have finally made it to last year's: Enter Ghost. A bit late to it, but I had to wait for my library to order and process it, so here we finally are! (If interested, please check out my reviews of previous winners, from 2018 to 2024, too: Exit West, An American Marriage, The Beekeeper of Aleppo, The Night Watchman, The Final Revival of Opal & Nev - my favorite of the winners so far, The Haunting of Hajji Hotak.)   

Oh, y'all. The power in the novel was absolutely in the everyday-ness, the “it is what it is” narrative tone, with which this story is told. There is something incredibly telling in the normalization of state and colonial violence and terror that suffuses every scene and interaction, but is just taken in stride, that is incredibly affecting/heartbreaking. This just shouldn't be anyone's norm, and yet... The way generations have experienced such vastly different reactions (devastation, hope, fight, distance, despair, resignation, etc.) to this occupation, but in a bigger picture, it’s only been 75 (ish) years and a single person could have lived through it all. It’s almost unfathomable, deeply upsetting, and Hammad just paints that reality so clearly. Related, she shows with great nuance the way that people can experience the same exact thing and interpret it and grow out of it so differently....and the internal/familial clashes that can result from those differences, even with a shared hope/belief in the same future. And she uses this story to try and subvert that "normal" life under occupation narrative, taking the script of how that story "should" look (or how the broader society thinks it looks) and creating something unique with it. 

The writing style itself, telling the story as a drama (a play script) as things get serious/emotional, is a fascinating choice. It's like the dissociation necessary to survive this type of daily trauma is shown on page with the distance that style creates. In fact, as that stylistic choice develops over the course of the novel, the interplay of reality and the script/stage drama (the real and unreal) is pretty wild. And since the play in question is Hamlet, the presence of ghosts is an unsurprising inclusion. Hammad addresses what ghosts do we carry with us (real and fabricated), which ghosts do we choose to acknowledge/address versus which we choose to ignore, which ones do we choose to let go, and which ones continue to haunt us. None of it is new, conceptually, but it is deeply and emotionally unpacked. 

The internal secrets and silences and protection (of self and others) that cause a family under pressure/in trauma to crack and separate in conjunction with the greater societal environment/witnessing is a lot in this novel. Hammad's message on the cyclicality in that hits throughout, but especially in those final moments, is heavvvvvyyyyyy. It's subtle, literarily, but very affecting. Perfectly on point. 

“My dear, if we let disaster stand in our way, we will never do anything. Every day here is a disaster.”

“Resilience was not the same as detachment.”

“Even if I cannot live in it, my soul will reawaken if there is a Palestinian state.”

“…when you read a novel about the occupation and feel understood, or watch a film and feel seen, your anger, which is like a wound, is dressed for a brief time and you can go on enduring, a bit more easily, and so time goes on running like an open faucet [...] and while there are moments in these concerts and poetry readings and lectures and plays when you might feel connected to the other people in this room, to the people behind the screen, you might feel a kind of flowering in the chest at this sight of your community's resistance embalmed in art, some beauty created out of despair, all of this means that in the end you, or at least the middle classes, are less likely to fight the fight because despair has been relieved, momentarily…”

“We haunt them. They want to kill us but we will not die. Even now we’ve lost nearly everything.”

“They get away with so much. We at least have to try. We might fail. Lots of people have failed before us. Basically everybody failed, actually.”

 “Human relationships are not social services, and love has nothing to do with deserving…”