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Last year, the British Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University. That talk has now been collected in a short book, published in September, called Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. As a novelist, Hammad tells us there, she finds herself drawn to the “turning point” of a story, the moment when a fateful truth suddenly dawns on a character, often with tragic results — what Aristotle called “anagnorisis.” She points to perhaps the most famous instance of this in all of western literature: the scene in Oedipus Rex when Oedipus realizes that, by trying to defy the prophecy that he would murder his father and marry his mother, he has ended up doing just that. “When a character realizes the truth of a situation they are in, or the truth of their identity or someone else’s, the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience,” Hammad writes. “Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.”
But Hammad also has her doubts. “Palestinians are familiar with such scenes in real life: apparent blindness followed by staggering realization,” she writes. She remembers meeting a former Israeli soldier who had fled his post at the Gaza fence in horror after a naked Palestinian man approached holding up a photograph of a child. For Hammad, the problem with such stories is they “center the non-Palestinian as the one who experiences the decentering shock of recognizing Palestinian humanity.” After all, the myth of Oedipus was already well known in Sophocles’ time; it is Oedipus himself whose knowledge lags behind that of the audience, which has little choice but to wait for him to catch up. While participating in the Palestine Festival of Literature last year, Hammad watched as one visiting writer after another underwent a “tragic awakening” when their hosts showed them firsthand the realities of life under occupation. (One of them seems to have been Ta-Nehisi Coates, who describes precisely this kind of awakening, full of gratitude and self-reproach, in his new book.) “I was moved to see them moved,” admits Hammad. “At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of despairing déjà vu, the scene of recognition having become at this point rather familiar.”
Dramatic irony — that pressure gradient of ignorance and knowledge that can be so pleasurable in fiction and so distressing in real life — is not just a theme of Recognizing the Stranger. It is the book’s essential condition. A simple note informs us that Hammad’s lecture was originally delivered on September 28, 2023 — in other words, nine days before the Qassam Brigades broke through the fence around Gaza and killed some 1,200 people in southern Israel, taking another 251 hostage. It is impossible to read Recognizing the Stranger without being haunted by what Hammad does not yet know: that, in the year separating the lecture from its publication, Israeli forces would kill 42,000 people in Gaza and injure almost 100,000 more; that Israel’s remorseless demolition of homes, schools, and hospitals would leave 2 million Palestinians displaced and at risk of starvation and disease, including polio; that Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, with another blank check of support from the United States, would order a ground invasion of Lebanon and risk all-out war with Iran. Nor could Hammad have known that the site of her lecture, Columbia University, would become a national symbol of the vibrant student protests for Palestinian liberation as well as their violent repression. “As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called,” Hammad notes in her afterword, written in early 2024. “I wonder what reality you now live in.” We know the answer.
I have thought many times in these past 12 months about the role of the literary critic in a time of war — an event that shatters any idea we may have of literature as existing separately from the world at large. Indeed, we might say the kind of dramatic irony that hovers over Recognizing the Stranger is a constitutive quality of all textuality, if rarely on so brutal a scale: That is, all texts are blind to their own fate, even as, like Oedipus, they are drawn inexorably toward it. On this point, Hammad turns to the Palestinian literary critic Edward Said, who taught at Columbia for 40 years. “Texts are worldly,” he wrote in 1983. “To some degree they are events, and, even when they appear to deny it, they are nevertheless a part of the social world, human life, and of course the historical moments in which they are located and interpreted.” For Said, the worldliness of the text placed certain political demands on the critic that could not be avoided; yet he feared that the literary critics of his time had adopted a “principle of noninterference” with the broader social world. “As it is practiced in the American academy today,” he wrote, “literary theory has for the most part isolated textuality from the circumstances, the events, the physical senses that made it possible and render it intelligible as the result of human work.”
Today, Said’s views have achieved a kind of Pyrrhic victory within the academic humanities, where politically engaged criticism is both the norm and, not coincidentally, more insular and detached from public life than ever. Meanwhile, critics in my position continue to argue that our role is to safeguard the integrity of the text from the corrosive effects of moral or political absolutes. One has only to read Adam Kirsch’s new diatribe against “the ideology of settler colonialism” to discern that part of the backlash against the younger generations’ support for Palestine is based in a belief about how literature should — and should not — be read. (Kirsch too is a literary critic who has taught at Columbia.) “Ways of thinking that start out as academic and esoteric don’t always stay that way,” he warns darkly — the idea being that supporters of Palestine have mistaken for a call to arms what is in fact best regarded as a supremely complex text.
Indeed, one marvels at how often the protesters for Palestine have been treated like the freshman reader of Lolita who, lacking the niceties of the contemplative attitude, objects to all that business with the pedophile. Of course, I hope that English students will learn the difficult pleasures of interpretation; as Hammad reminds us, Said himself was first and foremost a humanist with a deep love of the novel. But I also find great wisdom in the untrained response that blithely fails to distinguish the text from the world — it is something to be cultivated, not stamped out. Especially in a time of war, we should be bad readers: not because we must abjure curiosity or knowledge but because we in the U.S. should refuse to view the war as if it were a novel — that is, a text that exists in a universe of its own, fenced off from the world where we, the readers, live. I generally try to be modest about the rewards of criticism, but if we are to stop treating the world like a novel, we might begin by learning how to treat novels less like novels. This way, when something comes along that demands more than reading, we may be more prepared.
I will give you an example. In graduate school, Hammad tells us, she tried to write a short story inspired by her encounter with the Israeli deserter. But her writing instructor felt it was too weighed down by Hammad’s own pessimism and grief to be successful. To support this interpretation, he pointed to a large black dog that briefly appeared in the story and wrote in the margin, “This is you!” At the time, Hammad was indignant:
I didn’t mean to include the black dog as a symbol of depression. I wanted to respond, “But it’s an image I included randomly, something I saw in life! It just stuck in my mind, this big dog I saw shaking its fur and a little girl screaming in surprise!” But I didn’t, of course, because that is one of the weakest defenses in a creative writing workshop — to protest, when something doesn’t work aesthetically, by saying: But it really happened!
Reflecting on this story today, Hammad has come to agree with her instructor’s critique, however harsh. “Literature is not life,” she admits. “The material we draw from the world first needs to undergo some metamorphosis in order to function, or even to live, on the page.”
This is true. But it also strikes me that we are living in a moment in which great effort is being spent to deny that something is “really happening”: It is called genocide. As Hammad observes, within the dominant narrative in Europe and the U.S., all possible genocides are effectively pitted against the Holocaust in a contest of victimization that non-Jews are bound to lose — a situation particularly cruel for the Palestinians, who are “destined to be the victims of the victims.” Every Palestinian life taken, every hospital bombed, every child maimed, is asked to serve within the Zionist imagination as a symbol of the infinite Jewish pain for which there can be no salve. This is to say that the Israeli state has a monopoly on the linguistic referent; it is the only party that is allowed to say, in defiance of all the laws of creative-writing workshops, that something really happened.
What I am getting at is a certain attitude toward Israel’s war on Gaza that we might call “enforced literarity”: that is, a tendency to view the “plight” of the Palestinian as a humanitarian morality play rather than as a concrete political situation. The novelist and literary critic Zadie Smith illustrated this earlier this year when she wrote that, until a cease-fire is called, one’s political views about Palestine are of little importance. “The only thing that has any weight in this particular essay,” she concluded, “is the dead.” The sentence is clearly an attempt to provoke the kind of tragic recognition Hammad describes. The dead — how could we be so blind! But it is notable that, for Smith, the dead have no language, no ethnicity, no political status. All they have is weight; they are deposits of pure tragedy. The writer Tareq Baconi has observed that Gaza “personifies abjection in our time,” even among its sympathizers. The corollary is that the Palestinian is a personification first and a person second. He is all of us, as the slogan goes, but for this very reason, he is no one. (I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s observation that the stateless, possessing nothing but the sacred right to go on living, are reduced to their capacity to die. That she wrote this with the Jews in mind only sharpens the point.)
This is not to say there is something inherently wrong with bringing a literary sensibility to bear on a political situation. On the contrary, one surely needs a literary sensibility to make sense of the Balfour Declaration’s periphrastic mention of “existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine” or to hold in one’s mind the fundamental irony that Israel is using one genocide to justify another. But in a world where metaphor itself has been weaponized against the Palestinian people, Hammad is right to underscore the risks of literary recognition, which can easily facilitate an escape from responsibility. One remembers that Oedipus responds to the horror of the truth by gouging out his own eyes. For Hammad, if recognition is to have any relationship to justice, then it must bring about the opposite of this response: It must drive us from the safety of our dark minds, as Sophocles put it, and send us hurtling toward the otherness of the world. “This is the most I think we can hope for from novels,” Hammad writes. “Not revelation, not the dawning of knowledge, but the exposure of its limit.”
I think again of the large black dog in Hammad’s abandoned short story: an undigested piece of the world that marks the text as worldly in its own right, no more metaphorical than a house in Rafah or an air-to-surface missile. After all, in this little anecdote, it is her creative-writing instructor, not Hammad herself, who claims the dog has an extraliterary referent. When he writes “This is you!” in the margins, he is declaring the dog a symbol while predetermining what it symbolizes — his own student, whose personal feelings about the occupation have muscled their way into the aesthetic process. The paradox is familiar to us: The Palestinian writer is too close to Palestine to write about Palestine, yet whatever she writes will be about Palestine anyway. This is a strong theme of Hammad’s second novel, Enter Ghost, about a West Bank production of Hamlet that the Israeli authorities try to suppress. “I don’t want grand metaphors,” the director says. “I’m just so bored by it all. The symbols. The keys, the kuffiyehs — I mean, is this all we have? Olive trees?” The jaded protagonist jokes that they should make Ophelia a suicide bomber and “call it a day.” Solemnly, the director replies, “We can’t. Someone already did a version like that quite recently.”
The joke exemplifies precisely the kind of recognition Hammad is after in Recognizing the Stranger: a sudden collision with the intellectual apartheid that allows the Palestinian to be exploited for symbolic value while keeping her political reality unrepresentable. The director of Enter Ghost worries that literary portraits of the Palestinian condition, especially when well executed, will do nothing but briefly relieve the viewer of the desperation necessary to fight back against the Israeli occupation. Said spoke of this problem too, telling a story about an old college friend who worked at the Department of Defense during the bombing of Vietnam. Said’s friend assured him that the secretary was not the “cold-blooded imperialist murderer” he must have been picturing — for the secretary was a reader of novels. “Intellectuals accept the idea that you can read classy fiction as well as kill and maim,” Said wrote, “because the cultural world is available for that particular sort of camouflaging, and because cultural types are not supposed to interfere in matters for which the social system has not certified them.” One thinks of Obama’s summer reading lists, which assured voters that the man who was regularly ordering drone strikes across the Middle East was also a man who enjoyed Jonathan Franzen.
Against this cult of the text, Said proposed something he called “secular criticism,” in which the literary critic “stands close to” the world, to a “concrete reality about which political, moral, and social judgments have to be made.” This requires more of the critic than the mere provision of “context,” a lifeless notion that is frequently lobbed at pro-Palestine demonstrators who are presumed not to understand the region’s “unbelievably labyrinthine histories,” in Smith’s forbidding phrase. For Said, secular criticism meant refusing to get stranded, like a lotus-eater, in the “aporias and unthinkable paradoxes of a text”; it meant a willingness to act. “Among Palestinians, Said is perceived as a moderate, but for the West he was dangerous: a person who did not mince his words, who did not cow to pieties,” writes Hammad, noting that Said regularly received hate mail and death threats and was “the only person in the university besides the president who had bulletproof windows.” By the end of his life, Said had accumulated an FBI file of at least 238 pages, mostly detailing his political activism, though one of the earliest records mentions a 1971 panel on the “critical spirit.” In 2003, as Said was dying of leukemia, a Hoover Institute fellow would testify before Congress that, by helping to found postcolonial studies while at Columbia, Said had effectively undermined American foreign policy.
I do not know if this was true; I hope it was! I certainly do not think the business of criticism must always be directed to the most pressing struggles for justice in our time. (Little of my own work would qualify.) But if one agrees with Hammad that the question of Palestine is a question of narrative, then one must also admit that this supposedly most intractable of all political conflicts has an irreducibly literary element. What I mean is that the Israeli occupation of Palestine is clearly threatened by a certain act of reading, one the Israeli state is eager to suppress. This is why Israel’s defenders in the American media have tried to mold us into “better” readers: more cautious, more ethical, more contemplative. A good reader looks at Israel’s wars and sees a devastating picture of the human condition, a meditation on violence, or any number of other superlatives one might find in The New York Times Book Review. A bad reader sees American bombs, American jets, and billions of American dollars. She skips right to Israel’s acknowledgments page. She touches the art. “Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation,” wrote the poet Mahmoud Darwish. “Rather she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”
In her afterword, Hammad recalls meeting an oral historian who had interviewed a Palestinian woman in her living room in London at the time of the second intifada. During the interview, the woman saw another woman wailing on the television and exclaimed, “That’s me!” Only after Hammad learned the interviewee’s name did she realize it was her own grandmother. “I suddenly laughed,” Hammad admits, “because my grandmother is very dramatic.” One may again be tempted to give the humanitarian reading: Hammad’s grandmother saw represented in the woman on the screen something that she recognized in herself, something that any Palestinian or indeed any human being might recognize. But the second, uncannier instance of recognition undercuts this reading. In learning that the woman is her own grandmother, Hammad suddenly realizes that, far from being represented by the story, she is already in the story, albeit just offstage, an unnamed supporting character hovering silently outside this living room where she has presumably sat many times with this very real woman, who is her own flesh and blood. The world of the story is revealed to be the same world where the story is being told.
Against the model of literary recognition, then, we might propose a model of literary adjacency. What the critic Lionel Trilling called the “dark and bloody crossroads where literature and politics meet” is not a metaphor but a real place full of real things: books, bombs, money, vaccines, ideas, tents, people, all jumbled up together. In Enter Ghost, opening night is menaced, though not interrupted, by the appearance of several Israeli soldiers, who simply stand and watch the play without speaking. Hamlet himself, who is being played by the director, has just decided to “catch” Claudius by writing a play about his father’s murder — a work of literature that is all too real, the prince’s large black dog. “I have heard that criminals sitting in a theater,” Hamlet says, gesturing boldly at the soldiers, “have been so struck by the skill of the scene in their souls that they have straightaway declared their offenses.” By the novel’s end, Hammad’s tragedians have hatched a scheme of their own: They put on a guerrilla performance of Hamlet just outside a West Bank checkpoint. But they are not simply “reinterpreting” Shakespeare. They are reminding themselves that a play is, as Hamlet so famously put it, a thing: a physical entity that takes up time and space, a thing that stubbornly exists alongside guns and checkpoints and soldiers. Then, as if recognizing this too, a soldier opens fire.