The British-Palestinian novelist Isabella Hammad’s latest, radiant work Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is a clear-eyed meditation on myth, confrontation and the Palestinian struggle for liberation. Hammad’s major, insightful essay consists of a lecture that she gave in honour of Edward W Said at Columbia University on 28 September 2023. Her text explores the radical power of reading in the face of oppressive regimes, given how “fiction uniquely deals in subjectivities”, attending to Aristotle’s notion of anagnorisis.
This means a “turning point”, where “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character”. As Hammad exacts, “denial is based on a kind of knowing. A wilful turning from devastating knowledge, perhaps, out of fear.” Anagnorisis then becomes a paradigm to recognise the ways in which the humanity of Palestinians is denied, and in which people deny their own humanity if they choose to turn away from repeated injustice.
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Hammad emphasises the epiphanies that novels can activate, summoning readers to bear witness to the daily reality of Palestinians – and to grapple with our own responsibilities in this process.
This revelatory work ends with a deeply moving afterword written in January 2024, as she responds in real time to the myriad horrors meted onto Palestinians, from the Nakba in 1948, to the present suffering in Palestine and Israel. Hammad contends with the “proximity of humanism – its institutions, its material effects – to coloniality and colonial violence”, given its relationship to both historic and ongoing genocides, as imperial powers deny their orchestration. She encourages us to unpick the narratives that mould our existence, especially as “speech in support of Palestinian rights is punished at the highest levels”.
Hammad urges her readers to listen, think beyond despair, and speak out – urging that “there is still time”, invoking future possibilities for Palestinians who endure.
Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad is out now (Fern Press, £9.99). You can buy it from The Big Issue shop on Bookshop.org, which helps to support The Big Issue and independent bookshops.
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