RECOGNIZING THE STRANGER

A speech delivered by the author in September 2023 at Columbia University, with an afterword on Gaza.

“The Palestinian struggle for freedom,” writes British Palestinian novelist Hammad, author of The Parisian and Enter Ghost, “has outlasted the narrative shape of many other anticolonial liberation movements that concluded with independence during the twentieth century, and it is becoming more difficult to hold fast to the old narratives about the power of narrative.” The author opens by referencing Edward Said’s 1975 book, Beginnings, addressing her choice to begin in the middle of stories, specifically “the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context.” She views Said, primarily, as a literary scholar, crediting his “engagement with fiction as an heir to a particular kind of humanism…that commits itself to crossing boundaries between cultures and disciplines.” Acknowledging that most of her own writing has been about Palestine, Hammad illustrates this with a story that also demonstrates anagnorisis, which Aristotle described as “a movement from ignorance to knowledge.” She interweaves her thoughts on narrative structure and aims—e.g., “The material we draw from the world needs to undergo some metamorphosis in order to function, or even to live, on the page”; “Literary anagnorisis feels most truthful when it is not redemptive: when it instead stages a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness”—with examples of comparative literature as well as Palestinian history, including her great-grandfather's life and the continued persecution of Palestinians by Israel. “Narrative shape can comfort and guide our efforts,” writes Hammad, "but we must eventually be ready to shape-shift, to be decentered…in the project of human freedom, which remains undone.” The anti-Zionist afterword addresses Israel’s attack on Gaza nine days after the author’s speech and the ongoing war: “Do they really believe they can obliterate the Palestinian will to life?”

Simultaneously scholarly and righteously impassioned.