Isabella Hammad > Quotes

“The present onslaught leaves no space for mourning, since mourning requires an afterwards, 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.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“How many Palestinians, asked Omar Barghouti, need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“And yet the pressure is again on Palestinians to tell the human story that will educate and enlighten others and so allow for the conversion of the repentant Westerner, who might then descend onto the stage if not as a hero then perhaps as some kind of deus ex machina.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Empires have fallen. The Berlin Wall fell, political apartheid in South Africa did end, and although in neither of these cases were these putative conclusions by any means the end of the story, they are testaments to the fact that, under the force of coordinated international and local action, Israeli apartheid will also end. The question is, when and how? Where in the narrative do we now stand?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“It occurred to Midhat that a tragic story told quickly might contract easily into a comedy, and without the measure of its depths make the audience laugh.”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“Haneen once compared Palestine to an exposed part of an electronic network, where someone has cut the rubber coating with a knife to show the wires and currents underneath. She probably didn’t say that exactly, but that was the image she had brought into my mind. That this place revealed something about the whole world.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“The otherness that comes at you from the world has been inside you all along.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Perhaps a writer doesn’t need to have a clear sense of what her text will do in the world. Perhaps a writer can relax a bit. Perhaps it’s enough to ask a question, and hope, perhaps, to glimpse the meaning of that question in retrospect.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“For the first time in his life, Midhat wished he were more religious. Of course he prayed, but though that was a private mechanism it sometimes felt like a public act, and the lessons of the Quran were lessons by rote, one was steeped in them, hearing them so often. They were the texture of his world, and yet they did not occupy that central, vital part of his mind, the part that was vibrating at this moment, on this train, rattling forward while he struggled to hold all these pieces. As a child he had felt some of the same curiosity he held for the mysteries of other creeds—for Christianity with its holy fire, the Samaritans with their alphabets—but that feeling had dulled while he was still young, when traditional religion began to seem a worldly thing, a realm of morals and laws and the same old stories and holidays. They were acts, not thoughts. He faced the water now along the coast, steadying his gaze on the slow distance, beyond the blur of trees pushing past the tracks, on the desolate fishing boats hobbling over the waves. He sensed himself tracing the lip of something very large, something black and well-like, a vessel which was at the same time an emptiness, and he thought, without thinking precisely, only feeling with the tender edges of his mind, what the Revelation might have been for in its origin. Why it was so important that they could argue to the sword what it meant if God had hands, and whether He had made the universe. Underneath it all was a living urgency, that original issue of magnitude; the way several hundred miles on foot could be nothing to the mind, Nablus to Cairo, one thought of a day’s journey by train, but placed vertically that same distance in depth exposed the body’s smallness and suddenly one thought of dying. Did one need to face the earth, nose to soil, to feel that distance towering above? There was something of his own mortality in this. Oh then but why, in a moment of someone else’s death, must he think of his own disappearance?”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“To recognise something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Stories of longing were the only stories. To desire was as good as to possess.”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“I was born a few months before the Nakba. You know this. You know what it means? It means it was already my reality. I didn’t know what it was before.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“In today’s crisis of climate destruction, there will be moments – maybe they are happening right now, maybe they happened recently – that will later be narrated as turning points, when the devastating knowledge hits home to a greater and greater number that we are treating the earth as a slave, and that this exploitation is profoundly unethical. We are still seeking a language for this ethics.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Maybe all’s fair in love and war. Only it’s not, is it? Not since the Geneva Convention.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“It is a novel horror in human history to watch a genocidal war on our phones. For men, women, and children, scholars, artists, and journalists to live-tweet the moments before they are killed.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“You know this sense that everyone around you is arguing,” he said. “When you are writing you are writing to one another, even to people who are dead. Even to people who are not alive yet.” “Well now,” said Antoine, “this is really the dream of the university!”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“Once Palestinian voices began to reach wider audiences in the West, the story was quickly cast as a war of two opposing narratives, rather than a holistic and variegated history of European racism and empire and the ensuing and ongoing history of American empire, and the concomitant struggles for self-determination by colonised peoples, from Haiti to Algeria to Vietnam.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“As I write this, a ceasefire has still not been called. I wonder what reality you now live in. From the point in time at which you read this, what do you say of the moment I am in? How large is the gulf between us?”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“You are not the first to make this error,” said Antoine. He adopted a pastoral air and interlaced his fingers: “But you know that a place cannot be virtuous. An idea may be virtuous. Not a place.”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“He’s saying, it’s a choice between life and death. But really, what Mariam is pointing out is - there’s a third way. You can be a ghost.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“One night she extemporised upon the broader risk that art might deaden resistance, by softening suffering’s blows through representing it.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“We are all scarecrows turned philosophers,” he said, “with crows living under our hats.”
― Isabella Hammad, The Parisian

“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.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honouring one’s organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alignment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“My whole life I’d been aware of Haneen’s stronger moral compass; it made me afraid to confide in her until the very last moment, until I absolutely needed to. I also wanted to resist her, the way a child resists a parent and at the same time absorbs their wisdom; I wanted to sulk in her second bedroom and feel better with the secret muffled gladness that someone was holding me to account.”
― Isabella Hammad, Enter Ghost

“The United States is acquainted with the crime, having facilitated genocides in other countries such as Indonesia and Guatemala, for which they never faced retribution; indeed Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, considered the colonial replacement of Indigenous peoples by European colonists in the Americas to be a historical example of the crime.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Palestinianism was for Said a conditon of chronic exile, exile as agnoy but also as ethical position. To remain aloof from the group while honoring one's organic ties to it; to exist between loneliness and alighnment, remaining always a bit of a stranger; to resist the resolution of the narrative, the closing of the circle; to keep looking, to not feel too at home.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Writing in English about Palestine, I often find myself asked if my aim is to educate ‘Westerners’, a suggestion I always find reductive and kind of undignified. But I like this idea of breaking into the awareness of other people by talking candidly among ourselves. If there was another lesson I learned, in the episode of writing my depressed story, it was the quite basic one that literature is not life, and that the material we draw from the world needs to undergo some metamorphosis in order to function, or even to live, on the page.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“Nine days after I delivered it, the Qassam Brigades – the military wing of Hamas, the political movement in power in the Gaza Strip – launched a surprise attack by land, sea and air on the Israeli military bases and kibbutzim in the Gaza envelope close to the partition fence, as well as a nearby rave. 1,139 Israelis were killed, including 695 civilians, by a mixture of Palestinian and some Israeli fire.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative