Recognizing the Stranger 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

“The otherness that comes at you from the world has been inside you all along.”
― 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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“The flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it.”
― 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

“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

“To induce a person's change of heart is different from challenging the tremendous force of collective denial.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The Israeli state as a Jewish democracy to which Palestinian Arabs have always posed a demographic threat was a state born from European empire, cast in the mold of other European settler colonial projects, and it was both fueled and justified by a history of European racism and antisemitism.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The war over words originates in the West's familiarity with the fact that hate speech is the first seemingly innocuous step on the road to genocide.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The powers and principles that govern the world, hardly in hiding, reveal themselves now in three dimensions and technicolor.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“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, Recognizing 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

“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

“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

“The fact is, huge edifices do move in human history. 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

“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

“A problem with Barghouti’s example of an Israeli soldier’s epiphany and my own is that they centre the non-Palestinian as the one who experiences the decentring shock of recognising Palestinian humanity.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“There are things I admired, but it is fundamentally a depressed story. Every time someone tells a story you undermine the climax.’ He also pointed to the appearance of a large black dog at the kibbutz shaking snow off its fur, which makes a little girl scream. He wrote in the margin, ‘This is you!’ 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!”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“I once heard Palestinian activist and co-founder of the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement, Omar Barghouti, talking about an ‘aha moment’ – what I would call, as you might by now have guessed, recognition. He was talking specifically about the moment when an Israeli realises, in a turning point of action, that a Palestinian is a human being, just like him or her.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

“The Israeli state as a Jewish democracy to which Palestinian Arabs have always posed a demographic threat was a state born from European empire, cast in the mould of other European settler colonial projects, and it was both fuelled and justified by a history of European racism and antisemitism.”
― Isabella Hammad, Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative