“Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather, she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.”
— Mahmoud Darwish, Silence for Gaza (1973)
Recognizing the Stranger – On Palestine and Narrative, a slim volume of 80-odd pages brings together Isabella Hammad’s the Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture delivered at Columbia University nine days before October 7, 2023, alongwith her afterword in the early weeks of 2024, make up a searing appraisal of the genocide in Gaza, and the ongoing war on Palestinians, during what seems a tuning point in the narrative of human history. With incisive clarity and profound emotional resonance, Hammad writes from within the hurricane’s eye, illuminating the unrelenting Palestinian fight for justice and freedom. Recognizing the Stranger is not merely a work of literary and cultural analysis; it is a testimony, a call to remembrance, and a challenge to recognize what we might rather ignore.
Inspired by Edward Said and anchored by Mahmoud Darwish’s prophetic epigraph, Isabella Hammad interrogates the moments when understanding emerges from chaos—when the world’s fragments coalesce into a stark, often disorienting clarity. Recognizing the Stranger, like the greatest work of criticism, it transcends its immediate moment. It becomes a meditation on the provocations that defined Said’s intellectual legacy: the machinery of empire and the ravages of colonialism, the wounds of expulsion and the permanence of exile, the omnipresent Western gaze, and the unyielding struggle to seize control of one’s own narrative.
At the heart of Hammad’s argument lies a recurring motif—an obsession, even—that defines her body of work: the scene of recognition. As she acknowledges, “All writers have tics, a particular repertoire of moves that recur: mine is probably the construction of recognition scenes, or moments of what Aristotle in his Poetics called anagnorisis.” This concept, anagnorisis, signifies the moment when truth suddenly reveals itself to a character, when the narrative arrives at its fulcrum, and all its mysteries are laid bare. It is not merely the act of knowing but of knowing again, a re-cognition: ana-gnorisis. It is the sudden, piercing clarity of perceiving what, on some deeper level, one has always known but perhaps refused to confront.
For Palestinians, Hammad observes, such moments of recognition are not confined to literature; they erupt, devastatingly, in real life. “Apparent blindness followed by staggering realization”—this is the rhythm of a people forced to reconcile with the unbearable truths of their dispossession, exile, and survival. In this sense, Recognizing the Stranger becomes both a literary meditation and an unflinching exploration of the Palestinian experience: a life lived in the shadow of denial and the harsh light of recognition. Hammad’s prose does not simply carry forward these enduring themes; it hones them with a piercing precision, refracting them through the jagged prism of our turbulent present. Her words confront us with a question that is as urgent as it is unresolvable: what does it mean to carve out a voice from the ruins of history, to assert the right to narrate in a world architected to muffle and erase?
Offering a masterclass on anagnorisis, she narrates a poignant vignette from her visit to the Golan Heights with a Palestinian friend and an Israeli man. One individual joins them who called himself Daniel. Restless and evasive, Daniel repeatedly asked whether humans could ever act as individuals, free from group identity. Eventually, he revealed his story. A former soldier in hiding, Daniel had been stationed at the Gaza fence with orders: fire warning shots as people approached, and if they crossed the boundary, shoot them in the leg. Days passed uneventfully until a man appeared, walking steadily toward the fence. Daniel fired twice into the ground, but the man kept coming. As he drew closer, Daniel saw he was naked, holding out a photograph of a child. Overcome, Daniel couldn’t follow his orders—he put down his gun and fled.
What arises from these surges of recognition—these piercing flashes of undeniable truth? As she quotes Omar Barghouti’s haunting question: “How many Palestinians must die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” Historically, such breaches in the establishment’s polished deceptions—illusions crafted to legitimize the audacious violence of settler colonialism—have been fleeting, like ruptures in a tightly woven lie.
At its essence, Recognizing the Stranger offers not a resolution but a challenge: How do we endure the unease of bearing witness, and what obligations does true recognition impose upon us?
One of the salient features of the book is the foregrounding of Edward Said’s literary legacy rather than his frequently touted radical political figure. It manifest not only in the title and its arguments but weaving through Said’s body of work and his take on Novel as the device. “The novel was the grounds of Said’s training as reader and a scholar, and it was one of his long. standing intellectual passions. The novel was the principal lens through which he viewed the world and it lay at the heart of many of the ideas and arguments that he has given us. The relationship o between European traditions of representation, literary and otherwise, and the operations of imperial power was a relationship that he specifically trained our eyes upon.”
In Recognizing the Stranger, Hammad reflects on the alchemy of storytelling: “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.” This ethos shapes her body of work, infusing it with both lyrical depth and unyielding clarity. The echoes of Ghassam Kanafani‘s words – “Politics and Novels are an indivisible case” – still resonate, a haunting refrain in the symphony of Palestinian struggle. Fadl al-Naqib, in his memoir, poignantly captures this inextricable bond, revealing how Kanafani, the masterful storyteller, not only authored the Palestinian narrative, but was himself irrevocably shaped, even consumed, by its tragic arc.
In a pre-Nakba tale, her debut novel, The Parisian, or Al Barisi (2019), weaves the semi-biographical tale of her great-grandfather Midhat Kamal, born in Nablus when Palestine was part of Ottoman Greater Syria. Midhat’s journey—from his formative years in the south of France to his return under British Mandate rule—becomes a microcosm of the Palestinian experience. Yet, it is also a deeply human narrative of love, loss, and self-discovery, transcending the political framework in which it is embedded. Similarly, a post-Nakba tale, Enter Ghost (2023) follows Sonia’s return to Palestine and her participation in a theatrical production, which serves as a symbol of cultural defiance. Despite the broader metaphor, Hammad’s prose remains attentive to Sonia’s inner life—her fragility, her awakening, and her reckoning with her own identity. Introspective and richly textured, Enter Ghost underscores art’s capacity to confront power and reclaim suppressed narratives.
Hammad’s ability to balance the political with the personal situates her within the lineage of diasporic literature, yet her novels carry a unique force. History does not merely linger at the edges of her stories; it intrudes, fully embodied in the weight of empire, the pull of tradition, and the dissonances of modernity. In The Parisian and Enter Ghost, she constructs liminal spaces where questions of belonging, nationhood, and identity reverberate—not just through her characters but through her prose itself. Her language feels alive, as though straining against the boundaries of its own structure, a quality evocative of Proust’s introspection and Flaubert’s exactitude. Her stories don’t just reflect the world—they refract it, leaving us dazzled, unsettled, and undeniably changed.
She writes of lives suspended between worlds, rooted yet unmoored, where individuals navigate the intersection of homeland and exile, presence and erasure. Exile, she suggests, is not merely a condition of dislocation but a state of critical distance—a refusal to capitulate to the illusions of belonging imposed by power. This estranged vantage becomes a mode of perception, an ethical stance that resists resolution. Her work demands more than passive readership; it compels a confrontation—with history’s brutalities, with the constructs of identity, and with the fragile narratives we cling to in the face of forces far beyond our control. It probes not merely the way we perceive the world but how the world, with all its unrelenting gazes, perceives us in return.
The Parisian and Enter Ghost, that Hammad excels in sustaining her literary momentum while continuing to innovate. The richness of her narratives, the elegance of her prose, and her commitment to portraying Palestinian lives in their full complexity suggest she is more than capable of meeting these expectations. Whether she returns to historical fiction, delves further into contemporary narratives, or ventures into entirely new terrain, Hammad’s future work will undoubtedly continue to shape the evolving canon of Palestinian and global literature.
Echoing the cadence of Arab literature, Recognizing the Stranger, amplifies a chorus of voices – Arab revolutionaries, feminist organizers, Palestinian prisoners. She dissects the fissures within Western narratives, exposing the veiled violence of settler colonialism. This critique propels her towards an envisioned ‘elsewhere,’ a space of perpetual struggle where acknowledgement of differences fuels, rather than extinguishes, resistance. This ‘elsewhere’ demands not passive acceptance, but a resolute commitment to action.
In Recognizing the Stranger a striking critique emerges from Hammad’s interrogation of Western empathy, which she argues too often centers on the emotional catharsis of the privileged observer rather than the agency of the oppressed. The humanization of Palestinians, she asserts, should never have required validation. Empathy, in its solipsistic guise, risks perpetuating the very dynamics it purports to challenge. Instead, Hammad calls for a shift in focus—away from the gaze of the Western onlooker and toward the narratives and solidarities forged among the dispossessed.
Within the realm of contemporary literature, Hammad’s work distinguishes itself through its profound interrogation of colonial legacies and the intricate entanglements of modernity, while probing the very mechanics of storytelling itself. Hammad’s oeuvre thus far is an invitation—to revisit forgotten histories, to question inherited narratives, and to imagine futures where Palestinian voices are not just heard but celebrated.
In an era where the narratives of exile and identity dominate global literary discourse, Recognizing the Stranger emerges as a work of remarkable depth, tethered to the historical and cultural realities of Palestine and the devastating atrocities of the ongoing genocide in Gaza. An immense work of literary and political criticism, it is also a reminder of the enduring power of literature to challenge, to heal, and to illuminate. In Isabella Hammad, we find a writer who not only tells stories but also transforms how we understand the world and our place within it and prod us to grapple with our moment of recognition, our Ah-ha moment!
Narendra Pachkhédé is a critic, essayist and writer who splits his time between Toronto, London and Geneva.
