WOW, what a short but impactful book. this is exactly the type of writing I love and was very reminiscent of Didion & Ferrante to me. The content itself was deeply moving, and I have truly never read anything like it before. This was also all the more moving because I haven't read a book SO relevant since the events that unfolded after Oct 7th. The lecture & what was written in the afterward made me very emotional, especially as things have progressed in Gaza even after this was written. This was such an amazing read and I can't recommend it enough - please pick this up in September.

I've never read any of Hammad's work before, but will definitely be reading everything else & keeping up with future releases. I hope she comes out with more nonfiction!!

The author here tries to discuss the definition of the unveiling of the stranger in novels throughout history with particular reference to the Palestinian narrative. The stakeholders of Palestinian history, be it the writers, the journalists, or the supporters of Israel and Palestine have a vague idea of who the stranger is, they try to grapple in the dark. However,

Overall, it was a good book though some refinements would be appreciable.

This book is composed first of Isabella Hammad’s September 2023 lecture and then an afterword reflecting on the developments since October 7th. And so, her chosen topic – that of anagnorisis – feels intensely prescient. Hammad’s original lecture extends the term, the moment of discovery in which one realises previous ignorance, beyond the literary. Our lives may exceed the narrative frame and yet, “we hope for resolution, or at least we hope that retrospectively what felt like a crisis will turn out to have been a turning point.” From ‘ana’ (again) and ‘gnorizein’ (to make known, to gain knowledge of), anagnorisis is contained in an already knowing. Re-cognition more a confrontation by that which we do not want to know than a revelation. Was Oedipus really not able to connect the dots without a witness testimony? Does Perry the Platypus really need his brown fedora? Did we need the recent escalation of violence in the Middle East to come to these moments of private reckoning?

While in Palestine with a group of international writers, Hammad finds herself once again the audience to such a moment. “I was moved to see them moved. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel a kind of despairing déjà vu, the scene of recognition having become at this point rather familiar.” Here, realisation is not experienced by Palestinians and yet relies on Palestinian assertions of humanity. They are expected to relate the humanising details that might “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.” Instead, Hammad echoes a question Yasmin El-Rifae presents in her history of militant feminists in the final days of the 2011 Egyptian revolution: can we break into male consciousness without direct address? Simply “as a by-product of us speaking to one another?”

This lecture is so rich it seems hard to believe it was not intended for the page. Hammad holds up familiar ideas for closer inspection and, in so doing, captures not just the carefully distilled thought, but our gaze upon it. Following Edward Said, the site of recognition is reversed; the familiar becomes stranger; “the consoling fictions of fixed identity” are uprooted. Hammad notes that while recognising the limits of one’s knowledge can be exhilarating in fiction, it is often terrifying in life. “In real life, shifts in collective understanding are necessary for major changes to occur, but on the human, individual scale, they are humbling and existentially disturbing.”

For those of us who read both lecture and afterword after October 2023, they feel like a natural extension of one another. At this critical juncture we make the dramatic turn and come eye to eye with our past reasoning. “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.”