Isabella Hammad and the Politics of Recognition

“All writers have tics, a particular repertoire of moves that recur,” the novelist Isabella Hammad writes in her new nonfiction book, Recognizing the Stranger. She then identifies her own tic: anagnorisis, the creation of recognition scenes. These are moments when “the world of the text becomes momentarily intelligible to the protagonist and thus also to the audience…. Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.” This, for Hammad, is what recognition entails: the unveiling of something long obscured, alongside the realization that perhaps, deep down, one has subconsciously known it all along.

I first heard Hammad speak a year ago, at an event that many of us Arab writers now view, in hindsight, as a similarly revelatory moment—a prelude to the one that would upend everything. The event was the Palestine Writes Literature Festival, held at the University of Pennsylvania in September 2023. There, I listened to Hammad discuss her latest novel, Enter Ghost, a book that explored many of the themes for which her work has become known—especially how art and language, under occupation, can give new meaning to displacement, resistance, and the idea of home, both for Palestinians living under Israeli occupation and those in the diaspora. But what I recall most vividly from Hammad’s conversation was her discussion of a slightly adjacent theme: how to write from a place of exile when one is denied a homeland.

Two weeks after Palestine Writes, we witnessed the most vicious expression of this denial: the genocidal wave against our Palestinian kin in Gaza by the settler-colonial project occupying their land. Hammad’s words about anagnorisis now ring truer than ever: “Everything we thought we knew has been turned on its head, and yet it all makes sense.”

When you open Recognizing the Stranger, the epigraph by Mahmoud Darwish stops you: “Gaza does not propel people to cool contemplation; rather, she propels them to erupt and collide with the truth.” In the book, Hammad seeks to do just that. Through a litany of literary, political, and historical collisions, she urges the reader to move from cool contemplation to confrontation:

“Why should anybody have the power of veto in the UN Security Council? Why do Americans pay billions of tax dollars annually to a foreign war machine, deployed on a captive civilian population? If the United States and the United Kingdom both voted against the Palestinian right to self-determination should we interpret this to mean that the most powerful nations in the Anglosphere if not the Global North at large believe that Palestinians must remain a colonized and dispersed people forever?

While Darwish makes an appearance in both the opening and final pages, it is Edward Said who informs the book, from its title to its arguments. Recognizing the Stranger is an expansion of Hammad’s Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, delivered nine days before Israel’s most recent genocidal campaign against the people of Gaza began. But it is also a book that picks up many of the central themes of Said’s work: empire and colonialism, expulsion and exile, the gaze of the West and the permission to narrate for oneself.

Written partly before the war began in October 2023 and partly after, Hammad’s book takes up these concerns through a variety of close readings—of other works of criticism and fiction, of historical episodes and oral storytelling. In Recognizing the Stranger, we are told the story of a naked Palestinian man who approaches the Gaza fence with the photograph of a child, raising it in a plea to the soldiers not to shoot. The soldiers have their weapons ready, but as the Palestinian man gets close enough, a moment of recognition happens. A soldier registers his message: Look at me, naked. Look at my child, who could be your child. Look at me—I am a human being. The soldier lowers his weapon and flees. Similar scenes of recognition recur throughout the book.

Hammad also considers what it might mean to bear witness from afar. Through the barrier of a screen, the lines between the strange and the familiar blur: We come to know the endless suffering before us by heart, yet we have no real understanding of what it means to endure it. From this juncture, Hammad notes that to remain human in a moment of catastrophe means to inhabit instead of turning away from the agony. “Let us remain there,” she writes: “it is the more honest place from which to speak.”

Remaining in discomfort even if one is witnessing from afar is, in fact, one of the pleas made in Recognizing the Stranger. Exile can sometimes become an ethical stance—perhaps the only one available. As Hammad describes it: “To remain aloof from the group while honoring 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.”

Reading these lines, I find myself contemplating my own experiences of exile. I’m transported back to Cairo’s Tahrir Square during the 2011 Egyptian revolution, wandering through a maze of makeshift tents and precarious field hospitals. I remember my six years of political imprisonment for protesting the brutal Egyptian military coup in 2013, collaborating with fellow political prisoners to self-govern our crammed cells behind bars the way we had once envisioned governing our country.

I enter one section of Recognizing the Stranger and find the face of a comrade: the Egyptian revolutionary Alaa Abdel Fattah in his prison cell, then recounting Gaza’s plight in 2012—how “it’s been sent back in time from some grim future we haven’t arrived at yet,” a future toward which we are all heading. In another section, I catch sight of the Egyptian author Yasmin El-Rifae, speaking of a militant feminist group that protected women from sexual assault in Tahrir Square, and then read the analogies that Hammad draws between confronting predatory men and the Western onlooker.

The book gradually builds a lineage of Arab writers, thinkers, and artists who have long insisted on clinging to the defamiliarity that has come from a world rooted in their subjugation. The accumulating voices in the book speak of this perpetual diaspora—of exile, of a prison cell in one’s homeland, of a popular public square turned dangerous during a revolution—yet they also reach toward an elsewhere: a collective, never-ending reaching-toward that itself becomes a kind of home.

A work of literary and political criticism, Recognizing the Stranger does what these forms of criticism do best: It interrogates not only how we see the world but how the world sees us back. What are the consequences of our current global moments of recognition—the cascade of reckonings that have birthed one “aha!” moment after another? Historically, such fissures in the establishment’s optical illusions—illusions that serve to justify a glaring settler-colonial project—have been rare. As Mahmoud Darwish notes in The Gradual Exile: “Early on, David donned Goliath’s armor, and Goliath wielded David’s stone.” And yet few tend to observe this fact in the history of the Palestinian struggle. Today, however, as these fissures are beginning to let the truth shine through, there is another problem that many of us in the Arab community have to grapple with: the question of empathy.

Empathy is a familiar emotion these days. As Hammad notes in Recognizing the Stranger, it manifests itself often in the Western onlooker “who has not yet reckoned with how much they are already, if unwittingly—historically, politically, economically—involved in the lives of others.”

But for Hammad, empathy has its limitations. It forces Palestinians both to present a narrative that will educate and enlighten others and to hold and showcase their grief in English, the language of the majority of that grief’s main perpetrators in the first place. It puts the transformation of the contrite Westerner center stage, the Westerner “who might then descend onto the stage if not as a hero then perhaps as some kind of deus ex machina.”

In a past interview, Hammad suggested that “when someone well-meaning seeks to ‘humanize’ another human being, it’s worth investigating why that human being’s humanity should be in question in the first place.” In Recognizing the Stranger, she raises the question again: How many Palestinians must die for the world to arrive at its epiphany? And is this epiphany itself enough?

Since last year, even as more and more people have become empathetic toward the Palestinians under attack in Gaza, many well-intentioned people in the United States and Europe have remained trapped within their own self-absorbed confines. As I watched the US-backed settler-colonial project of Israel carpet-bomb Gaza with AI-automated mass slaughter, explode pagers that blinded and severed the fingers of thousands in Lebanon, and flatten six residential buildings in Beirut before an eye could blink, it was clear that Western empathy, when expressed, tends to be framed by self-interest: We—those in the West—should care because if it happened there, it could happen to us. We could be next. This is detrimental to us, too.

This form of “empathy,” masquerading as solidarity, can itself be an extension of colonial violence. Arab bodies become—as always—interchangeable, faceless placeholders. Our torn limbs, burst eyeballs, and leveled homes are significant only to the extent that they serve as a mirror reflecting the West’s own potential vulnerability.

In Recognizing the Stranger, Hammad questions the worth of a recognition born from such empathy, which without subsequent action remains a hollow gesture—words that try to replace substantive reparations with the illusion of discourse and ceremony. “The recognition of Indigenous peoples by settler colonial societies…might be a place to start,” writes Hammad, “but it is no place to end.”

When the pinnacle of Western “recognition” ends in a place that is no place to end, what form of engagement does this demand from us, those whose bodies are seen as mere educational spectacles? How can we, as Hammad suggests, penetrate the awareness of onlookers by decentering them and “talking candidly among ourselves”?

Like all great thinkers, Hammad does not offer definitive answers. Recognizing the Stranger sets out to raise the questions in the first place and then complicate them. Hammad tells us that although turning points often become clear only in hindsight, we are undeniably swept up in one now whose direction remains unclear: The world is turning, yes, but toward what? Are we on the brink of a decolonial dawn, or teetering on the brink of an even deeper Nakba? “From the point in time at which you read this,” Hammad writes, “what do you say of the moment I am in? How large is the gulf between us?”

Hammad invites us to dwell within this gulf in time and to engage in the vital work of imagining how this chasm between the present and the future might continue to fracture, albeit toward our collective liberation.

This post was originally published on here