Recognizing the Stranger is the book form of Isabella Hammad's 2023 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University.
Overview#
This lecture was delivered nine days before the Hamas's October 7 attack in Israel and the Israeli military's subsequent devastation of Gaza; in an afterword, Hammad revisits her lecture in light of what the war has wrought.
I am still rereading the text and allowing my thoughts to assemble themselves. What is below consists of summaries and quotes.
Turning points and recognitions.#
"And then I decided after all that I wanted to start in the middle, and more specifically that I want to talk about the middle of narratives--their turning points, which I'll relate to the shifting narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle in its global context." (1)
Some stories about moments of recognition.#
Oedipus Rex#
Oedipus discovers that he is the criminal he seeks, that he has already killed his father and married his mother. (10-12)
Returning to Haifa#
Said and Safiyya discover their first son--whom they had left behind after being forced to flee Haifa--living with adopted Jewish parents. The adoptive parents give the son the chance to choose his parents, and he denies his birth parents: "He asserts that his only father died in Sinai eleven years before." (13-18)
Palestinian Festival of Literature#
International writers at the Palestine Festival of Literature visit Hebron, go through checkpoints into and out of the West Bank, etc. Their responses are familiar: "They said things like 'My youth is gone' and 'I have walked through a door and it has locked behind me.'" (20-21)
Omar Baghuoti#
Omar Baghouti's talk of "aha moments", wherein "an Israeli realizes, in a turning point of action, that a Palestinian is a human being, just like him or her." (24-25)
Hammad on Daniel#
Hammad's own story of Daniel: a soldier guarding a fence to Gaza, who is told to fire warning shots to prevent people from reaching the fence before shooting them in the leg. A Palestinian man approaches the fence, he fires his warning shots, then sees that the main is completely naked, holding only a photograph of a child: "He did not shoot the man in the leg. He put down his gun and fled." (26-27)
Barghouti: "How many Palestinians need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?" (27)
Quotes#
"The idea that Jewish Israelis at large might be persuaded through dialogue to see Palestinians as human is absurd, given that Israelis live in a militarized society in which dissent is punished. The destined audience of this persuasion is rather the unaffiliated onlooker, the foreigner, the one who has not yet reckoned with how much they are already, if unwittingly--historically, politically, economically--involved in the lives of others." (28)
"The Palestinian struggle for freedom has outlasted the narrative shape of other anticolonial liberation movements that concluded with independence during the twentieth century, and it is beginning to become more difficult to hold fast to the old narratives about the power of narrative." (31)
"A problem with Barghouti's example of an Israeli soldier's epiphany and my own is that they center the non-Palestinian as the one who experiences the decentering shock of recognizing Palestinian humanity.... The pressure is again on the 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." (35-36)
"I do think there is another way we can frame this, one which focuses less on who is the main character or who is the victim, which I draw from Yasmin El-Rifae's brilliant book Radius, about a militant feminist group protecting women from sexual assault in Tahrir Square toward the end of the 2011 Egyptian revolution. El-Rifae ponders the analogous issue of women appealing to or trying to educate men about misogyny and patriarchal violence. 'Rather than wonder about the efficacy of addressing men,' she asks, 'can we think of breaking into their awareness as a by-product of us speaking to one another? Can we focus instead on our own networks, on thinking together, on resisting together, on supporting one another--openly?' 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." (37-38)
"What I learned through writing this book is that literary anagnorisis feels most truthful when it is not redemptive: when it instead stages a troubling encounter with limitation or wrongness." (44)
Backlinks
The following pages link to this page: