Author: Isabella Hammad
Publisher: Fern
Paperback
One of the books of the year 2024!
Cat says: Recognising the Stranger was originally a speech Isabella Hammad delivered as the Edward Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University, 9 days before the 7th October 2023. There is also an afterword written at the start of this year. Drawing upon Said, about whom she says, ‘The novel was the principal lens through which he viewed the world,’ Hammad discusses the device of recognition in narratives, how in order to recognise something, a character has to have already known it but for it to have been obscured in some way. This thread of recognition or what Aristotle called ‘anagorisis’, she then applies to the Palestinian's struggle and in particular how the rest of the world views Palestine, ‘Individual moments of recognition are repeatedly overwhelmed by the energy of a political establishment that tells the onlooker: this is not what it looks like. It is too complicated to understand. Look away.’ She packs so much into this astonishing little book and I’m now really looking forward to reading her novels.