Review of Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

Review of Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative by Isabella Hammad

Originally delivered at Columbia University on September 28, 2023, Isabella Hammad’s Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative has now been published by Black Cat – an imprint of Grove Atlantic – along with a more recently-written afterword on Gaza. In said afterword, Hammad writes:

The world has tolerated violence against Palestinians for a long time, but this attack has exceeded that violence to an extent that has at moments been intolerable even for those who consider themselves total bystanders. But while the world’s majority may say no – hundreds of thousands in the streets of Algiers, Jakarta, London, even Berlin – US support for the Israeli government and its actions is as strong as ever.[1]

Hammad’s initial lecture was organized by the Society of Fellows and the Heyman Center for the Humanities and marked twenty years since the passing of Edward W. Said, a Palestinian-American literary critic and theorist. Isabella Hammad is a British-Palestinian writer who has published two novels – The Parisian and Enter Ghost– along with numerous short stories. In 2024, she was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the RSL Ondaatje Prize.

Two years after the memorial gathering, BBC reports: “the world’s leading association of genocide scholars has declared that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.”[2] Indeed, the International Association of Genocide Scholars (IAGS) passed a three-page resolution on 31 August 2025 stating that Israel’s actions fit the legal criteria defined in the UN convention on genocide.[3]Coincidentally, “IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza” begins with the phrase 

“Recognising that”, before listing Israel’s intentional attacks against civilians in Gaza and accusing the settler-colonial state of methodical and extensive war crimes and crimes against humanity.[4] Recognizing the Stranger questions this moment of “anagnorisis as a movement from ignorance to knowledge” and demands that another act follow it.[5]

In the creative review below, I approach Hammad’s theoretical ruminations through the prism of a 1958 semi-fictional film titled Mamluki – the story of two young men who are abducted from a Georgian village and sold into slavery, only to end up as soldiers on opposing sides during Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt.[6] Pairing the film with Hammad’s work, I focus on four major themes: writing and existing in the middle, transnationalism, the limited perspective of subjectivity, and finally, the act of recognizing the stranger and what must come after.

When discussing her writing process for the lecture, Hammad shares, “And then I decided after all that I preferred to start in the middle, and more specifically that I wanted to talk about the middle of narratives – their turning points.”[7]So that is where I will also begin. Mamluki gains its title from the Arabic, meaning ‘one who is owned’ and explores the 18th century history of Safavid and Ottoman Empires kidnapping young people from the Caucasus and selling the men as soldiers. In decades to come, many of these foreign slaves gained political power and became part of the ruling elite.[8] The film’s protagonists are young friends – Khvicha and Gocha – who grow up in a small Georgian village. The mid-point of the film sees both children at the Istanbul Slave Market, happy to be reunited after being abducted on separate occasions.[9]

Hammad muses on these occasions in narratives and lives, on human existence as that of always being in the middle. “Generations continue to be born, and we experience neither total apocalypse nor a happily-ever-after with any collective meaning beyond the endings of individual lives”, she writes.[10] Humanness considered from a collective point of view is constantly perhaps-about-to-change. Khvicha and Gocha are perpetually at the slave market, their fates soon to be decided. “Yet this narrative sense remains with us”, Hammad continues, “flickering like a ghost through the revisions of postmodernism: 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.”[11] Arguably, it is as a response to this forever-middle that we create art, write novels, make films. Hammad draws inspiration from Sylvia Wynter’s description of the novel as a revolutionary form, “in essence a question mark.”[12] Writing, for Hammad, seems to be an active acceptance of the middle position, a place from which to ask questions and hope to make sense.

Khvicha and Gocha’s joy of meeting again, however, is short-lived as one is sold to an older Mameluke from Egypt and the other to a Venetian merchant. In the years to follow, these protagonists struggle to integrate into their new surroundings, an experience which migrants are intimately familiar with. In many ways, they succeed, becoming high-ranking officials in their respective militaries. Here, characters try to forget the ‘otherness’ within. It is this assimilation that leads them to fight on opposite sides of a war.

According to Hammad, a remedy for this type of migrant experience can be found in Said’s definition of Palestinianism. She writes:

Palestinianism was for Said a condition of chronic exile, exile as agony but also as ethical position. 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.[13]

This can be a tall order for those who seek a sense of belonging, but Hammad argues that in today’s transnational world, with “vast population transfers, of refugees, exiles, expatriates and immigrants”, we can embrace our “diasporic, wandering, unresolved, cosmopolitan consciousness.”[14] Here, Said and Hammad are describing themselves – transnational individuals, but also referring to the non-Zionist Jews and anyone who is of “irremediably diasporic, unhoused character.”[15] So, instead of seeking total belonging, Hammad – through Said – offers a reversal of recognition: an understanding of the familiar as strange and a dismantling of fixed identity.[16]

Then, through this ethical positioning in exile, Hammad claims, we can find the particular power of subjectivity, or perhaps what Sylvia Wynter terms the “gaze from below.”[17] For Wynter, the limited, oppressed, exilic positioning of a subject can form a basis for new imaginings, new ways of creating the world. At times, this rootedness in subjectivity is also a way of exposing the instability of knowledge. For example, Hammad writes, “In Joyce’s stories, the epiphanic moment is not usually a moment of understanding, however, but one that introduces a shift of perspective. A kind of partial turn.”[18] Wynter calls this a turn to face the illusory character of humanness and the acknowledgement that the divide between self/other is manufactured.[19]

Even more, realising the limits of partial understanding or coming to terms with being wrong when confronted with art is what Hammad considers a “deeply pleasurable” experience.[20] In the final scenes of Mamluki, Khvicha – now wrapped in a different name, clothing and language – mortally wounds Gocha – also shrouded in a different name, clothing and language. As Gocha falls, he utters his last cry in Georgian, prompting Khvicha to recognise his childhood friend. In shock but also with a sense of inevitability, Khvicha abandons the fight and sits in the middle of a battle, holding Gocha’s lifeless body. A voice-over speaks the most iconic lines of the film – 

“Neither one was an Egyptian nor a Venetian. Both were hapless Georgia’s children.”[21]

And then… what happens then? Hammad makes her major claim:

Recognition is a kind of knowing that should incur the responsibility to act for it to have any value beyond personal epiphanies, or appeasing the critics of the one doing the recognizing. Great effort is required to ensure that such a moment marks the middle of the story, and not the finale. Another act must follow.[22]

Mamluki – made during the Soviet occupation with a limited budget – gives viewers a recognition scene and, through the tragic finale, hints at the fact that mere kinship cannot keep one man from killing another. But it’s also a flawed piece, filled with uncritical conceptions of nationalism. As Hammad explains, recognition – the act of knowing the thing you knew all along but did not want to confront – is not enough. Now that the world has turned, what will we do?

After all, “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.”[23] Recognition scenes are bloody in Mamluki and in our real lives. How many must pay the price for us – those who are not on the battlefield – to admit that which we already know?

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is written from the middle – middle of a life, of a genocide, of agony. Hammad believes that this middle ground is a more truthful place to speak from.[24] Throughout the text, she contemplates transnationalism and an intentional lack of belonging, as well as partial subjectivities and what must follow recognition. The death toll in Gaza is rising as I type this. Hammad calls on her readers to not give in. “Be like the Palestinians in Gaza”, she writes, “Look them in the face. Say: that’s me!”[25] I am neither Egyptian, nor from Venice but that’s me! That’s me! That’s me!

[1] Isabella Hammad, Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative (New York: Black Cat, 2024)., 24.

[2] Emir Nader, “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say,” BBC News, September 1, 2025, https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o.

[3] “IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza,” Genocide Scholars, August 31, 2025, https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on-Gaza-FINAL.pdf.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Hammad, 8.

[6] Davit Rondeli, Mamluki, film (Georgia: Georgia-Film, 1958).

[7] Hammad, 4.

[8] Daniel Crecelius and Gotcha Djaparidze. “Relations of the Georgian Mamluks of Egypt with Their Homeland in the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2002), 320–341.

[9] Yvonne J. Seng, “Fugitives and Factotums: Slaves in Early Sixteenth-Century Istanbul,” Journal of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39, no. 2 (1996): 136–69.

[10] Hammad, 5.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid., 6.

[13] Ibid., 22.

[14] Ibid., 21

[15] Ibid.

[16] Ibid.

[17] Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool University Press, 2015), 207.

[18] Hammad, 14.

[19] Wynter, 242.

[20] Hammad, 18.

[21] Rondeli, Mamluki.

[22] Hammad, 20.

[23] Ibid., 11.

[24] Ibid., 22.

[25] Ibid., 28.

References

Crecelius, Daniel and Gotcha Djaparidze. “Relations of the Georgian Mamluks of Egypt with    Their Homeland in the Last Decades of the Eighteenth Century.” Journal of the Economic  and Social History of the Orient, Vol. 45, No. 3 (2002), 320–341.

Hammad, Isabella. Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative. New York: Black Cat, 2024.

“IAGS Resolution on the Situation in Gaza.” Genocide Scholars, August 31, 2025.  https://genocidescholars.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/08/IAGS-Resolution-on- Gaza-FINAL.pdf.

Nader, Emir. “Israel Committing Genocide in Gaza, World’s Leading Experts Say.” BBC News,  September 1, 2025. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cde3eyzdr63o.

Rondeli, Davit. Mamluki. Film. Georgia: Georgia-Film, 1958.

Seng, Yvonne J. “Fugitives and Factotums: Slaves in Early Sixteenth-Century Istanbul.” Journal  of the Economic and Social History of the Orient 39, no. 2 (1996): 136–69.  http://www.jstor.org/stable/3632618.

Wynter, Sylvia. “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy  of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition.” Essay. In Black  Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, edited by Jason R. Ambroise and  Sabine Broeck, 184– 252. Liverpool University Press, 2015.