In September 2023, the novelist Isabella Hammad delivered the Edward Said Memorial lecture at Columbia University. Erudite and elegant, the speech was an exploration of what she described as the “narrative shape of the Palestinian struggle.” Said taught literature at Columbia, where, except for the university president’s, his was the only office with bulletproof windows and a panic button. Nearly four decades before Hammad’s lecture, Said’s office was fire-bombed in response to his political positions. Months after the lecture, students who set up encampments to protest the Israeli bombardment of Gaza were suspended and arrested.
Hammad’s remarks were published this past September in a slim book titled Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative, and as we charge through the second year of a brutal war, the book has taken on more resonance than Hammad perhaps anticipated. She is the author of two novels, The Parisian and, most recently, Enter Ghost, both of which are about Palestine. Because she is engaged with the subject of Palestine, she explains in Stranger, she has long been drawn to unstable narratives and the limits of characters’ perspectives.
Hammad is most interested in stories’ turning points, when rising action peaks and, borrowing Aristotle’s word, an anagnorisis takes place: “the moment when the truth of a matter dawns on a character, that moment toward which a plot usually barrels, and around which a story’s mystery’s resolve.” More simply, it is “the movement from ignorance to knowledge.” Drawing upon writers, poets, and philosophers — from al-Hariri and Sophocles to Ghassan Kanafani and Javier Marías — Hammad explores the ways in which scenes of revelation arise in literature and in history. It is the moment Oedipus learns the truth of his parentage, or when Hammad discovers (while writing her first novel) that in a photo of her grandfather walking through a Parisian garden, the garden is not real at all; he is posed in front of a painting in a photo studio in Jerusalem.
Hammad discovers that in a photo of her grandfather walking through a Parisian garden, the garden is not real at all.
She concedes that recognition scenes have become a tic in her writing, and in Recognizing the Stranger, Hammad explores their limitation as a literary motif. Eventually, revelations fall flat in fiction, and perhaps also in real life. Hammad shares an encounter with an Israeli soldier who has an epiphany about the Palestinians he is told to shoot and flees his post. “How many Palestinians,” Hammad quotes Omar Barghouti, a human rights activist, “need to die for one soldier to have their epiphany?” As we watch countless Palestinians die in Gaza and the West Bank, there seems to be no number. Another death here, another death there. When Hammad tries to write a short story inspired by the soldier, her teacher criticizes it as “recursive.” Where is the forward movement? The climax is depressed; the aftermath disintegrates.
Narratives can help make meaning of the world we live in; they give us a sense of the challenges to overcome, of heroes and villains, of possible resolutions and a possible vision forward. But, Hammad tells us, “the flow of history always exceeds the narrative frames we impose on it.” We are in the middle of history, and the story is always changing. Our task is to construct narratives that recognize the dead who have passed, and those who are dying, and the dead who will be. We see them, but the problem remains: What happens after the revelation?
“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,” Hammad writes. “To realize you have been wrong about something is, I believe, to experience the otherness of the world coming at you. It is to be thrown off-center.” This is an instructive way to think through another book published around the same time and its reception. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ widely discussed book, The Message, is also about narrative and has landed Coates contentious television news segments, long podcast interviews, profiles centered around the book’s publication and Americans’ moral crises about Israel.
A reporter, essayist, novelist, and public intellectual, Coates has returned after a brief hiatus with a volume that he wrote for his students (the introduction is addressed to them). He has set out to understand the way language is used to craft and hold power; how it allows people to remain uncurious about those who do not have it. The book is divided into three parts, based on his travels to Senegal, South Carolina, and Israel and the West Bank. The media, unsurprisingly, has focused on the last third of the book, which relays a trip he took to the West Bank in 2023 sponsored by the Palestine Festival of Literature.
The reaction to The Message seems dramatic compared to the actual book, which feels at times like an elevated journal entry. The writing has its share of clichéd ideas (“To be Palestinian is to be more than a victim of Zionism”) and didacticism (“There has to be something in you, something that hungers for clarity”).
Still, I could not understand the criticism that the section about Palestine — though it draws upon Israeli, American, and Palestinian voices — lacks rigor. Much to the chagrin of pundits like news anchor Tony Dokoupil and journalist Ezra Klein, Coates criticizes the apartheid system he sees in the West Bank but does not interview any settlers or Israeli government officials. There is plenty of investigative reporting on the monstrous inequalities in the West Bank, and Coates’ project is something else.
“To recognize something is, then, to perceive clearly what on some level you have known all along, but that perhaps you did not want to know,” Hammad writes. This is the moment Coates finds himself in. He is trying to feel his way through discovering Israel’s occupation and bring his large audience with him. Often, in Hebron or Jerusalem, observing a memorial to a mass murderer or speaking to a former IDF soldier, he must sit and take everything in.
His wanderings on the page contrast with the clarion call of the article that made him famous: “The Case for Reparations,” published in 2014 in The Atlantic. “I was proud of ‘The Case of Reparations’ because it did rely on instinct but was a synthesis of facts,” he writes in The Message. “It was crafted in the mold of the (mostly white) magazine writers I’d admired.” The piece uses Israel as a successful example of reparations, in this case to the Jews for the Holocaust. But what he observed in the West Bank was Jim Crow come to life, in a new context. He felt betrayed by the media industry and his own sense of history. Coates no longer wanted to understand Palestine as an analogy but as itself. When he returned home, he read, had long conversations with historian Rashid Khalidi, spoke to Palestinians in the U.S. He was thrown off-center into a search for a truth. Even as he explored the West Bank and the new knowledge that shook him, a sense of moral clarity emerges in The Message that is familiar from “The Case for Reparations.” He did not need to talk to settlers or Israeli officials, he told CBS’s Dokoupil, because nothing could justify what he saw.
What happens after the revelation?
Coates’ process of recognition in The Message will not be a revelation for Palestinians, or those who know Palestinian history, or those who have long been sympathetic to the Palestinian struggle. Yet calling Israel an oppressive regime remains controversial, even if international courts and prominent human rights organizations have joined the choir. As a journalist, I’m embarrassed to admit that rigorous investigations have failed to change the American political consensus and hold Israel accountable for its human rights violations. In the story of Oedipus, Hammad reminds us, Oedipus needs a “reliable” witness to validate his suspicions that he killed his father and married his mother. Journalists ought to be those witnesses, but in America, self-proclaimed objective experts battle each other on cable every day. Facts and numbers are tossed around, and people throw their hands up, despairing that the conflict is just too complicated to understand. Anagnorisis remains elusive.
Coates is striving to be a more compelling witness. He has always been skillful at holding up a mirror to American racism, and his past work tore open debates about the lasting effects of slavery and resulted in increased public support for reparations. Perhaps what’s so critical about The Message is that it attempts to hold up a similar mirror in the context of Palestine. In his narrative, Americans are not bystanders in a foreign war. Congress passed an immigration bill in 1948, he explains to readers, the same year the U.S. became the first country to recognize Israel — advancing a way to keep Jews “over there.” He pushes us to recognize ourselves in a new narrative of white supremacy that is not simply domestic but global — and one that requires a more expansive political imagination.
But what is the relationship between revelation and some new direction? Coates does not offer a satisfying answer. When thinking through journalists’ belief that they can arrive at objective conclusions through reporting and researching, he concludes about Palestine, “I am left believing that at least here, this objectivity is self-delusion.” It’s not more facts but moral clarity that’s needed, he seems to say. This left me wondering about his role as a reporter — or any reporter’s role — when covering the Israel-Palestine conflict. He writes, too, that “empires are founded by travelers, and the claim of some exclusive knowledge of the native is their mark.” He is critical of those who point to their passport stamps as proof of their wisdom or even morality. Coates does not believe that traveling alone allows the traveler to see the people he is writing about. The sentence is beautiful, but after turning it over a few times, I was left wondering how Coates would square the fact that he, too, is a traveler with moral certitude, and that in a world of displacement, migration, and growing diasporic communities, we are all becoming travelers.
At the end of the book he rightly bemoans that Palestinian writers and editors have been largely excluded in the U.S. from shaping the narrative of the conflict. But the ending tapers off. He is a stranger, a happy one, among Palestinians he meets in the U.S. “The corpus resists my analogies,” he writes. “It escapes my words. It demands new messengers.” That may be so, but in a book in which Coates has his moment of recognition, we are left waiting for a third act.
Hammad, by her own admission, is not a non-fiction writer beyond lectures like “Recognizing the Stranger.” Still, in the published text, she was compelled to write an afterword about Gaza that makes up about a third of the book. Hammad departs from her earlier tone. Here, the writing is urgent. She offers statistics and numbers, brief summaries of the latest political developments, the image of the journalist who wept on television.
At one point, Hammad describes a little girl’s rescue from the rubble in Gaza. Three men carry her out on a stretcher, and she asks them if they are taking her to the cemetery. After all, she was surrounded by corpses and was preparing herself to die. One of the men tells her that she is alive and that she is beautiful. It is a moment of recognition for her: She is not dead.
There are turning points in the narrative of one’s own life and turning points in the narrative of a people, or a nation, or a political community. Even as writers like Hammad and Coates reach for new language to expand our moral vision, we are thrown by the reality of this long conflict as it continues beyond our narrative frames.
“Genocide destroys the present and the past in order to abort the future.”
In a recent conversation with writer Adam Shatz on the London Review of Books podcast, journalist Muhammad Shehada and doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah spoke about how Palestinians in Gaza have lived through multiple wars before turning 30. Abu-Sittah, who has worked as a surgeon in war zones like Iraq and Syria, explained what is unique about the post-October 7 period. “The difference between a war, even a brutal war, and a genocide is this: Wars alter the present to shape the future. You attack Iraq in order to change the shape of Iraq. You attack Yemen to change the future of Yemen,” he said. “The difference between the war and the genocide is that the genocide destroys the present and the past in order to abort the presence of a future.” The war — and even the much-hoped-for ceasefire — won’t be turning points in and of themselves; instead, in the aftermath, we’ll face scorched earth and an uncertain future for Palestinians.
That a post-October 7 world will not lead to a two-state solution, and that our old political paths have led nowhere, has not yet been reckoned with. It could be that the narrative climax of this conflict won’t come from counting the dead and recognizing the horror but from expanding a political language that does not rely on stale formulas like military necessity versus terrorism or Western civilization versus barbarism. Instead, language and narrative ought to help us imagine what Palestinian society can look like following genocide.
After all, what does it mean for that little girl to learn that she is alive in this Gaza, which is now strewn with shattered buildings, decimated fields, and mass graves? A third act must follow.
July 14, 2025: An earlier version of this article misstated the date that Ta-Nehisi Coates first visited Palestine. That date has been corrected.
Rozina Ali is a journalist, and contributing editor to Lux. She covers the War on Terror, the Middle East, and literature.
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