Enter Ghost

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of pregnancy loss and wartime violence.

In Enter Ghost, protagonist Sonia Nasir and those around her engage in various ways with their Palestinian identity and their engagement with the resistance to Israeli occupation and oppression. Their experiences in the novel show the diverse Palestinian identities and modes of resistance, even within families.

The Nasir family alone exemplifies the heterogeny of Palestinian identity and resistance. Sonia’s father, Nabil, grew up in Haifa, Israel. As a young man, he attended university in Beirut, where he was active in the resistance (although his mode of engagement remains unspecified). When an Israeli sniper killed his friend, Nabil spent a year living with the friend’s family in a refugee camp before moving to Europe. His experiences traumatized him, and he grew to believe the dream of Palestinian nationhood was dead. Sonia’s maternal grandfather was a Palestinian refugee from Tiberius, but her mother, who grew up in Europe, “seemed to waver between identifying as part of it and removing herself from the whole thing” (58). For most of her life, Sonia took after her mother, distancing herself from her Palestinian identity and the conflict.