After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. While Haneen made a life here commuting to Tel Aviv to teach at the university, Sonia remained in London to focus on her acting career and now dissolute marriage. On her return, she finds her relationship to Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic and candid Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing Gertrude’s lines in classical Arabic with a dedicated group of men who, in spite of competing egos and priorities, all want to bring Shakespeare to that side of the wall. As opening night draws closer and the warring intensifies, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life Sonia once knew starts to give way to the daunting, exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
Timely, thoughtful, and passionate, Isabella Hammad’s highly anticipated second novel is an exquisite story of the connection to be found in family and shared resistance.
About the speakers:
Isabella Hammad is the author of The Parisian and her second novel, Enter Ghost, is forthcoming in 2023. She won a 2019 National Book Award “5 Under 35” and received the 2020 Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She has received fellowships from the Lannan Foundation, MacDowell, the Santa Maddalena Foundation, and the Bellagio Rockefeller Foundation, and has taught creative writing in the graduate programs at New York University and Brown University.
Yasmine Seale is a British-Syrian writer and translator. Her poetry, essays, visual art, and translations from Arabic and French have appeared widely. She is the author, with Robin Moger, of Agitated Air: Poems after Ibn Arabi (Tenement Press, 2022). Other work includes Aladdin: a New Translation (2018) and The Annotated Arabian Nights(2021), both out from W. W. Norton. She has received a PEN America Literary Grant and the Wasafiri New Writing Prize for Poetry.
The Entre Nous series is co-organized by Columbia Global Centers | Paris, the Institute for Ideas and Imagination, and the American Library in Paris.
Important information: This event will take place in person at Reid Hall | Columbia Global Centers at 4 rue de Chevreuse.
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