Enter Ghost

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

Sonia Nasir is the main protagonist of Enter Ghost. The novel is largely written in first-person narration from her point of view, except for sections written as a script during the rehearsals and performance of Hamlet. The novel is punctuated with Sonia’s recollections of her past. Sonia is a complex, dynamic character who finds her sense of place and purpose throughout the novel.

Sonia grew up in Britain and lives in London. Her father is Palestinian with family in Haifa. He was active in the Palestinian liberation movement as a young adult. He later left and studied in Paris and London. Her mother is half Dutch, half Palestinian, and grew up in Utrecht and London. Sonia’s parents divorced when she was in university. Her father still lives in London, and her mother lives in Marseille, France, with her new partner. Sonia trained as a ballet dancer as an adolescent and became an actor during her first year at university. She went on to study at drama school and later became a working actor in London, performing in many plays in the West End in London. Sonia was briefly married to a wealthy Italian British man named Marco, who worked as a movie and theater reviewer.

At the beginning of the novel, Sonia is 38 years old and experiencing something of a midlife crisis. Her latest affair, with a boorish director named Harold Marshall, ended badly when it became clear she was more in love with him than he was with her. She is getting older and between acting roles. This crisis prompts her to spend the summer in Haifa with her sister, Haneen, to take a break and, implicitly, find some direction and anchor in her life.

At the outset, Sonia is something of a “self-centered actress,” as she denies being to her sister. The author shows this through the perspective of the text itself, which is written in the first-person point of view. Sonia has little insight into the feelings and experiences of others. For instance, she reflects on how she often misinterpreted her husband’s feelings during their marriage. Unlike her sister, Sonia did not engage with the question of Palestinian identity or the Palestinian struggle throughout most of her life. Instead, Sonia focused on her career and kept busy with many acting roles. She feels she is “anchored” by the roles she plays. For example, after her pregnancy loss, she feels the role of Solange “stopped [her] falling off a cliff” (127). Acting creates in her a feeling of “something very pure and close to dying, to standing on the precipice of life […] It was a sensation of being useful, and then used up, which freed me from myself” (127). When acting, Sonia feels paradoxically both the most herself and the most untethered from her identity.

Throughout her time in Israel and the West Bank working on Hamlet, Sonia finds a new usefulness and direction in her life. She finds her role, both in the theater and in her Palestinian Identity and Resistance. As a British Palestinian whose family is from “inside” the 1948 Israeli borders and who did not lose their house in the Nakba but rather from a sale, Sonia feels somewhat disconnected from Palestinian identity and the struggle for a Palestinian state. She learns to see her role as Gertrude in Hamlet as a way of connecting with other Palestinians with a variety of experiences. Although theater alone is not sufficient to create change, as she notes, “our play needed the protests, but the protests did not need our play” (274), she recognizes the very act of staging Hamlet is a way of contributing to the Palestinian cause. Sonia’s engagement escalates gradually: At the outset, she swears to never again visit the West Bank; then, she reluctantly participates in the play; next, she attends a protest in Jerusalem; and, finally, she willingly joins the performance near the checkpoint that makes them a target of Israeli armed forces and puts her life in danger.

Sonia’s character highlights The Challenge of Intimacy in Relationships throughout the text. Although she gradually becomes closer to her sister, she is still hesitant about entering into a romantic relationship with Ibrahim despite her physical attraction to him. Their relationship remains ambiguous at the end of the novel, leaving this aspect of her character arc unresolved.