Isabella Hammad: ‘I heard Edward Said speak when I was seven’

Isabella Hammad, 33, was born in London to a Palestinian father and British-Irish mother. Named last year as one of Granta’s best young British novelists, she is the author of The Parisian (2019) and Enter Ghost, which was shortlisted for this year’s Women’s prize. Her new book, Recognising the Stranger, began as a lecture last autumn at Columbia University to commemorate the Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said, an annual event whose previous speakers include Noam Chomsky and Daniel Barenboim. Hammad’s talk, given nine days before 7 October, explored “narrative turning points”, with a particular focus on the story of Palestine. She spoke to me from Manhattan, where she currently has a fellowship at the New York Public Library.

As a novelist, do you hesitate to write nonfiction?
I don’t think of myself as an essayist, and I haven’t written many essays; when I have, they’ve been like this lecture, a creative act involving literary criticism, not straight journalism. I’m a novelist and that’s how I feel comfortable in the world. But there have been times where, under the pressure of my rage, I’ve written because I just need to say something. You know, you work on a novel for years – it’s a different kind of speech act, it’s not making any arguments and you don’t have to inhabit your own opinions. Obviously, there’s a genocide right now: that’s why I’ve been moved to write [nonfiction], just as a person and a human in the world who has felt that need.

The lecture you gave on 28 September 2023 is followed here by a long afterword written in January, three months into Israel’s assault on Gaza. For the reader, the effect is disconcerting in the light of what has passed since.
I found it quite difficult [to reread], especially as I’m reciting these horrors, which are horrors, but nothing compared with the numbers that have been killed now. The lecture itself is in this quite contemplative tone, which changes dramatically in the afterword. When something so terrible is happening, it’s not a time to be talking about moral complexity.

You refer to Israel as “a militarised society in which dissent is punished” and liken 7 October to an “incredibly violent jailbreak”.
I was being precise. The idea that 7 October was an invasion is completely wrong. This is a captive population in a ghetto, basically. You can’t exercise self-defence against a population that you are occupying militarily. The BBC will shout down a Palestinian guest and say, well, that’s not what the Israelis would say. Of course it’s not what the Israelis would say – they’re upholding an apartheid regime in which they’re exacting a genocide on a captive population. To say that Israel is a militarised state in which dissent is punished is precise. They don’t let journalists into the Gaza Strip; they put in prison people who like a social media post from Gaza. I’m just trying to be precise with language – that’s the least we can do.

Did you face pushback editorially?
I feel very supported by the people I work with. We went through the text and discussed phrasing, but that’s just good editing.

Can you recall your first encounter with Edward Said?
Whenever anybody gives these Said memorial lectures – which started at Columbia after he died [in 2003], and are now at Princeton, Warwick, Cairo – they’re always like: “I knew Said”, “Edward was my friend”. I’m much younger than all of them – I did once hear him speak but I was seven or eight or something and I just fell asleep in the audience.

When did you start reading him?
At uni, but his ideas are now so baked into the culture that I think I knew what orientalism was before I read my dad’s old copy of Orientalism, with his teenage marginalia, one summer in Palestine. There are definitely flaws in some of Said’s arguments, but he worked on them throughout his career. He’s had such a huge influence that I sometimes worry that he is received more [in terms of] the emphasis on discourse as a way of talking about power through representation, at the expense of looking at material realities. I feel the effect of that in American identity politics, particularly; sometimes it’s a way of obfuscating things, I fear.

Was there a book that first made you want to write?
I have a memory as a child of carrying around a very tatty Penguin collection of surrealist poetry, with a painting on the cover of a blue woman with a butterfly on her face. I remember being very taken by a poem that described waves breaking on a shore like eggshells. If by “wanting to write” you mean that impulse to play with language, it was probably these quite literary books for grownups that I came across and only half-understood that first gave me that feeling.

What are you working on at the moment?
A novel set partly at the 1955 Asia-Africa conference in Bandung, Indonesia. My protagonists are a secretary and a photographer.

Tell us about your writing routine.
On an ideal day, I write in the morning and read in the afternoon. At the moment, I’m following a few trails of research simultaneously so I’m often reading in the morning as well. Ideally, I’d start writing before I’ve spoken to anyone but this isn’t always a realistic aim.

How do you feel about the future?
I’m not an oracle. But many, many people who don’t have anything to do with Palestine are devastated by what they’re seeing, which has shattered all sorts of illusions they had about their societies and their governments and about what’s humanly possible in terms of destruction. I don’t know that it’s necessarily an optimistic thing to say, but there’s no going back from this, whatever that means.

• Recognising the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative is published on 26 September by Fern Press (£9.99). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply