The Ghost of 48

Tracing Ghost 

At some point in the pandemic, I became obsessed with ghosts. 

    I began to compile a mental library of ghost references, including ones that weren’t so obvious. For example, I included Lady Chatterley’s Lover because it is haunted by a man who went to war and was fundamentally not the same when he returned. I used broad parameters for this ghost territory, including anything that could fall under the umbrella of a remnant, apparition, haunting or possession – anything that brings into the present some aspect of the past. 

    What I noticed with this mental exercise is that ghost stories especially proliferate in the aftermath of war, and they can work as the perfect symbol for the restlessness and sadness associated with something that, for the sake of health, should be left behind.  

    What I noticed is that once upon a time I believed I could be in sole possession of this house, but I have been trying to soothe a rattling that has been there in the background for a number of years.  

    Most days I feel like Lady Macbeth trying to rub an invisible bloodstain from my hand, blood that has seeped into every surface, and in this reality there is no hope of ever staying clean. There are so many ghosts to contend with and these are no friendly Caspers. Their energy is demonic, malevolent and they take to killing and destruction with glee. 

    What are all these ghosts, how did I come to have so many of them, and what will act as an exorcism to give this house again a period of peace?  

Excusing Ghost   

It is common to speak of an occupied land as dispossessed. It is more correct to call it possessed. After all, the land continues to exist, but it is now held by the other who seeks to remove all traces of who and what lived before. This includes the displacement and killing of inhabitants, the destruction of buildings, and an upending of the landscape so that it is unrecognisable, and thus the ghost as possessor can take total control. 

   It is common to excuse such a ghost, to downplay their destruction, to normalise the havoc that they wreak. This is an appeasement tactic when we encounter malevolence. It is assumed that if we excuse and humour, the possessor will be content with what they have already claimed as theirs.  

   This approach, though understandable because it is easier, is not advisable with a ghost whose fundamental nature is taking and destroying, who only understands taking and destroying.  

   There are certain ghosts who will continue to take more, who will continue to spill the blood of the living, and we console ourselves with the little line that it is over there and it’s nothing to do with us. Perhaps this deep into this possession, we can pose a question about how many people we are willing to feed this ghost, how many homes and how much land before we say enough, and how long we are willing to delude ourselves with this line of thinking before we admit that the possessor sees no end to their possession and that rather than pacifying, we are emboldening its current rampage. 

Burying Ghost  

We live in an age of trauma talk. 

   At the lower end of the scale is stress and the sense of pressure and weight. 

   At the upper end is a burden that is defeating and we take on the empty eyes and faded skin as if our life has been sucked out of our bodies. We begin to resemble the lifeless, losing all will of animation, and days are passed horizontal because the past is ever-present, and we are unable to shed it. 

   With a haunting, there is the tendency to blame. We blame ourselves for what we perceive as weakness. It is our personal deficiency that stops us from being as spritely as the people around us. It is our deficiency that traps us in a past that persists into the present. 

   And while we may acknowledge the existence of trauma, it is our deepest wish that the haunted keep their burden to themselves by sealing their mouths and staying out of sight. They are instructed to get on with it and to make a proper effort to go about their day because what haunts them is not part of their chosen country’s story or their chosen country’s way. In the meantime, it is advisable for them to act normal and to pretend it is a normal world they occupy. This is a school of thought that says that if we keep saying it is paradise and sunshine, the world will become paradise and sunshine, and the ideal is the mechanical citizen who hides their terror and the weeping that happens every night.  

   At times we may be willing to admit the seriousness of a trauma but we don’t want to really deal with it, not its symptoms and certainly not its source. Some types of trauma are more palatable than others so a small portion is permissible in public as long as the rest is kept tucked away. 

   Underneath this is the reality that we are all easily spooked and we labour with the unconscious belief that if we allow the public acknowledgement of a haunting, it will rattle the rest of the herd, who will end up haunted as well.  Hence the pressure on the sufferer to keep their pain entirely to themselves so the rest can play at normal and completely wash their hands.  

Addressing Ghost 

In addressing our ghost, what language are we to speak, and it is useful here to pose a question about energy. 

   If this ghost is a regular Casper and friendly, then go ahead and let the chatter be merry, as if reunited with the most beloved of family. 

   If the ghost’s energy is sadness and despair, then it is going to require much gentle conversation to uncover the layers contributing to the ghost’s insistence on being present.  

   And then there is the malicious and malevolent, and with this type of ghost, no sweet words, no wheedling or cajoling is going to make it act with courtesy and respect. 

   What is needed is an excavation and banishment, a stifling of all energy and oxygen until the ghost toes the boundaries of decency. For such a monstrous and pervasive ghost, we must set up the conditions so that one day we can speak, but this endeavour is both lengthy and wearying. It is far easier to shut one’s eyes and wait for someone else – a superhero out of those endlessly repeated movies – to fly down and to solve everything, saving us the dirty work that, at present, unfortunately falls to us.  

Naming Ghost  

 ‘I am haunted ever so much’ 

   This line has begun to play over and over in my mind. This haunting comes in the form of sleepless nights and a stream of thoughts that won’t slow their pace. 

   It is a ghost, no less, and what I have realised is that not only am I dealing with this new haunting, but older ghosts have come back as well, that this period of darkness recalls older periods of darkness, and I have lost the ability to treat each incident as isolated.  The past I believed had been put to rest is again present, and whatever sweet words worked before are no longer working, and that is due to the intensity of this haunting. 

   Stumbling and fumbling, I search for a name to pin to my ghost. 

The abhorrent, the monstrous, the depraved, the evil and malevolent. 

Then a whisper. 

The worst, the absolute worst. 

And this ghost is the worst, its havoc uncontrolled and unrestrained, and there are those who wish to believe that it can still be controlled and will eventually listen to calls for restraint, though there’s no indication that this is the case. 

   Some choose to believe this ghost is within the parameters of the normal and there is nothing to trouble us, and if we are troubled, it is on us and it’s best to keep our disturbance out of sight. 

   So it is this silenced world I find myself in. It is blood and violence and killing, and the worst part is being repeatedly told in the face of it to carry on as usual. Do not cry, do not make a sound, understand now, not a peep. 

   It would be easy to think it is just me but the people around me echo my sentiment: that this malevolence requires a re-examination of our lives and our societies and the pushed narrative of history.  

    I sometimes think part of the trouble lies with the paradise story that is part of the Abrahamic traditions. We were once in Eden and then we were thrown out. If we use enough force, we can still recover the past. 

   The trouble is the eye cast back, trying to recover a paradise lost, and it does not matter if doing so forfeits the present and the future. 

   But the answer, if there is one, is not in whatever equilibrium used to be my life. Instead it is an uncertain something-else – ghost banished or else at rest – and it is somewhere up ahead. 

Stirring Ghost 

In April I went to Uruguay and I took with me Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad. 

   This novel uses the trick of fixation. In fixating so completely on a production of Hamlet in the West Bank, it approaches from the periphery, sketching in the ghost that we can only stomach by glancing at it from the corner of an eye.  

   By focusing only on what’s in a character’s line of vision, the book nonetheless identifies what lurks in the shadows and gives a true measure of its ability to disrupt and destroy any possibility of a normal life. 

   It was also in Uruguay that I went to see The Zone of Interest because I had not been able to forget the speech of its director, Jonathan Glazer, as he accepted his Oscar at this year’s ceremony.   

   Perhaps because I came to both works so close together, they have since started a strange conversation in my mind. The thread of the conversation relates to humanity, categories of haunting, and the possibility of having a peace only for ourselves and saying never mind what happens to the rest of the world. 

   There is an Arabic expression that says we are more generous when we are cutting from the skin of someone else. It is here we find ourselves with some who advocate acceptance of what they never would accept for themselves, who ask the traumatised to negotiate, concede, and accept the violence that we would denounce were it unleashed elsewhere in the world.  

   The question now is what are we to do with our ghost and how are we to go forth, and this brings in the even more important question: what would I accept as a decent life for myself and by extension every single human being on Earth?  

Normalising Ghost  

What was the strange conversation that started in my mind between Hammad’s book and Glazer’s film? 

   In both, there is a foreground that is the focus and then beyond that an evil just out of sight. 

   In Enter Ghost, the characters attempt to go about their lives normally, never mind that there isn’t much that is normal in their world: checkpoints, violent dispossession, destruction of property, arbitrary arrest and imprisonment, killings, the building of illegal settlements on occupied land.  

    Still this is a life of putting one foot after another, and perhaps this performance of Hamlet sees the light, and perhaps it gives people a way to survive. In the context of Enter Ghost, it is too much to ask people to thrive. Instead rehearsing Hamlet is about continuing and not being deterred by the conditions that are designed to stifle even the barest version of life. 

   What is the purpose of a play in the middle of an ongoing occupation? What is the point of Shakespeare and Hamlet when there is the more pressing question of how are we even going to survive? 

  I also ask myself what is the point of writing in a genocide, what is the point of a song, what is the point of a poem when the world wishes that you would just disappear and die? 

  But perhaps it is during the most intense haunting that we most need the story, the song, and the poem, and by extension the stage that is the centre of Enter Ghost. 

   The Zone of Interest operates with a different type of normality: parties and picnics and loot, a sickening indifference to people being gassed just beyond the wall.  

  The film makes us question the scale of slaughter we will permit so long as it doesn’t affect our lives, and if we can even speak about normality when we have luxury here while over there people are being massacred in ways that only the most depraved can dream?  

   So here is our critical plot point. Can we say we care about trauma when we normalise such violence, thus haunting every generation to come?

Remembering Ghost 

What are we to do with this ghost? 

   We first need a period of uninterrupted peace that allows for rest and processing. This implies distance and separation and for a while the ghost is not allowed anywhere close. 

    Then there is the reckoning with the ghost: measuring, taking scale, storying. It is tracing the path that led to the haunting so that we can find the way out. 

    Every year in Uruguay, there is the March of Silence. It is an act of remembering, a continual demand for justice and an insistence on never again. 

    In Chile, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights was established as an act of witnessing, as a gathering of the country’s period under a dictatorship. What is striking is that the museum entrance involves a descent, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is etched onto the wall that leads the visitor to the front door. The museum devotes an entire floor to the 11th of September, 1973, the day president Salvador Allende was overthrown in a military coup, thus beginning seventeen years of disappearances, killings, and repression under Pinochet. A visitor ascends through the levels documenting Chile’s history before ending up on the top floor with the referendum that led to the end of violence and the return to democracy.  

   What does this have to do with the ghost and the haunting? 

   The total presence of a ghost should never be erased. The past can’t be undone by putting it out of sight and pretending it never existed. This type of dishonesty solidifies the hold of the ghost over the present and every possible future. 

   What are we to do with this latest episode of the ghost? 

   The future is ahead of us and whatever is to come is going to be very hard. A society free of violence is not a static state and it actively needs to be cultivated.  

   And how are we to get there when there is so much blood in the present? Perhaps our answers lie in that Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that we affirm it without restriction, that its principles are upheld for every human being in how we think, how we talk, how we act, that we refuse any future that is the promise of anything less.  

Referencing Ghost 

Sometimes it is too much to confront the terrible by looking it directly in the eye and no apologies are made for a peripheral approach that is allegorical and does not give the ghost its actual name.   

   I wish to acknowledge Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad and The Zone of Interest by Jonathan Glazer as where this essay first had its start. 

   The Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile has an interactive app for exploring the museum which is prefaced by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. At present, this document is lip service more than anything. Its power is that it holds a standard for a better future that applies without restriction to every human being.  

   For those who favour conventional ghost stories, I recommend The Little Stranger by Sarah Waters and The Shining by Stephen King. I have been referring to his survey of the horror genre, Danse Macabre, this entire year.  

   Lastly for a work of real horror that is worse than anything that can be made up, there is the article by +972 Magazine about Lavender, which will likely haunt humanity in the years to come.