Ophelia’s terror: anatomising the figure of the female suicide bomber in The Al-Hamlet Summit

2002: three months, three Palestinian women, three bombs. Sulayman Al-Bassam premiered The Al-Hamlet Summit, his political appropriation of Hamlet, Darwish’s Palestinian poetry, and Müller’s Hamletmachine, at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Mapping the politics of anger and despair onto Shakespeare’s play, he suggests that terrorism from Palestine to the US is rooted in colonialism and Western military interventions in the Middle East. Hamlet is a jihadist, Horatio becomes a British Arms Dealer and Ophelia, a suicide bomber. This paper explores the politics of representation in the body of Ophelia, who is anatomised as she detonates herself under the palace orange trees