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• The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders - 2025 Catapult, New York, NY

• Sarah Aziza website - https://www.sarahaziza.com/

  Sarah Aziza (she/هي ) is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in ‘Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. She is the author of The Hollow Half, a genre-bending work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream. It is available wherever books are sold.

  Sarah’s award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Best American Essays, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, The Guardian, and The Nation, among other publications. Previously a Fulbright fellow in Jordan, she is the recipient of numerous Pulitzer Center grants for Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Writer’s Workshop, a Pushcart Prize nominee, and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers Workshop.

  Sarah is represented by Elias Altman at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agency.

  Sarah Aziza

  Languages: English (fluent) Arabic (fluent)
  Hebrew and French (intermediate)
  sarahazizawriter@gmail.com

  Sarah Aziza is a writer, translator, and journalist based in New York City.

  She is represented by Elias Altman at Massie & McQuilkin Literary Agency.

  Journalism

  2015 - Present

  Primary topics of coverage include human rights, gender and women’s issues, refugees, foreign affairs, and culture. Reported from New York City as well as numerous countries in the Middle East, North Africa, and Western Europe.

  Work has included both long and short form writing, collaborative pieces, podcasts, and TV interviews.

  Publications include The New York Times, The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The Intercept, The Nation, Slate, The Rumpus, Lux Magazine, The Intercept, and The Atlantic, as well as several print anthologies.

  Television and radio appearances have included Democracy Now! NPR, WNYC, WBUR, Al Jazeera English, and the Canadian channel, CBC.

  Participated in numerous academic panels at venues including Johns Hopkins, The National Press Club, the Wilson Center, and NYU.

  Three-time grant recipient at the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, which has funded numerous reporting and research trips abroad.

  Creative and Educational Work

  2020 - Present

  Awarded 2023 Margins Fellowship at Asian American Writers’ Workshop.

  Awarded month-long writer’s residency at Tin House books, October 2022.

  Founding contributor (fiction) to The Koukash Review,“A new indie literary magazine featuring South West Asian / North African voices.” October 2022.

  Featured writer/reader at Hala Alyan’s poetry series, Kan Ya Makan, September 2022.

  Recipient of the Literature Grant from Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation, September 2022

  Fellow at Sachs Program for Arts Innovation, May 2022

  Contributor to Madeleine Mori’s Wine Folio Notebook, published by The Margins in June 2022

  Co-organizer and speaker at Brooklyn Public Library’s event series, Can Palestinian Lives Matter? Summer/fall, 2021. Series launched in response to my piece of the same title, published May 2021 in The Intercept.

  Creative non-fiction in The Baffler, The New Yorker, The Rumpus and elsewhere. (Various)

  Essay Tea/Time included in Rutgers Creative Writing among a collection of South Asian and Arab writers. 2021.

  Work Experience (non-writing)

  The New York Times: Bilingual Proofer/Editor

  Proofread and edit Times content on Arabic-language syndicates for accuracy and style. (February 2021-Present).

  The Nation: Fact Checker

  Full-time paid position; fact-checking and light editing duties. (June-December 2017).

  New York University School of Journalism: Graduate Assistant
  Responsible for organizing journalism-related events for faculty and students, supporting younger journalism students, and representing the Institute in recruiting efforts from 2016 through May 2017.

  New York Times: Fact Checker
  Worked as a paid fact-checker at The New York Times from May-September, 2016.

  Arab American Association of New York: Adult Education Volunteer, Translator
  English teaching and translation for the Arab immigrant community of Bay Ridge, Brooklyn from July 2015 - May 2018.

  Fulbright Fellow: Jordan, 2014-2015
  Received a Fulbright grant for the 2014-2015 year to Jordan, which sponsored a year of partnership with UNRWA in refugee education and humanitarian work.

  Education

  New York University, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

  M.A. in Journalism, Literary Reportage New York City, May 2017

  University of Pennsylvania Philadelphia, PA May 2014
  College of Arts and Sciences

  BA With Honors in Comparative Literature, Middle East Studies
  Summa Cum Laude, Phi Beta Kappa, Dean’s List 2010-2014

• Pulitzer Center - https://pulitzercenter.org/people/sarah-aziza

  Sarah Aziza
  GRANTEE

  Sarah Aziza splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the West Bank, and South Africa, among others. As a journalist, she focuses on human rights, refugees, women, and the Middle East, seeking to elevate the human complexity behind global issues. Her work has been featured in Harper's Magazine, The Washington Post, TheNewYorker.com, The Atlantic, The Intercept, The Nation, Slate, and The Middle East Eye, as well as National Public Radio. She is currently working on a book based on her reporting of women's stories in the Middle East.

• Democracy Now! - https://www.democracynow.org/2025/4/29/the_hollow_half

  “The Hollow Half”: Palestinian American Sarah Aziza on Gaza, Generational Trauma, Anorexia & Exile
  StoryApril 29, 2025Watch Full Show
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  "The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders"
  The award-winning Palestinian American journalist and author Sarah Aziza has released a new book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, in which she examines her recovery from an eating disorder from which she nearly died in 2019, linking it to the generational trauma experienced as part of her Palestinian family’s history of exile. Aziza was born in the U.S. as a daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees. “I began to recover memories of my Palestinian grandmother that led to a curiosity … about my family’s history in Gaza, in Palestine, the greater Nakba,” says Aziza. “And as a daughter of the diaspora, I hadn’t tied my own story so viscerally to the story of my people.”

  Transcript
  This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
  AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

  The International Court of Justice is holding a weeklong hearing on Israel’s obligations to provide aid to Gaza. On Monday, Palestinian envoy Ammar Hijazi accused Israel of using humanitarian aid as weapons of war as Israel continues its devastating blockade.

  AMMAR HIJAZI: That’s really the heart of why Palestine and over 40 other states are addressing the court today. It is not about the number of aid trucks Israel is or is not allowing into the Occupied Palestinian Territories, especially Gaza. It is not about Israel destroying the — it is about Israel destroying the fundamentals of life in Palestine while it blocks U.N. and other humanitarians from providing lifesaving aid to the population. It is about Israel unraveling fundamental principles of international law, including their obligations under the U.N. Charter. It is about Israel turning Palestine, and particularly Gaza, into a mass grave for Palestinians and those coming to their aid.

  AMY GOODMAN: We end today’s show with a new memoir by the award-winning Palestinian American journalist and author Sarah Aziza. She was born in the United States as a daughter and granddaughter of Palestinian refugees from Gaza. Her new book is called The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders. In it, she examines her recovery from anorexia, that she nearly died from in 2019, as part of the generational trauma experienced as part of her Palestinian family’s history of exile.

  We welcome you to Democracy Now! It’s an honor to have you with us. The Paris Review just published an excerpt of your new book, The Hollow Half. Congratulations on its publication. You have this quote, “You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, you entered the hospital. You were suffering from anorexia. Many believed it could be fatal for you. And that is not only so real in your body, but it has also become a metaphor for what you describe, your family, the post-traumatic stress disorder from what’s happening in Gaza. Can you lay out what happened to you and how you broadened that to your family and people’s experience?

  SARAH AZIZA: Yeah. Thank you so much, Amy. It’s an honor for me to be here. Thank you for your work.

  Yeah, so, the story does start with my body sort of being shattered and nearly erased by this mental health issue that I was dealing with, that I thought, you know, according to the medical Western model, I accepted the diagnosis that this was an individual disease, something I needed to wrestle with and recover. But as I sort of trace in the book, even beginning in the hospital, I began to recover memories of my Palestinian grandmother that led to a curiosity, a deeper curiosity, about my family’s history in Gaza, in Palestine, the greater Nakba. And as a daughter of the diaspora, I hadn’t tied my own story so viscerally to the story of my people. Of course, I knew it, but sort of the understanding that many people in the diaspora have is we have crossed this threshold, this border — right? — whether it’s a temporal border or a geographical border, of “We’re the safe ones. We made it out. And, you know, we pray for Gaza, we maybe organize for Gaza, but somehow we’re a little bit more protected here in the United States.”

  But what this book really examines is both the incredible inspiration that I directly draw from my grandmother, who was an illiterate, disabled, small woman who survived the Nakba, the 1967 War, was displaced from Gaza, you know, sort of the kind of woman that’s not held up to us in the United States, or even, you know, maybe in broader culture, as a hero and as a model. I was following the model of the American dream, the meritocracy. I believed that if I could advance myself, you know, I can make my baba proud, I can make my grandmother proud, but I didn’t need to tie my own story so directly to her. But what I realized was that her suffering and her loss, but also her resilience, carried some of the keys that I needed to recover from my individual malady and sort of reorient my life with Gaza and Palestine at its center, rather than falling for, I guess, the line of the American dream, which ends up being hollow and betraying most all of us, as your guests today sort of laid out in some very real, present ways.

  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And, Sarah, could you talk about the title, The Hollow Half?

  SARAH AZIZA: Of course, yeah. I mean, as I was just sort of alluding to, the hollowness is — there’s many dimensions to it, I think. One of them is the hollowness of the hunger — right? — and the anorexia that the book begins with, but it’s also the hollowness of the American dream. And it’s also the hollowness of this idea of halfness, this idea of being half-American, half-Palestinian. By the end of the book, I’m sort of rejecting that. I’m sort of coming to understand that Palestinianness is a whole identity, and it speaks to every part of my life, whether I’m in the diaspora or outside of it. So, yeah, it kind of unfolds the further the book goes along.

  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And as someone who works with translation from Arabic into English, you write about the Arabic word dhikr for “memory.” Can you talk about how memory in Arabic is a living thing?

  SARAH AZIZA: I love that question. Yeah, the fourth chapter is named after this Arabic word dhikr, which means both to remember and to invoke. So, the book begins with memory. It begins with recovering from the archive and the family archive all that was sort of lost or left behind as my family moved from their ancestral home, which was destroyed and ethnically cleansed in 1948, into Gaza, and then, after the ’67 War, out of Gaza into Syria, Jordan and eventually Saudi Arabia. So, this is a form of memory — right? — recovering from history what was erased or written over or discarded by the powers that be.

  But dhikr also means to invoke, so it was sort of an answering of a call, a calling back to Palestine, realizing that Palestine really invokes the value system that I want to adopt as a Palestinian, but also anyone who seeks to defy empire and search for a different future for all of us. I think we’re seeing every day how pressing and urgent the need for a different future is. So, it’s an invocation, as well as a remembering.

  AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, can you talk about how you’ve kept in touch with your family in Gaza now, sharing their messages with the world? Talk about people like your cousin Nabil and how you’ve been translating his writing and his poetry.

  SARAH AZIZA: Yeah, thank you for bringing my family into this conversation. Yeah, the book was — I started writing it in 2020, but I was still finishing it in 2023, when the genocide escalated, you know. We could the genocide has been going on for decades, but — so, yeah, we have a lot of family in Gaza. My family has lost, in the greater, like, extended family, over 200 people. But there’s a —

  AMY GOODMAN: Where do they live?

  SARAH AZIZA: They were in Nuseirat refugee camp, Deir al-Balah, some of them in Khan Younis, also in Jabaliya, so all over. Of course, it’s been unspeakably heartbreaking and horrific and a deep challenge to find words. Actually, the dedication of this book is “For Gaza, words fail.” So, I wrote this book, but I also recognize the limits of language.

  But as you, you know, beautifully brought to our attention, I did translate some of my cousin Nabil’s poetry. He’s been sending these missives to me and my parents quite frequently from Gaza. And, you know, he’s a pharmacist, actually, but lost his job, of course, in all the destruction. But it turns out he’s a poet, as well, the ways that he speaks of his despair some days, his hope other days, his pain, his hunger, most recently, in this increasingly intense famine that he’s facing.

  It was a gift to be able to publish some of his words. I hope to do more. As a Palestinian in the diaspora, I mean, I’m honored to have a book out. My cousin Nabil even messaged me, saying they were proud, they feel remembered. But I think it’s always so important to point back to the voices in Gaza, so I hope to do more of that, you know, as my career goes on. I want to elevate and translate and bring Palestinian voices from inside the land to the broader community, yeah.

  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Could you talk, as well, about your cousin Haneen, who was 26 years old and set to graduate from college a few months after October 7, 2023?

  SARAH AZIZA: Of course. Yeah, Haneen is Nabil’s sister. She’s also just this incredibly precious soul. She’s continuing, you know, to send us messages, as well. But yeah, she was getting ready to graduate from college, having survived so many wars and still being able to continue her education, then higher education. When the war started and they were displaced for the first time, she brought her graduation gown and cap with her, you know, as they fled from one place to another. And I think that just speaks to this duality that Palestinians, particularly in Gaza and the greater historic Palestine, have to hold constantly. It’s the same hope that drove my father to continue to overcome one obstacle after another, as I trace in the book.

  So, Haneen is just such an inspiration to me. She has continued to educate her younger brothers, you know, sort of like homeschool them throughout these displacements. And I spoke to her on the phone somewhat recently, not as recently as I would have liked, as it’s difficult. But, you know, she still has high spirits most days. I know it’s — I don’t want to sugarcoat it. Resilience is a complicated thing, and it has its limits. But I would love to be half the woman that she is someday.

  AMY GOODMAN: Sarah, you write in your book about your father and grandmother’s return to Gaza, to the smell of the sea, to the moment of joy. Can you talk more about their experiences, and how you experience Gaza here? You were actually born here.

  SARAH AZIZA: Yeah. Thank you. That’s one of my favorite parts of the book, getting to reconstruct this moment. My father was born in Deir al-Balah, Gaza. And then, in '67, when he was 7 years old, they were displaced to Saudi Arabia. But then, as a teenager, he and his mother went back to visit Khan Younis and Deir al-Balah. And, you know, just this moment he describes of — you know, he was living in Saudi Arabia, so around other Arabs, speaking Arabic, but when he crossed over and began hearing the Gazan dialect and smelling the sea, his body remembered the sea, maybe in ways he didn't even know he was carrying. So, you know, he just described this feeling of aliveness, this familial sense of “I’m with my people again.” He said, “I wanted to run to run each one and take their hand and tell them, ’I’m one of you. We’re family.’” And from there, you know, he discovers, as a young man, Palestine all over again, because this is a diaspora experience of trying to get as close to our land and our history as we can, with one set of obstacles after another, and each year and each decade it gets harder.

  But yeah, so, I also got to revisit Palestine several times, using the privilege of my American passport. I spent a few months in Nablus. And then my brother, father and I were able to find the traces of our family village, which was destroyed in 1948. It’s in rubble. The cemetery was razed by either bulldozer or tank, but there are still traces. And I think Palestinians everywhere are finding whatever way they can to continue to connect to that history and to bring that history into the present and to use that history to inform our hope for the future.

  JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Yeah, and I’m wondering if you could talk some about your — the emotional changes that you’ve gone through as you see now the Israeli war, the massacres in Gaza continuing, and the rest of the world refusing to do anything substantive about Israel, and also being here in the United States, where anyone who protests this genocide is immediately criminalized and persecuted, whether it’s by universities or the government or even sometimes the media.

  SARAH AZIZA: Absolutely. Well, again, this is one of the reasons I appreciate this programming, is it’s a place where I’ve seen courageous reporting and elevating of Palestinian voices, when I’m not seeing a fraction of what we need to see. So, thank you again.

  Yeah, again, it’s been horrific. It’s been — it feels like a privilege to even talk about how horrible it’s been for me, because I know nothing compares to what the Palestinians in Palestine, and specifically Gaza, are going through. But it’s propelled me to dedicate myself ever more to these stories, to preserving and defending all the beauty and the abundance that is Palestine. You know, we are more than a genocide. We are more than Nakba. So, it’s, again, that duality of — in this book, there are many moments of joy and lushness and abundance, but also these moments of horror and heartbreak. And, you know, that’s really just a small example of the larger scale of the Palestinian experience that you speak to.

  I think the last almost two years now has been this strange sense of déjà vu, but on a scale none of us ever wanted to imagine. There’s this sense of the externalization of history, like this thing that I knew in my body and carried in my body, in my DNA, you know, of there is a force that’s trying to erase us from the Earth. There is a force that wants to silence our stories, that wants to silence anyone who would speak out in solidarity with us. It’s been a very lonely and isolated sort of experience being a Palestinian in the U.S. — again, not to privilege my suffering.

  But I think the world is starting to see what Palestinians and those who have been paying attention have always known, which is Zionism is a relentless and totality — like a totalizing project. It won’t stop until we’re erased and we’re gone. And there is no amount of nuance — there’s not a modicum of nuance to Zionism. And as the U.S., which is also a Zionist country, has doubled down on its Zionist policies and intentions, both under Biden and now under Trump, I think that the lines are just clearer than ever. Yeah, I hope that people understand, if they didn’t before, that Zionism, as well as just like the U.S. imperial project, is a project of anti-life. You know, there is no life for Palestinians, and there’s no life for many of us, as long as these projects are allowed to go on.

  So, I commend the courage of the students and the journalists and the academics and the everyday people on the street who have been standing with us. And I just hope that we can continue to push forward, because any hope that Palestinians have, it begins, first and foremost, with the people on the ground resisting the absolute brute force of empire, which is coming to bear with everything it has on Gaza, but also here in the U.S., that we need to stay steadfast.

  AMY GOODMAN: And what has it meant to you that so many of those, for example, who have been arrested have been Jewish, that Jewish solidarity with Palestinians fighting what is taking place?

  SARAH AZIZA: I mean, I think it just completely cuts out at the knees this argument that anti-Zionism is antisemitism. I think that, again, that’s such a disingenuous argument. It always has been. You know, actually, the PLO Charter in the 1960s that they issued, you know, sort of — this is the resistance group that was resisting Zionism. They said that anyone who is Jewish who lived on the land originally was considered Palestinian. You know, this is like — we’ve always been a pluralistic society, a multifaith society. Again, this idea that it’s a religious war or an antisemitic project, absolutely false. Of course, there’s been — you know, there’s an ancient Jewish community on historic Palestine. This is, you know, not about the identity of those that are massacring us, but it is about the massacre itself. Massacres, genocide, ethnic cleansing, imperialism, these are wrong, no matter who is perpetrating them. And we are ready to work, as you mentioned, hand in hand with anyone of any identity who wants to stand in solidarity. So we’re grateful for those partners.

  AMY GOODMAN: I want to thank you so much for being with us, Sarah Aziza, the Palestinian American journalist and author. Her new book is just out. It’s called The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders.

  That does it for our show. Democracy Now! is currently accepting applications for an individual giving manager to support our fundraising team. You can learn more at democracynow.org.

  Democracy Now!_ is produced with Mike Burke, Renée Feltz, Deena Guzder, Messiah Rhodes, Nermeen Shaikh, María Taracena, Tami Woronoff, Charina Nadura, Sam Alcoff, Tey-Marie Astudillo, John Hamilton, Robby Karran, Hany Massoud, Anjali Kamat, Safwat Nazzal. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

• Literary Hub - https://lithub.com/words-as-borders-weapons-traps-sarah-aziza-on-being-a-palestinian-writer-today/

  Words as Borders, Weapons, Traps: Sarah Aziza on Being a Palestinian Writer Today
  The Author of “The Hollow Half” Explores Language, Silence, and Being
  via Catapult
  By Sarah Aziza
  April 22, 2025
  Q: What is it like to be a Palestinian writer at this time?

  A: Once, I had no name. I rose each day as if it were the first morning on earth. I moved sturdy and permeable, translucent with a wondering hunger for the world. That is to say, I was a child, and I was safe.

  In these days, language stirred around me, brushing me with its shapes. Some words left traces, or formed like dew around my throat. These I kept and sipped from; they were the sounds of love. I did not yet know the difference between English and Arabic, or how some words might become—borders, weapons, traps.

  *

  One day, my mother called me to her lap. She was holding a plump paperback; inside, straight and curved lines, overlaid by grid. Her long, unpainted nails traced them, then guided mine to do the same, releasing noises with each one.

  In the coming days, the shapes began to coalesce, sounds forming, traveling from my mouth to my mind. “AM” was first, followed by SEE and EAT. A body, presencing.

  I did not yet know the difference between English and Arabic, or how some words might become—borders, weapons, traps.
  My first story: that rat is sad.

  I was overwhelmed, stricken on behalf of the rat. Why is she sad? Where can I find her, can I make her glad?

  The world-making power of words never left me.

  *

  More lessons. In a sunny playroom, my father held The World, giving its plastic orb a spin. He placed his finger on a point and taught me the word Palestine.

  A revelation, and a loss. Before this, Palestine was ambient, limitless and undefined. It whispered in grainy photographs from Gaza, hanging in the hall. It breathed yansoon in the winter, naʿnaʿ in the heat. It held me in the muscled, soft arms of my grandmother, her bangles singing as she reached for me.

  I had Palestine, undefined. Palestine, like respiration—constant, unconscious. Vital, and sweet.

  How unbearable it is, to know life once felt so generous.

  *

  Of course, there was so much I did not know—all the Palestine that slept under my father’s bed, or boxed in the garage. Pages and pages, all in Arabic, traces of his past, which was also mine. A birth certificate from Deir al-Balah, Gaza. Old letters, report cards dating back to his first UNRWA classroom. A paper trail, a motley archive languaging through space and time.

  All this, he sheathed in silence. He was waiting for the day the land was no longer prisoner, when our hostage Gaza would be released. And so I was not touched by that word which defined his childhood—لاجئ, refugee. History would be easier to utter, he imagined, once Palestine was free. Later, later. Inshallah. In the waning glow of Oslo, he tried to believe.

  And for now, the bills and the dollars came in English. For now, he loved the way I pronounced words that tied his tongue. In the spring, he watered the grass as I covered the driveway with chalk flowers. He beamed at my quiet concentration, my head bobbing to an unheard song. His, filling with a litany of relief. How much easier my life would be. How much better he thought, how free.

  *

  Was he writing?

  *

  I did not think to resist, as language began to split. Like Palestine, Arabic was delineated, secondary, subset. Staggering: how easily its vastness vanished from view. Anglophonic dominance at the library, on PBS, at school. Arab silence, naturalized.

  And so I fell in love with words as they found me: in English. They arrived self-evident, confident as canon, and I devoured. Back then, loving books felt like another way of loving life: between the pages I lived, and lived, and lived again.

  *

  Was I a writer yet?

  *

  Even after we moved to Saudi Arabia, English crowded us. My father’s company, and our housing, was American. Around us, expats hailing from China to Senegal to Peru. English, the bridge between new friends. English, in our American curriculum and pirated DVDs.

  Arabic flickered on fringes, in the after hours. A crooning adhan in the night. The melodrama of mosalsalat. The language of long Fridays tucked in small apartments, crowded with cousins, elders, and noise.

  There, inundated by Palestinian voices, I felt myself briefly vivid, planted warm inside my flesh. Here, touching and kissing and eating and holding and language all seemed to do the same thing: remind me I was alive, woven, we.

  Was this writing? Reading? Palestinian? Being?

  *

  I always loved coloring. Then, around age eight, I began to paint with words. The sensation of falling forward, page as plunging. Letters, the wild and benevolent animals bearing me deeper, further. Sometimes I was the gallop, and sometimes, the world. Imagination, divine. Not commanding, but collaborating with exuberance. Feral and free of fear.

  My budding queerness murmured under the love stories I rewrote without The Prince. My body cartwheeled through outer space, smuggled onto submarines, sprouted wings or fins.

  And always, in some margin, I was writing the word “love.” Over and over, attaching it to name after name. I LOVE MOMY AND DADY. I LOVE SITTOO I LOVE TARIQ I LOVE ALL THE CATS AND HORSES. The words felt like a kind of spell—as if my love, written enough ways, could cradle the earth.

  Later, the strangeness of life grew sharper. I tasted melancholy, terror as I glimpsed my parents as mortals, the world’s senseless suffering. My own depths, too, grew ominous. Gaping, inverting abundance into threat.

  Once, I wanted everything inside me. Now, writing became rescue, a rope I wove and followed through the dark. Sometimes, when I felt safe enough, language became skin. Words, my tentative or tender touch.

  What I’m saying is, I was a teenager, a young woman probing her own heart. My life felt weighty and singular, and with writing, I tried to find its shape.

  *

  In these moments, was I Palestinian? Was my prose?

  *

  (((I would love art to be apolitical. Believe me, I would)))

  *

  As a teen, I moved “back” to the United States and found Palestine was all talk. Or—no, not Palestine, but conflict. Not Palestine, but Israel and the Arabs. Israel, besieged by explosive beings who were begging for a cage. Not Palestine, but peace process. American lips, barely parting with the softness of their “ps.” Process—their wistful, wounded civility. Peace—an English wish those at a distance were pleased to wish and wish.

  Voice cracking, she spittled me with the news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real.
  At my Ivy League university, I heard students debate the morality of apartheid, the reasonability of theft. One morning, as I stood at a memorial for 1,300 Palestinians killed in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead, a rageful white woman approached. Voice cracking, she spittled me with the news that I did not exist: Palestinians aren’t real. At this, I was speechless.

  Palestinian—unreal, yet my presence made some classmates feel unsafe. Nonexistent, yet my ethnicity made three different frat boys recoil. Later, a fourth one laughed about “Arab equality” as he assaulted me.

  .*

  If Palestine was occluded, Palestinian was read as affront, transgression, threat. How in English it was sieged with meaning, overrun with interpretation, starved of body and earth.

  *

  In college, I might have written poems. I wanted to.

  But with time, I began spending my words on persuasion, defense. How captured, how political, how Palestinian my prose became. I had been startled, distressed to discover Americans knew so little history. How easily, void of all context, they believed us savage, terrorist. How it hurt, to imagine my family so accused.

  So, I wrote to confront them with our Nakba, to name our suffering and dead. The inverse of my father’s optimistic edits—his Palestine was a bouquet of kind memories and words. My language, swollen, exhuming all he had wanted to redact. I packaged catastrophe in paragraphs. Spoke the syntax of NGOs, the language of lack.

  *

  How narrow this made us. How thin my words became. Trying to slip through their needle-eyed empathy, I was disciplined diction, subtraction and projection, sophisticated and benign. My body, too, tried to pronounce worthiness: see how unthreatening, it said, shrinking. See how controlled, how small.

  *

  How many years to unlearn this.

  How deep the silence, first.

  *

  Where does language go, when we betray?

  *

  When the words took me again, it was in the night. More alive in sleep, I was—dreaming, drifting in the mind of a child. Startling up, stirred by a young hunger that stole me to my desk. Many midnights I sat up with language, open, remembering. Inscrutable, at first—fragments of sensation, color, coalescing slow.

  Until, on the page appeared: Baba and his World. My grandmother’s arms, and her voice as it always was: felahi, free of American words.

  *

  For a year, I wrote in secret, relearning language in both my tongues. Finding Palestine strident, vigorous in Arabic. My English, humbled, listening.

  *

  It’s true, that what stirred me to write at first was grandmother, father, Palestine. But when I wrote towards them, it was not, this time, to prove. There was only the rhythm of my aliveness, the love which was remembering, remembering.

  Writing, beginning to be, like the beginning. Faint brushes becoming stronger strokes—language as the body’s echo, body as the instrument of life.

  I was becoming, uncovering,
  Palestinian,
  writer,
  at once
  again.

  *

  For the first time, I had a sense of—fleeting, furtive, fragile—home. In this space, English was the walls, but Arabic, the ground and sky. Two languages, blending, Arabic at last coming first. The false starts were many—I had misplaced so much language. But always, I held close that one line by Darwish—لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. We have a homeland made of words.

  *

  October, 2023. A rupture in time. A rend in the false present tense, past and future pouring through. In the shattering horror, how I craved disbelief. But no—this was both unprecedented and familiar. Not new, but Nakba, amplified to the depraved dimensions of “dumb bombs” and AI. Ancestral nightmare rising—in my blood, with our blood.

  Palestinian, on the far side of English safety, I am complicit—yet unfinished.
  How my body shook at the wild cruelty. How I wanted to tear the walls around me, so American and demure. And how my eyes—how, how, how?—my eyes, like everyone’s, watched the atrocity go on.

  Some editors scrambled to reach the Palestinian writers they knew. When they emailed, requesting words, I told them I had none.

  *

  Yet, in Gaza, language lived. Amidst Zionist onslaught, millions of dispatches rising, transcribing the shattered hours. Our phones filled with them—gutting footage, desperate and damning captions, inventories of heinous crime. This time, the Nakba would be televised.

  *

  Many of these Palestinians produce their messages in English. They die in Arabic, but know in which language they are killed.

  *

  The Darwish line continues: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ ….We have a homeland made of words. Speak, speak….

  *

  Tell the Americans, my cousin in Nuseirat, Gaza texts me in Arabic. His messages are holy and filled with horror—for over eighteen months, a record of a young man becoming ghost. Today, he speaks with a weariness that shudders my soul. Tell them: it is plain and simple: what we are facing is genocide, genocide.

  *

  Plain and simple—and so is my failure. Language, built by humans yet failing to encompass what they do. And yet there is love in the trying, and so I surrender to attempt.

  Learning: to face Gaza is to shatter—to lose, maybe forever, that child and her wonder, the universal and timeless joy. Her departure is a wound. The grief, a sign. To write and to live for a world in which she might return.

  *

  The Darwish line, in full: لَنَا بَلَدٌ مَنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلَّمْ تَكَلَّمْ لأُسْنِدَ دَرْبِي عَلَى حَجَرٍ مِنْ حَجَرْ لَنَا بَلَدٌ مِنْ كَلاَم. تَكَلِّمْ تَكلَّمْ لِنَعْرِفَ حَدّاً لِهَذَا السَّفَرْ!

  We have a homeland made of words. Speak, speak, that I may steady my path stone upon stone. Speak, speak, so we may know an end to our sojourning.

  *

  …to be a Palestinian writer—?

  To be, a choice obliterated, taken and taken from my kin.

  —taken, taken, my kin—

  Palestinian—now, I live watching Palestinian bodies bear what bodies cannot. (Until they cannot). My own body, Palestinian—the meaning, again, must change. Palestinian, on the far side of English safety, I am complicit—yet unfinished. Student of sacrifice, of fight.

  Writer, I choose to let my language break.

  *

  Speak speak, said Darwish, but then—

  Silence, he ordered,

  silence for Gaza.

  *

  *

  Like me, my cousin once was a child. In Gaza, there were days that he, too, woke exuberant, tumbling toward the gift of life. I know this—because he, too, is a poet. His language—exhausted, fuming, terrified—still carries the trace of song. The beauty in him, the last to surrender, even when his words speak defeat.

  Unextinguished, the Palestinian who is a writer, before Palestinian writer. The spark of where he began, and belongs.

  ______________________________

  The Hollow Half bookcover

  The Hollow Half by Sarah Aziza is available via Catapult.

  Sarah Aziza
  Sarah Aziza
  Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in 'Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications. She is also the author of The Hollow Half.

• Mizna - https://mizna.org/mizna-online/uncrafted-2/

  February 26, 2025
  Uncrafted #2: An Interview with Sarah Aziza
  by Hazem Fahmy

  In the past few decades, as liberal cultural institutions have grown more dastardly effective at co-opting and defanging the political potential of writers and artists from historically marginalized backgrounds, the amorphous imperative to “witness” continuously re-emerges in the face of unceasing tragedy wrought about by the United States, its ruling class, and its ghastly allies across the globe. We are implored to “witness” atrocity after atrocity, but never as more than bystanders, contributing nothing beyond sympathy, and even then, only for the “perfect victim.” I am drawn to Sara Aziza’s stunning blending of form precisely because it refuses this hijacking, asking us instead to unravel the dangerous language with which we understand and articulate the victims of empire from within it.

  – Hazem Fahmy, Uncrafted Column Editor

  HAZEM FAHMY

  Broadly speaking, how do you think about your relationship with craft as a term and a concept? And in what ways have you encountered it, institutionally or pedagogically?

  SARAH AZIZA

  I was definitely brought up with a lot of conventional American English craft. In high school, all of the readings I can remember doing were Hawthorne or Shakespeare—very white Anglo-American canon. I remember learning to write the five paragraph essay, and book reports, and things like that—being directed when examining literature to identify themes and answer questions and to believe that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between symbols. Usually there’s some latent Christian messaging as well. Funnily enough, I didn’t feel very keen on poetry until adulthood because the poetry I’d been exposed to before then just felt very mechanical, sort of transactional, like you’re extracting meaning.

  Then I studied comparative literature in college, which was a little better because we were looking at literatures from multiple languages and nations, but still in a bit of an abstracted way. I was expected to theoretically examine texts according to a few frameworks, whether it’s Adorno or Althusser, and literature was very much presented as this capturable, break-downable thing. And I never personally experienced literature that way at all. I experienced it as a very mysterious, undefinable power that evaded simple categorization.

  I was really interested in what felt interstitial, what was in the shadows, or the gaps, or the white spaces. There seemed to me to be an aura around the literature that most moved me, an aura that was supra-linguistic; a thrill and danger that was more than the sum of its parts. And yet, writing and literature were so often broken down into parts, given to me as formulas or rules. So it took me a long time to actually become a creative writer because when I followed craft directions, it seemed to be taking me parallel to the literature that I experienced as a reader.

  Later,I went to journalism school. Journalism has its own set of rules and conventions that also felt completely evacuated of humanity. It’s much more formulaic and has a more explicit commercial aspect to it in the U.S., where formulas are basically derived based on what is believed to sell to readers with diminishing attentions. So that was also a really suffocating kind of space to write in, one that felt very mercenary. I was trying to cover topics like Syrian refugees, or the Arab-American community, or women’s issues, and I constantly had to flatten and diminish the humanity, power, and political import of what I was writing about because of the craft conventions of journalism.

  So from both sides, academia and journalism, I just felt like I never had that many satisfying writing experiences. That changed when I dropped off from any writing for a while. When the pandemic hit, it was a time to seclude, and by then my disgust with American journalism had grown to the point that I basically swore off writing altogether. I was silent for a period of months.

  My eventual return to writing meant forgetting craft in a lot of ways, and finding this intensely private space. I was actually waking up in the middle of the night—like I was having these ancestral dreams—and then waking up and writing almost in a hypnotic state. Those moments were a gift, circumventing or short-circuiting all my training. I was writing only half-consciously, just in accordance to what felt good, and what I felt like saying. Conventional craft would have never gotten me there. I was using language in all kinds of experimental ways to try find some clarity, maybe some memory as well.

  I did that for long enough that when I finally woke up and was writing by choice and not hypnosis anymore, my body had a new sense of what writing could feel like. I was writing from a more instinctive, intuitive place. I was smashing syntax and eschewing grammar. Eventually, it became a very political practice where I recognized craft as discipline. I decided my language had to be feral after that—it had been very domesticated up to that point, and I wanted to maintain more of a sense of the independent, the angry, and the defiant.

  HF

  I wanted to go back to your point about literature’s capacity for mystery and the undefinable. As vital as it is to center an unambiguously political critique of institutionalized ideas of craft, for me it is also a question of pleasure. For example, there’s been much conversation about the “MFA novel” or the “workshop poem,” these really formulaic ideas of what a sentence should look like, or how a project should be structured—the kinds of characters and concerns that a work can be fixated on. Of course, these are also very political choices, involving what you can and can’t criticize or forefront, but it’s also about narrowing down what is enjoyable.

  SA

  I do connect those two a lot: pleasure and mystery. I think about Audre Lorde’s approach to the erotic as the source of our greatest power. I see the erotic as the space in which you are working, or living, or loving from a place of abundant truth and aliveness. That’s certainly different for everyone. But for me—from a very, very young age—I had this sense of life being so exhilarating, so vivid. It’s so hard to access that feeling right now, if I’m honest—in a time of genocide, of course, and generally as an adult.

  But as a child, I had this sense of wonder, this joyful feeling of the world exceeding one’s understanding, both bewildering and benevolent.. Every day, life gave itself and unfolded, and I really loved being alive. Still, pleasure for me in its simplest form is when I feel like I am learning something new, or am being challenged, put in a place to feel strange, even. Obviously right now, in the shadow of genocide, mystery for me takes on a much heavier undertone. I wasn’t naive a year and a half ago, of course. I was in the middle of writing a book about the Nakba. But now, my vision is so often saturated with the immediate, with material conditions, and I am bewildered in a much more menacing sense—how could it possibly be that this genocide has gone on for fourteen months?

  When I can, I push back on my despair by thinking about human goodness, love, and community I witness firsthand. It’s another source of mystery. And I guess there’s still something in me that believes in the worthwhileness of being here. Even when it feels like I can’t locate that in myself, I see it in people in Gaza, in my family there; the desire to continue living, to continue loving, to continue having children.

  To connect it back to writing—the mystery of literature for me does its best work when it cuts through, in the sense of what Roland Barthes called the punctum in photography. It’s different for every person, but he writes about how, when looking at a photograph, we might encounter some detail that pierces—through the mundane, through expectation, to the heart—and makes an imprint. For me, it’s through those moments of piercing, whether in beauty or grief, that the universe, life, and the erotic flood in. And it fills in a way that nothing else fills. Whatever it is that floods in that moment is the only thing, at the end of the day, that keeps me going. It revives in a way that basic necessities like food and water don’t. I’m seeking that for myself first and foremost when I write, and I really am dazzled and humbled if anything I write in pursuit of that ends up being meaningful for someone else. There’s definitely a shortage of it. That’s why, as idealistic as it might feel to say in a moment of genocide, art still remains essential. Beauty remains essential.

  HF

  You mentioned earlier that initially your relationship to poetry—like that of many people, certainly mine—felt very distant, like something that couldn’t speak to you. When did it, to use Barthes’s term, puncture through for you?

  SA

  There would be moments as a young adult, early teens to early twenties, where I would stumble across a line or two of poetry and it would take my breath away, but I was still more disciplined in those moments, so poetry also scared me. I remember Emily Dickinson’s poems terrified me. And she’s not even the most formally experimental, but there was something dangerous in her poems because of the way she strangles language.

  So while I stayed away from poems that seemed too easy to capture, I also stayed away from poems that felt wild. It was only in 2020 when I was in that period of torpor that poetry really became important to me because it, at its best, colors outside the lines, and can reflect urgency in a way that longer forms don’t. To name a few, in that moment, Solmaz Sharif, Kaveh Akbar, Dionne Brand, Mahmoud Darwish, and June Jordan were particularly nourishing and instructive for me.

  I love poetry that feels like it has broken edges, because I think that language should always spill into silence. I think that silence is much more important than words—language can so often exclude, or attempt to control, but silence is abundant in its emptiness. Poetry has more of a capacity to respect silence, to gesture toward all that exceeds us

  HF

  It seems to me like what you found in poetry during this period was the opposite of what had been pushed on you in journalism school. Journalism in the West in general, but particularly in the U.S., is obsessed with this idea of objectivity, which we’ve seen being put to particularly violent uses since October of last year. For you, to what degree was moving toward poetry moving away from journalism?

  SA

  I now feel like I’m always going through poetry with everything. I make a distinction now that might seem unimportant, but to me, it’s critical—I tell people: I’m not a journalist, I’m a writer. Because I refuse that myth of objectivity now. I only dwell in nonfiction because I’m invested in the possibilities of reclaiming it. It’s also definitely easier to categorize my work as nonfiction instead of journalism, but both of these categories have this sheen of supposed truth because it’s “not fiction.” Leaving journalism was very much due to my outrage at having to flatten the stories I was covering, whether of Syrian refugees in Jordan, or the Yemeni population here in New York City. Editors wanted an Arab-American journalist, but only to translate, in every sense of the word, for an American audience. I was hyper-conscious of the fact that any warmth, color, or anger in my language would all be chocked up to bias, and likely cut. And yet, my editors were also asking me to basically victimize my subjects, to portray them as victims. They wanted me to confirm their biases, in my Arab voice.

  HF

  I’m assuming they were also asking you to translate very particular narratives that a liberal American audience would find palatable.

  SA

  Absolutely. Even though my characters really didn’t belong inside those narratives. For example, I remember being sent to cover women’s issues in Saudi Arabia and meeting vibrant, ambitious Saudi women—but they weren’t allowed to exist that way on the page when I came back to write for American audiences. It was infuriating and demoralizing. I only managed to eke out a handful of stories in that mode before I just felt so disgusted and done. I didn’t write about Palestine at all during this time, because I felt like there was no way to write about it in a remotely humane or politicized way without being accused of being rampantly biased. There’s an argument to be made for trying anyway, but at the time, my soul couldn’t take writing Palestine for liberal white audiences. In general, I’d argue Palestine is the most disciplined subject in American journalism.

  So I was moving toward poetry around 2020 as I was also severing my allegiance to any audience, but especially the white American audience. At the time, I was not saturating myself with just any poetry, but particularly with work by writers of color and queer writers; writers who I was realizing I belonged with.

  Besides losing my interest in either earning or keeping an audience, I was trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say and who I came to speak for and to. Those questions had all just been decided for me at the beginning of my pedagogy, without me even realizing it. There was an implied audience and an implied set of subjects and ways to speak about them that I had inherited and hadn’t questioned sufficiently. The poets and other writers I was reading were helping me think through that.

  HF

  I’m curious about your feelings about the term nonfiction. I personally always hated it because I find it to be a nonterm; the thing that is not fiction, when it actually refers to such a wide and rich constellation of forms, sensibilities, and approaches.

  SA

  It’s so funny what people bring to that term. Like I said before, it has the potential to slip into some of the dangers that come with saying that journalism is “objective,” as if “nonfiction” has no invention in it. I don’t know what the root of the word “fiction” is—I assume it has to do with fabrication, but I think anyone who’s honest knows that we’re all living our personal narratives all the time. All of reality is created by imagination. Of course, we could also talk about emotional truth versus “factuality.” Since 2016 especially, people have made so much of the idea that we’re “post-truth” or that we now have “alternative facts.” I haven’t wasted that much breath trying to enter that conversation.

  When I started writing my book, I was trying to figure out a way to tell my reality, which is penetrated by multiple temporalities—ancestors, the future, the dead—and in this midst, glimpses of a self that is changing from one moment to the next. I was trying to grapple with all of these dimensions, unknowns, and silences—all of these modes and geographies, my imperfect Arabic and my imperial English—all of that happening at once.

  Attempting to represent all of that on the page, I tried out all kinds of different forms. I was mixing language, using devices like redactions and footnotes, and weaving in ghost stories; stories of my grandmother’s ghost, which felt so real to me that it did belong in “nonfiction.” I was trying to narrativize history in a way that mingled with archival work, reported fact, imagination, and ancestral intuition. I decided I needed all of those things to approach what I thought was the truth, which did not boil down to the strictest definition of “nonfiction.” That’s what art offers.

  The book exists, but it hasn’t been published yet, so we’ll see what people will think—but I have a peace of mind knowing that what I wrote was my best attempt to approximate that multiplicity, vastness, and mystery.

  HF

  The politics of knowledge is very contiguous in the context of Palestine and the West. The Nakba couldn’t be a legitimate term and history here until “brave” Israeli historians cracked open the archive and got the documents, until aging Zionist war criminals felt comfortable enough to proudly confess what they’d done in memoirs and documentaries. But Palestinians, of course, have always known what happened. There were always survivors and their descendants who knew and relayed what happened. Obviously, it’s not to say we don’t need the careful archival and historical work, but there’s a much larger issue here on who gets the “permission to narrate,” as Edward Said would put it.

  SA

  Empire is really stupid because of how narrowly it defines legible knowledge. One source of hope for me is the continued refusal of empire to actually exhibit real interest in its own survival, like refusing to take cues from nature, indigenous people, or history itself. When thinking about writing against empire, I think about emergency, about “resistance” in its many forms. But I also think about the desire to preserve who we are in our wholeness and beauty, our desires and interests and curiosities and idiosyncrasies; our uniqueness in the midst of resisting.

  In thinking about my relationship with English and English education, I started taking apart my syntax. I would download declassified documents from the 1950s and redact or appropriate the language and mess with it. It felt like there were lots of ways to be insurgent. I’m thinking about Look by Solmaz Sharif, for example, and how she takes the military dictionary and uses it as a starting point to craft poems against the US military industrial complex. But her next book, Customs, was also very different. So as much as resistance is a really fruitful and important place for me, I never want my craft, art, humanity, or existence to just end there. That would allow for too much of my life to be shaped by oppression.

  I want to write against, but I also want to write without. I always ask myself: what art would I create if I’m not even thinking about the oppressor? What can I write that the despots and fascists could never grasp or understand?

  I think a lot as well about Édouard Glissant and opacity when it comes to how stupid and limited imperial knowledge is. I love the moments where art, or even just human friendship, revel in themselves, in what the enemy can never know about us. I think that can be so beautiful, abundant, sustaining, and powerful. And it does work against empire because it begins to build, even if just on the page, or in a space, or for an evening, a different reality. It’s practicing, moving us toward the future that is the reason for our resistance. We resist in order to get to a place where we no longer need to resist.

  HF

  Before we get into Mourid Barghouti’s work, as we planned for this conversation, I wanted to ask you about memoir writing more broadly. As the author of one yourself, are there particular considerations of craft for you when it comes to this form?

  SA

  For starters, I’m very suspicious of conventional notions of narrative, the idea that you have to have rising action and climax, or a beginning, middle, and end. That’s very dangerous to me, especially because I’ve been writing a memoir that has to do with trauma, the Nakba, and recovery. I wanted to be very careful. For instance,I didn’t want it to be a straightforward narrative of “resilience”—I’m very suspicious of this term as it’s packaged and sold in the mainstream, based on simplistic ideas of redemption and clear binaries. On the other hand, when I was talking to agents and editors, most of them fixated on my female body and its experiences of ancestral and sexual trauma. Many wanted to lean into that in a very lurid sense. They looked for emotional, almost erotic descriptions of my fragility, my shrinking flesh. It’s a conscious choice to resist this fetishizing appetite for the trauma of certain people; queer trauma and female trauma, but obviously also Palestinian trauma, or that of the colonized subject more broadly.

  When I started writing about my grandmother, I was very sensitive to these considerations. I wanted her suffering and loss to be reclaimed, to be thoughtfully, faithfully presented in language. On a personal level, too, this was so important for me—because her trauma also informs the story of who I became and what my struggles were. Yet, I didn’t want to write about her in a way that implied she, or those like her, are just destined to suffer.

  HF

  To just be a perfect victim.

  SA

  Yeah, like Mohamed el-Kurd talks about. It was important for me to show her rage, to show my own rage. A quote from el-Kurd that I really like is: “we have a right to contempt.” It’s a little spin on Glissant, who’d said: “we have the right to opacity.” In that same sense, we have a right to contempt, anger, and messy feelings. I didn’t want my book to just be a shallow valley of suffering, one trauma after another, and I didn’t want it to be tied up neatly in a bow of “resilience.” I wanted my grandmother—a brown, disabled woman—and all my people to be granted the complexity, fallibility, and nuance that has been afforded to white, male characters for centuries. And I wanted to begin and end in irresolution—because that is how I experience the world, and because our liberation is incomplete.

  I was also thinking a lot about the responsibility of handling another person’s story. I was writing a personal memoir, but also a family memoir, so I thought a lot about the privacy of my grandmother and father, whose stories I was trying to approach and tell. I wanted to know as much as I possibly could—from other relatives, from photo albums and family records—in order to render their stories faithfully. I learned a lot from Saidiya Hartman’s words about writing into the archive while also respecting the sovereignty of those characters’ stories. There were things that I gave myself license to render on the page, and others that I felt belonged to no one but my grandmother, so I kept them out. I wanted her to be understood, but I didn’t want her to be exposed.

  HF

  This actually leads quite smoothly to another question I wanted to ask you, which is that of ethics in the memoir, especially as it’s one of the forms where this concern is most pressing.

  SA

  It was central for me. Besides what I’ve just mentioned, I was thinking a lot about how to approach putting less flattering things in the book because some of the people who harmed me were fellow Arabs. My grandfather, as well, was a complicated character. But as we were saying earlier, I didn’t want to write a story in which we were perfect victims. Because of what Palestinians are currently facing, I often felt this pressure that because I have a mic I have to show the best of us. I really struggled with that sometimes because I just don’t want to give anyone any more reason to disparage Palestinians, or more specifically Palestinian or Muslim or Arab men.

  But then I realized that that’s also dehumanizing because that’s not allowing us to be human, i.e. inherently complicated, fallible, and often misguided. It’s also desecrating our love and relationality. Because in reality, love is always fucking up. We make mistakes and harm one another. I was trying to find a way to welcome in some of that messiness because that’s also our birthright. We deserve to be full.

  Sara Ahmed talks about the risks of bringing up stories of trauma, specifically sexual trauma, perpetuated from within our own communities because white audiences are so primed to clutch to those things and say: “See? Look at these barbaric men!” But she also talks about the harm of rendering these things secrets—so it’s important to tell them with care. She’s another person I took ethical cues from when deciding to include certain things that ran the risk of being used against us. But in general, I just think it’s more important to write toward our fullness than to preemptively flatten and hollow ourselves out. That’s already done for us so much.

  HF

  Agreed, and to that point, I think there’s also a huge difference between someone writing about the experience of patriarchy, misogyny, or gendered violence in the particular context in which they have experienced it versus writing about how a racialized group is exceptionally or inherently violent. Plus, there will simply always be racist who are just waiting for anything to cling to in order to justify their racism against Arabs, Muslims, or whoever else.

  SA

  Exactly, and so I didn’t want to just be writing against them, just to prove that we’re not those things. That’s why I started writing toward other women or queer people, or even men in our community who are both deeply flawed and also abundantly beautiful and full of love. Writing against the oppressor’s expectation of me in that instance would have only reified it.

  I’m now thinking about how Barghouti, in I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, writes the histories that “history” won’t record for him. He writes: “I want to deal with my unimportant feelings that the world will never hear. I want to put on record my right to passing anxieties, simple sorrows, small desires and feelings that flare briefly in my heart and then disappear.” A little later, he goes: “We shall retell history as a history of our fears and anxieties, our patients, our pillow lusts, and our improvised courage. . . We shall make the two hour electricity cuts to our houses important events because they are important events.”

  I love how he focuses on the social mundanity of Palestinian lives. This is another ethos that I bring into writing. I really like the humility and the softness with which he writes and then has these moments of surging political feeling, as well.

  HF

  Something that strikes me about his book, which you alluded to earlier in yours, is that he seems uninterested in giving a linear account of his life, but is much more focused on these vignettes that tell a larger story of life in and outside of Palestine.

  SA

  Yeah, my book definitely weaves multiple timelines, and it is fragmentary in a way. Because Palestine is such an overdetermined category, his book was a breakthrough for me. It showed me you can take something as small as a single taxi drive, a single conversation, and write about Palestine through that. He talks about how “politics is the number of coffee cups on a table.” There’s such humility and boldness in zooming in on very simple details like that, especially because after ’67, his family couldn’t be in one place because of the occupation. I Saw Ramallah, for instance, opens on him standing at the crossing between Jordan and Palestine, and it’s just a moment-by-moment inching through this ordeal of crossing the border. It’s very simple and understated.

  He also didn’t just write with a global audience in mind, but very much with his village, as well. He’s constantly cracking jokes at his own expense. He’s constantly questioning if he’s the right person to write about Palestine. And he’s coming from this place writing poetry in a time when it was trending toward the very ornate and abstracted, whereas he wanted to write with a simplicity that did not equate shallowness, or a lack of seriousness, power, and love. It was very freeing for me to realize that I could write about Palestine in any decibl, that I didn’t have to shout, and it didn’t have to be dramatic. Adania Shibli shows this so well in her book Minor Detail, how the occupation is experienced in the little things. Barghouti talks all the time about how the meaning of the occupation is witnessed in some absurd or obnoxious thing, like how two teenage lovers can’t meet.

  HF

  In terms of the mundane, he’s also not really trying to tell a grand familial narrative. The book is really focused on the painful and absurd experience of fatherhood in exile, in his case a double exile since he also had to leave Egypt eventually. Radwa Ashour and Tamim Barghouti, his wife and son who are also very accomplished and respected writers in their own regard, are very present throughout, but they also appear in these very humble and simple ways. For example, there’s a chapter about Tamim being a kid and throwing tantrums because he was done with whichever European metropolis they were living in at the time.

  SA

  Yeah he’s not trying to project these big meanings of being Palestinian. He allows those meanings to accrete through a faithful, unassuming telling of his story. It’s very powerful and poetic at the same time. He stays in touch with what it means to move through the world as a father and a husband in exile, wrestling with things like occupation and chronic illness. When he talks about the wall dividing the West Bank, he talks about how it disrupts all these small aspects of daily life. He says that in his moments of despair, he feels like it will never fall. But he also knows that it will fall because “of our astonishment at its existence.” It gives me hope that, so long as we remain shocked by the unnaturalness of settler-colonialism, we have a chance of defeating it. Trying to stay astonished at evil, I think, is another thing that art can do, or help us do.

  HF

  In the final chapter of the book, after imploring Palestinians and other Arabs to reject the corruption and cowardice of comprador regimes like the Palestinian Authority (among many others in the region), he demands that: “Palestinians must repossess the moral significance of resistance, cling to its legitimacy, and rid it of the bane of constant improvisation, chaos, and ugliness. The oppressed only wins if he’s essentially more beautiful than his oppressor.”

  SA

  I do think that Palestinians have had a lot of practice in remaining more beautiful than the colonizer. Resistance takes many forms, but here, I see it as this commitment to one’s self-grounded beauty. Only from there can we truly appreciate the astonishing affront that is colonization, exploitation, war. I imagine that, for Palestinians in Palestine, being on and having a relationship with the land is deeply instructive, and renewing. For me in the diaspora, I must find other ways to remain awake to the fact that the reality in which I live is not natural. We all have a route within us to beauty. Mine is through human touch and relationality. All this requires defending, and it takes practice. So beauty propels our resistance, and through resistance we remain beautiful, moving toward the more natural reality— our future, freed.

  This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity and represents the first in a new interview series Hazem Fahmy is editing with Mizna Online titled Uncrafted, exploring intersections of literary craft and anti-imperial thought.

  Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Jewish Currents, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her book, The Hollow Half (April 2025), is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

• The Adroit Journal - https://theadroitjournal.org/issue-fifty-three/a-conversation-with-sarah-aziza/

  A Conversation with Sarah Aziza
  BY SWATI SUDARSAN

  Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, the Intercept, the Guardian, and the Nation, among others.

  Her first book, The Hollow Half, is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream. The book was just released from Catapult.

  *

  Swati Sudarsan: In The Hollow Half, we enter the book at a point of silence, where you are removed from selfhood. The narrative that follows is a journey back to the self, which goes through history, ancestorhood, and the body.

  At what point did you feel you had a story to tell? That there was a book in you?

  Sarah Aziza: I was really surprised. I’ve been dictating stories to my mom since before I could read, which I’d staple together with drawings, and make books. But as a kid of immigrants, I didn’t think the creative arts were an option for a livelihood. My parents never forbade it, but it simply wasn’t modeled to me. Being a journalist was the closest I allowed myself to writing.

  In 2019, I was coming out of the hospital after four months of treatment for anorexia, and felt completely dismantled as a person. The only thing I was really sure of was that my mind was broken, that it wasn’t something I could trust. I was afraid to speak. I was so sure that what would come out of me was stupid, or crazy, or both. Writing felt out of the question. I quit journalism and was moving into some odd jobs when the pandemic hit. I was here in New York, where the fear and lockdown were very acute, and it felt like the world was going off the rails. With all this, I began actively relapsing, as I describe in the book.

  But then, I started waking up in the middle of the night and having a very visceral sense of ancestral presence and memory. In a fugue, I would find myself at my partner’s desk—I didn’t even have a desk because I was not a writer. But there I was, typing in the middle of the night, writing from around 2 am until it began to get light out. At the first sign of dawn, I’d retreat, go back to bed, because I couldn’t face the fact that I was writing. It was terrifyingly vulnerable, and I was also worried that these episodes were a sign that I was losing my mind.

  But it continued, and before long, I had over 100 pages. When I forced myself to look through the document, I found common threads about Palestine and my grandmother. Reading through, I began to feel a sense of aliveness for the first time in months. It was irresistible. I began to write in the day and to actually connect with those pages. At the time, it was the only force in my life that came close to counteracting anorexia, which by that point seemed like it might overcome me again.

  Still, the writing remained an extremely private thing, and I assumed it always would be. Until one day, I was on a walk with a close friend, someone who is a kindred spirit to me. I mentioned these pages to her in passing, but she replied with this gentle certainty and said—it sounds like you have a book. I was startled. I felt a jolt of electricity, this sense of that being both impossible and wildly exciting. It took another year, though, before I gathered the courage to begin to really pursue it as a book.

  SS: I felt acutely by the end of the book that we had journeyed with you to this opening you’re talking about. The next stage of the journey, of a life, of the story of a person. This concept of simultaneous hope and fear comes up often. What hopes and fears did you have while writing?

  SA: Both the writing and the journey encompassed in the book have left me profoundly convinced that there is a deep knowing within us that is irreducible. In my case, a lot of my eating disorder tied back to the repression, and later recognition, of my inner self. Among other things, I spent roughly twenty years trying to stifle, avoid, or cover up my Palestinian ethnicity as well as my queerness. It was terrifying to approach these things at all, let alone write about them. But it got to the point for me where it was basically: tell the truth about yourself, or die. It’s dramatic in my case, but I believe everyone has some set of choices like this.

  SS: Your book tells us early on that borders are important. Of course, you explore overt borders — like those between countries, between family members, and so forth. I also felt the presence of borders of ideas: rupture and blending. Weight and empty space in the body. Hope and fear. Perfection and annihilation. Love and grief. They seemed to arrive spontaneously as dualities in the narrative, and sometimes in my body as I read. How conscious were these ideas for you?

  SA: These are all beautiful questions and ideas. Thank you for setting the table with these. I’m glad you didn’t just see borders literally.

  You suggest “ideas” as borders. I might have used the word “narratives,” but yes, also ideas and categories. The story begins at the far extreme: anorexia is nothing if not an infinite set of borders and lines and rules. My identity as “half and half” was another supposed binary. But this book ultimately is anti-binary, anti-borders. It wants to push beyond what we’re permitted to imagine for ourselves, whether it is gender or the amount of liberation possible, or the definition of what a successful/beautiful/correct self is . . . so yes, the real story begins in rupture, as rigid ideas of life and worth and history are collapsing. The space this created offered the opportunity to move forward into further ruptures—each one terrifying, but leading to a fuller, more complex, harder-to-define sense of self and world. And you said “blending.” I think that is wonderful. Key to this book is a sense of allowing multiple things to be, which is really the opposite of a border.

  At first, I was using writing to figure all this out. I tried so many things—copying and redacting historical documents, more Arabic, less Arabic, poetry, folk tales, transcripts of oral histories . . . And, of course, writing and rewriting scenes, memories, and dreams. I was trying out different notes, like a tuning fork almost—does this note match this inner sense that I have, this thing that is asking me to trust it and give it voice? It took a long time.

  But the trouble really started once I started trying to conceive of it as a book. I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but personally I hadn’t seen narratives which incorporated the ancestral, physical, intellectual, and temporal simultaneities I was experiencing. I didn’t think it was possible. But in the end, it had to be possible, because this is what feels like true self and true life, to me. I realized I had to be loyal to this, and not the “rules” of narrative. I was going to say plainly: my grandmother is here, time is not linear, the dead are with us. And I am different from the compartmentalized, disciplined person I thought I was.

  Really, it was my body that first pushed me to face this as a way of being—as you know from the book, there were a lot of mysterious ways history was showing up in my physical experience, queerness pushing through, all these things teaching me new ways to think about identity, time, and memory.

  SS: Etymological explorations of Arabic are important to your book. I remember when I first started talking to you about doing this interview, I thought about how it is such a generous act to share a life story. I remember I said to you, “thank you for trusting me,” and you said, “of course, I trust.” I thought about that phrasing for a long time after, with the verb at the end. After reading your book, and as our friendship has developed, I now come to think of it as a “Sarah-ism.” You say things like, “I fear.” Or “I hope.” It contrasts with how a lot of Americans speak. There is an impetus in English to carry out the sentence to a conclusive end. Instead of “I fear,” they say, “I fear (insert specific thing).”

  The way you speak creates a feeling of opening and a container, not just for an idea but a world of ideas. And on a larger scale, this book itself contains so many ideas and threads. What was the process of discovering these threads and learning how to braid them into a story?

  SA: Thank you, I feel very touched by that syntax observation. It reflects the way Arabic is in large part derived from verbs, and the majority of nouns carry the aura of their verb roots. There’s a viscerality to it, a sense of dynamism. My English naturally carries some of this over, but I also tried intentionally to put it in the book and not allow editors to comb out. I wanted the language to feel a little bit strange to an English-language-only speaker or reader for both aesthetic and political reasons.

  I love your words “container and beginning.” I feel very seen when you say that. It’s the new way I now try to move through the world. Anti-conclusion. A more honest way to speak and look at time and living. It’s always opening.

  SS: Where did language fail you?

  SA: It fails a lot, and especially when writing in the midst of genocide. In the face of the worst imaginable cruelty, I felt so small in my attempts to use language at all. The dedication of the book declares this before the story even begins: To love, and to Gaza—words fail.

  But even before the genocide, I began from the assumption that language will fail, and I think it is a beautiful and freeing way to relate to language. Language is the thing I love the most, but there is a type of surrender I try to practice in my writing, acknowledging that it is going to fail. Mental illness also defies language, which is why the opening section of the book is called “Silence.”

  I also use white space a lot, to gesture toward opacity and privacy. At certain moments, I may want the reader to feel they’re being denied entry, either to protect myself or remind the reader the limits of knowing another person, the impossibility of truly encompassing human experience. I’m saying, I can take you no further, language can take you no further. In my mind, the book ends in silence again—originally that was the name of both the first and final chapter.

  SS: Power is an important exploration in the book. I thought about it in many forms as I read. One way was through the names we are given access to. For example, your pet name is blacked out. This is powerful. When it comes to your abuser, we get the full name, and that is also very powerful. Also, you explore the seduction of false powers, such as the disfigured morality felt in anorexia, or the narrative of opportunity in immigration and diaspora, or how your blonde hair is a “performance” of power. I thought about how manipulation of existing power structures takes us away from belonging, which is its own sort of power.

  What is your sensibility of power?

  SA: That is a really profound thread for me personally. In one respect, I wanted to expose the hollowness of many definitions of “power” and “empowerment.” I was completely wrecked, despite having a lot of the trappings of personal empowerment. I was born in the U.S., I had a good education, I was able-bodied, and I had a lot of “willpower.” I went to the very end of what these narratives of privilege promised and there was nothing. Anorexia is also a perverted form of power. If “weakness” is need, I can be “strong” by denying myself things I need (here’s a binary), while performing, achieving—really, it’s a kind of dominance of self, and body.

  Any sense of power I have now comes from the knowledge that I have a self that is immutable, that can survive without any of these trappings or performances. That’s absolutely basic, but I needed to start there.

  SS: Your answer makes me think of resistence and power in genocide or pandemic, and how the act of witnessing is a type of power. Your memoir witnesses your grandmother. You talk about how she couldn’t be “the star” of her life for many reasons, and how outside of American culture, the sense of self is woven into other people and it is the weaving of souls. At the same time, you explore how in the West, we are taught to overvalue individualism. Your book invokes so many other texts, and I imagine part of the self you weave is built in part through your relationship with these many other souls. Can you tell me what it was like to witness yourself and your relationship with your grandmother?

  SA: Yes, my grandmother had this beautiful sense of always reaching towards others—her stories and thoughts and hands. Culture in the West insists that the ultimate achievement is to move independently, but this is actually a terrifying prospect. In my experiences in Palestine and Jordan, I find an interwovenness, a porousness, a general sense of being held. Not to romanticize it, but I think it is a truer reflection of reality. Of course, it can also manifest in self-effacing ways—my grandmother’s selfhood was often constrained by conditions of patriarchy and poverty. At the same time she had “عزة النفس”—it comes from the same origin as my name, “Aziza.” The root means “dignity” or “esteem,” but here it is reflexive. She had a dignified soul, and you really felt that around her too. Even as an older and disabled woman, she could stand her ground, she was a force to be reckoned with when she felt wronged.

  And I am grateful you bring up the texts that I cite. Everything that I am and think is part of a chorus, inherited or received, I have a thousand teachers. I’m a writer because I am a reader. I have a deep love for the citations in the book. They are homage, respect and love. It is very beautiful to let go of the idea of individuality. Now, I feel held in so many ways.

  SS: I would love to know more about your research methods. You told me that you had to teach yourself how to write in order to tell your truths most effectively, which in turn taught your readers how to engage with your work. What were your most creative or unexpected research methods? Where did you find answers you weren’t even looking for?

  SA: It was a journey. There was a lot of uncomfortable self-research, whether reading old diaries or requesting medical records from multiple hospitals. At the beginning, I was really questioning—how can we know ourselves? I decided to just go wild and think about all the ways a person might appear.

  Of course, I was hungry to know everything about my parents, grandparents, ancestors. I spent hours asking my mother and father about their lives, which was laborious, beautiful, sometimes painful, and often healing. One jarring thing that happened was, as I interviewed my father, many things he thought he didn’t know turned out to be repressed memories, which would come back suddenly, often hours or days after we talked. I included a small snippet in the book, it was so profound and painful, I wanted to share that moment in his voice.

  Eventually I had to expand out, asking older living relatives about my grandmother, about their own lives during and right after the Nakba. There are family documents, photos, and passed-down stories. I tried to exhaust these personal archives, and then moved to academic sources. With time I felt I was developing a kind of ancestral imagination, my creative abilities were collaborating with the past and there was a lot of intuition which synthesized with all my diligent reporting. I began to give myself license to leap between what I can surely know and what I spiritually and viscerally believe to represent the truth. That was maybe the most unexpected, the way that leaping began to occur, and how right it felt.

  SS: While you’re doing this difficult research, you have to think of yourself as a person capable of being harmed. You could even retrigger yourself! How did you take care to be safe while writing your story?

  SA: This is a constant question for me. It took me four years to write the book, not always chronologically. I was also trying to actively heal and recover, so when I felt I couldn’t push into something, I would stop. My body would tell me quickly if I went too far—I experienced all kinds of strange physical symptoms corresponding to different things I was confronting. It got very harrowing—some of this is outlined in the book.

  As far as practices to take care of myself . . . some were very simple. Short walks, sitting by the dog park, feeling the sun on my face. Trying to find ways to cushion my routine with rest and quiet. Other times, I’d go to a particular, noisy intersection near my apartment. The chaos jostled back into the present, a sense of the world carrying on, all these stories outside of myself. Letting more people into my life, more deeply. I remember the first time I let a friend see me really break down, in an ugly way. I was starved for real vulnerability. I needed to be held.

  When the genocide began, it felt like the world was ending every day. I was finishing the book but also writing outside of the book a lot too. I couldn’t protect myself from the extreme heartache, stress, and rage, so I tried to take care where I could: sleep was a non-negotiable, and I had to try to stay on track with food. Everything starts from the body.

  SS: What remains unexplored in this book? And I’m asking this without implication—maybe this is the next project, or maybe you reached the limit on something, or maybe this is akin to the constancy of arriving. How the very thing you explore mutates and shifts as you arrive, so it always remains just out of reach.

  SA: I lean towards constant arrival; I am curious and impatient to see what writing has for me next. I’m trying to trust, and be open to multiple possibilities, and retune my ears. This book had its own language, but who knows what the next project will sound like. Of course, the genocide is still ongoing, and writing is a limited facet of resistance, so I am open to the idea of doing other work in service of Palestine and liberation. I just went to Palestine a couple of months ago and came away with a profound sense that what I want to expand on is Palestinian life, possibility, futurity, even joy. We are more than any one political outcome, though some are more horrific than others. I want to resist genocide and occupation of course, but also not abandon everything that is beautiful and profound, that precedes and exceeds tragedy.

  SS: My immediate next read from reading your book will be The Secret Life of Saeed by Emile Habibi. You call it “the best map of the world I had ever seen.” I yearn to witness this. For readers, what do you yearn for them to witness right after your book comes out this month?

  SA: One that comes to mind is Perfect Victims by Mohammed el-Kurd. It’s really responding to this moment and speaking directly about narratives and Western complicity and poking through arguments that keep people from seeing realities. Also, three weeks after my book comes out, a poetry anthology called Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi will be published. I always recommend Heavy by Kiese Laymon, and anything by June Jordan and Ghassan Kanafani. Most of all, I’d want them to follow writers and journalists who are in Gaza right now. I’d want them to start divesting from the mainstream channels of culture and news and amplify the sources that really serve the people, there and here. Donate to mutual aid. Organize your workplace, agitate for divestment. It’s such a harrowing time, but that means we need to do more, not less.

  Swati Sudarsan is an Indian American writer who grew up in the Midwest. She was longlisted for the Granum Foundation Prize in 2024 for her novel-in-progress. She is a 2025 Periplus fellow. Her work is published in The Rumpus, McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, Catapult, Denver Quarterly, and more.

Aziza, Sarah THE HOLLOW HALF Catapult (NonFiction None) $29.00 4, 22 ISBN: 9781646222438

Battling illness while excavating her family's traumatic past.

In 2019, Palestinian American writer Aziza checked herself into a psychiatric ward in New York City in order to address a case of anorexia so severe that, at intake, her doctor told her that she was lucky to be alive. After successfully completing the treatment, she entered an outpatient program where she relapsed, months before the pandemic began. In the claustrophobia of lockdown, she felt trapped and panicked, depending on her husband for a level of support she struggled to accept. "I see myself anchored in my body," she writes. "Locked inside a life I want to love but cannot understand." Although quarantine made recovery feel impossible, it also gave Aziza time to explore her complex relationship with her deceased Palestinian grandmother, whom she called Sittoo, and the Gazan homeland that Sittoo was forced to flee long before the author was born. Between her childhood diaries, her father's memories of his mother, her own memories of traveling and working in Palestine, and a short foray into psilocybin-aided therapy, Aziza pieces together the ancestral trauma that, combined with her gender, forms the psychological basis of her eating disorder. Lyrical, vulnerable, and insightful, this formally inventive, deeply researched memoir masterfully weaves the author's struggle with anorexia with the history of her family and their multigenerational relationship with their Palestinian homeland. The author's description of her relationship with her husband is particularly poignant in its honesty and circumspection, providing a devastating picture of what it means to be sick around those we love.

A graceful memoir about anorexia, family, and displacement.

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 Kirkus Media LLC
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"Aziza, Sarah: THE HOLLOW HALF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827100982/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cbfadcf6. Accessed 30 July 2025.

The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders. By Sarah Aziza. Apr. 2025. 400p. Catapult, $29 (9781646222438); e-book (9781646222445). 810.

Aziza is at war with her own body. In morbid dread of fleshiness, grease, and fragrance, she has become addicted to hunger. While undergoing treatment for anorexia she reflects on her family history, especially her earthy, indomitable Palestinian grandmother Horea, a survivor of the Palestinian Nakba. Unlike Horea's timid son, who tries desperately (and ineptly) to blend into white America, Horea invades Sarah's decorous suburban childhood with tastes and odors of a vibrant yet alien culture. Horea is judged and mocked by Sarah's school friends and their parents, and Sarah internalizes their disgust. Eventually, Aziza writes, "I began to fear her fatness." Rejecting Horea means rejecting Aziza's past, her Palestinian identity, even her sexuality, for all are dangerous. While her father disappears through cultural assimilation, Aziza seeks erasure in starvation, and begins "chasing hunger over strength." Only by rediscovering her power as a Palestinian woman--in a body "rooted in bulk, solidity, girth. A body asked to be heavy, to anchor a shattered nation with her fortitude"--will Aziza, perhaps, be able to survive. A beautiful and sobering memoir. --Lesley Williams

Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2025 American Library Association
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Williams, Lesley. "The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 13-14, Mar. 2025, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847201902/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=89a05ff1. Accessed 30 July 2025.

By Sarah Aziza

Sarah Aziza's debut memoir, The Hollow Half (Catapult, $29, 9781646222438), is a vulnerable account that interlaces her recovery from an eating disorder with her journey to reconnect with a family history that spans generations of violent displacement. With stunning prose, Aziza, a Palestinian American who hails from a family of Gazan refugees, navigates effortlessly between geographies, timelines and languages to parse trauma and refuse the Israeli occupation of Palestine.

Early on, Aziza describes her father's "informal archive," a collection of items--programs from Aziza's college graduation, report cards, old IDs--that document his life, from his birth in Gaza to present day. Aziza creates her own archive as she seamlessly moves between personal narrative, journalism and history. From the opening pages, we are introduced to her life as a journalist, her eating disorder and her attempts to maintain bodily autonomy within what she experiences as a carceral recovery clinic. Depicting the multiple ruptures that have occurred in Aziza's life, The Hollow Half and is haunted not only by her present fight to recover her physical body, but also by her ancestral past. At the same time, the memoir is infused with Aziza's family legacy of refusing occupation and displacement, and practicing life and faith. Throughout the memoir, Aziza discovers the ways language and history resuscitate her Palestinian grandmother Horea's spirit.

Aziza's embodied narration travels from her childhood in the heat of Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, to the cold U.S. Midwest, to her present adopted home in Brooklyn and her return to her homeland of Palestine. Aziza also figuratively returns to this homeland through recounting her grandmother's and father's lives, embracing her inherited legacy of survival and love. We follow the rhythm of her explorations of the past in English and occasional Arabic, which is quite easy to understand in context and facilitates a deeper understanding of Aziza's family and culture.

As she tracks her movements through memory and dreaming, Aziza invokes the Palestinian poets Ghassan Kanafani and Mahmoud Darwish, as well as Christina Sharpe's In the Wake, which examines Black life and survival in the afterlife of slavery. Brilliant and surprising, The Hollow Half conveys memory as a "fight that accelerates your return."

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Ortiz, Monica Teresa. "The Hollow Half." BookPage, May 2025, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835362589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9872cefb. Accessed 30 July 2025.

"Aziza, Sarah: THE HOLLOW HALF." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Feb. 2025. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A827100982/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=cbfadcf6. Accessed 30 July 2025. Williams, Lesley. "The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders." Booklist, vol. 121, no. 13-14, Mar. 2025, pp. 31+. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A847201902/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=89a05ff1. Accessed 30 July 2025. Ortiz, Monica Teresa. "The Hollow Half." BookPage, May 2025, p. 23. Gale General OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A835362589/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=bookmark-ITOF&xid=9872cefb. Accessed 30 July 2025.

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