The Hollow Half
A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARD
A brush with death. An ancestral haunting. A century of family secrets. Sarah Aziza’s searing, genre-bending memoir traces three generations of diasporic Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City—and back
“You were dead, Sarah, you were dead.” In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is narrowly saved after being hospitalized for an eating disorder. The doctors revive her body, but it is no simple thing to return to the land of the living. Aziza’s crisis is a rupture that brings both her ancestral and personal past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a mysterious incident summons the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother.
In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Aziza unearths family secrets that reveal the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of violent Palestinian displacement and erasure—and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival and love. As she moves towards this legacy, Aziza learns to resist the forces of colonization, denial, and patriarchy both within and outside her.
Weaving timelines, languages, geographies, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create “nation” and “history.” Blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry, this stunning debut memoir is a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Palestinian-American journalist and Fulbright fellow Aziza delivers a visceral debut autobiography that braids mental illness, queer identity, and generational trauma into a striking meditation on exile. Centering on her struggle with anorexia, Aziza recounts the collapse of her body and marriage to a man she calls "C" in lyrical, often harrowing detail, describing herself as "a marionette with severed strings" before her psychiatric hospitalization in 2019. Her recovery was tenuous, hampered by subpar medical care and stubborn self-loathing. As she recounts those struggles, Aziza also writes of her budding queerness, cataloging the emotional toll of suppressing her desires in order to save face within her religious family. Threaded throughout is a reflection on Aziza's Palestinian heritage and the impact of Israeli occupation, particularly in Gaza. Aziza's disconnection from her body mirrors her family's geographic and psychic distance from their homeland, where longing for peace has calcified into "patience, sumud, and grief." It all adds up to a poetic and politically potent exploration of survival. Fans of Carmen Maria Machado and Rabih Alameddine will find much to admire.
