Book Description
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.
Praise For This Book
"Excruciating, to live in a nation, a culture, a moment in which one must continuously insist upon their own humanity and the humanity of those they love. And yet, so many of history’s greatest writers—from Darwish to Morrison—have taken up this project, fractalling shards of unprecedented experience into something as vital, precious, undeniable, as life itself. Sarah Aziza sings herself into that chorus with clarity and tenderness, writing, 'Palestine: an orientation toward a life that names, and holds open, the ruptures loving makes.' The Hollow Half is inventive, propulsive testimony, a lush love letter to a place, a people, and the resilience of memory." —Kaveh Akbar, author of Martyr!"The Hollow Half is a shimmering testament to disciplined love's exigencies and transcendent possibilities. It is a book that all who seek a path beyond the brutal systems and narratives of colonial modernity will return to time and again." —Nadia Owusu, author of Aftershocks
“The Hollow Half catapults every single expectation we have ever had of the memoir genre, and the settled memory. Is it a memoir? It's at least that. But Aziza both longs for and accepts radical tradition and the aches of innovation. The book is body and spirit, full and famished. I'm not sure I've read a book more unafraid of finding free.” —Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy
"In a world where 'survival requires a brief act of insanity,' Sarah Aziza has given us a miraculous clarity that is nothing short of catastrophic to a global order intent on paving over and dis-remembering Palestinians. Never have I read a book that has made me feel as loved, held, and cared for, in my Palestinian body, as The Hollow Half. Here is return translated, however im/permanently, into a kind of present tense. Here is a capacious dreaming, forming constellar kinship across, against, and despite borders in space-time, while never failing to return us to the body. This is a memoir we have all needed for many lifetimes." —George Abraham, author of Birthright and executive editor of Mizna
