Palestinian American author Sarah Aziza’s debut memoir, The Hollow Half, 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, 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. In The Hollow Half, 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. As the book’s cover mentions, “It is not a simple thing to return to the land of the living.” The Hollow Half depicts the multiple ruptures that have occurred in Aziza’s life 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, a place tethered to her soul, 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.
Aziza admits she is “a hungry daughter” and wants to “rescue every fragment of us.” 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: On Blackness and Being, 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.”