The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders - Hardcover

by Sarah Aziza (Author)

WINNER OF THE PALESTINE BOOK AWARD
WINNER OF THE ANISFIELD-WOLF BOOK AWARD FOR MEMOIR

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.

Author Biography

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 Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.