EBOOK
About
With the lucidity of a poet and the precision of a journalist, Sarah Aziza embarks on a quest to understand her family legacy, tracing three generations of diasporic Palestinians-from Gaza to the Midwest to New York City, and beyond
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is hospitalized for an eating disorder. This brush with death becomes a rupture which brings both her personal and ancestral past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a cup of apricot yogurt stirs the taste of Sarah's childhood, summoning the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother. In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Sarah unearths family secrets that force her to confront the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure-and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival, and love.
As silences break, heartbreak opens onto possibility. Sarah begins to grasp the ways her legacies echo and inform one another-through tragedy, and through love. She begins to resist the forces of assimilation, denial, and patriarchy, learning to assert herself in new ways that honor both her ancestors and herself.
Weaving timelines, languages, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create "history." This stunning debut memoir ends in a cri de coeur for a world in which every body has a right to contain multitudes. "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 Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian-American writer, translator, and Fulbright fellow who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank, in addition to the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper's Magazine, Mizna, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, the Rumpus, NPR, the Koukash Review, the Washington Post, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and the Nation, among others.
In October 2019, Sarah Aziza, daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, is hospitalized for an eating disorder. This brush with death becomes a rupture which brings both her personal and ancestral past into vivid presence. The hauntings begin in the hospital cafeteria, when a cup of apricot yogurt stirs the taste of Sarah's childhood, summoning the familiar voice of her deceased Palestinian grandmother. In the months following, as she responds to a series of ghostly dreams, Sarah unearths family secrets that force her to confront the ways her own trauma and anorexia echo generations of Palestinian displacement and erasure-and how her fight to recover builds on a century of defiant survival, and love.
As silences break, heartbreak opens onto possibility. Sarah begins to grasp the ways her legacies echo and inform one another-through tragedy, and through love. She begins to resist the forces of assimilation, denial, and patriarchy, learning to assert herself in new ways that honor both her ancestors and herself.
Weaving timelines, languages, and genres, The Hollow Half probes the contradictions and contingencies that create "history." This stunning debut memoir ends in a cri de coeur for a world in which every body has a right to contain multitudes. "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 Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian-American writer, translator, and Fulbright fellow who splits her time between New York City and the Middle East. She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, and the West Bank, in addition to the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper's Magazine, Mizna, the New York Times, the Atlantic, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, the Rumpus, NPR, the Koukash Review, the Washington Post, the Asian American Writers' Workshop, and the Nation, among others.