The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
Living between identities, or half identities, what does one embrace? Sarah Aziza’s memoir, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult Books, 2025) takes the reader through a journey of ramifications associated with identity. The book opens with a snippet of loss that is slowly recovered in memory and embodied by the author’s grandmother, who becomes a strong link in Sarah’s unification with her Palestinian identity as she traces her own belonging back to displacement in the 1948 Nakba.
In 2019, Sarah is battling an eating disorder, anorexia, and is placed under observation in a clinic for recovery. While in recovery, Sarah’s mind wanders to her first recollections of her grandmother. “In those days, perhaps, I came closer to my parents’ idea, a mixed child noy yet mixed up. Sitting between my father and his mother, laughing as all three of us tried to cheat at cards, I felt not Arab or American, but home.”
Elsewhere in America, as a Palestinian-American, Sarah notes the ‘otherness’ she encounters, starting with her family name. There is a distinct warmth to the turbulence of rediscovering the Palestinian identity which is juxtaposed against the individuality that is inherent in the US and particularly evident at the clinic where, despite evidence of anorexia having a higher incidence among minorities, the focus on wellness is dissociated from past traumas.
As Sarah describes the cold atmosphere of the clinic, memories of her past start seeping in, even as the author muses on her earlier childhood dissociation from her Palestinian grandmother. “When my grandmother died, I was startled by the size of the nothing that I felt. I grieved for my father, but told none of my friends she passed. I was ashamed to realise they had never heard me speak her name,” Sarah notes. Her grandmother died in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, in exile away from Palestine.
The book shifts between timelines as it follows cues from recollections. An apricot yogurt cup stirs memories of the Arabic language – the book uses Arabic etymology and script for several words and phrases that form part of the author’s memory trajectories. The Arabic language, in turn, provides a connection to Sarah’s grandmother as she remembers the blessings uttered in Arabic. Through words that impart more slivers of memory, the author traces her past through departures as she considers a person’s departure starts from home.
In her childhood, Palestine was still an abstract, an occasional mention by her father as she states, “There are no tales of shed blood, no wistful tributes to a lost homeland. My father simply hops his fingers, jumping decades and tragedies.” It was Sarah’s American mother that explained her father was from Gaza, but allocated no further room for discussion. Her father’s later assimilation to America, where the family lives, is linked to several experiences that the West has normalised but which cause rupture between land and people, such as being registered as Egyptian at university because “Palestine was not a country, not a choice.”
In stark contrast to the author and her father, living in America within a system that prioritised individual achievement over family heritage and history, the grandmother is a link to land, to history, language and all that is missing in the US. As Palestinian oral history becomes more prominent in the book, and Sarah’s visits to Palestine are documented, the emptiness that characterises the earlier pages, also reflected in the book title’s choice of word ‘hollow’, starts to diminish in the greater reality that is the current predicament of Nakba trauma over generations.
Journeying through oral history and through Palestine, the non-existence of Palestinians which is emphasised in the US is countered by relics of the past and the stories associated with them. Sarah first asks her father about her grandmother’s history, weaving together the beginnings of a story that is her heritage, noting that while she had no birth certificate, in the Palestinian village of ‘Ibdis that was first mentioned in Ottoman history in 1596, “names were kept by heart”. As Sarah delves further into her father’s family history, she notes the distinction between perfunctory learning and immersing one’s self in “the Palestine of my inheritance – brilliant, complicated, and sliding into loss.”
For Sarah, bodies also carry lineage, trauma and dispossession. Her experience with anorexia is reflected in the way she conceptualises the body as an inscription of history, life and experience. Meanwhile, for the rest of the world after the Nakba, Sarah’s grandmother is reduced to “a humanitarian subject, a unity of charity dangling from Western benevolence.” The perception is simplistic, particularly in a colonial context where bodies become witnesses to violence. Sarah’s perception of bodies as they behold colonial abuse when visiting Palestine is also documented – the verbal abuse and interrogations impact the body long after the immediate departure from the arrival hall – from verbal abuse to the surveillance system that is everywhere in colonised Palestine.
Visits to Palestine make Palestinian writers more tangible in their expression. And while memories are enriched, Sarah notes that the exotic or silenced parts of her Palestinian heritage in the US are experienced in Palestine as normal. “To speak Arabic was to simply speak. Palestinian dishes were just food,” she writes.
As the book progresses, dispossession becomes more prominent especially in Palestine. Loss is tangible in Palestine because of oral history and memory: “We reached across, and through, those losses … Here there was no knowing another without questions of history, of horizons treasured, and robbed. What is the earth that made you? What land does your body hold?”
By the time the book nears its end, the absence of Palestine which is prevalent in the West and in the US is challenged by its existence. Gaza in particular stands out in the book, not only because of the author’s own heritage but also due to the way Gaza is constantly singled out. “The relationship of resistance to the people [of Gaza] is that of skin to bones,” the author notes. With all the loss that is part of her family history, and the history of Palestine, the author constructs an existence that is painful but rooted in reality, making the novel’s title almost redundant as the hollowness is replaced by belonging.
