The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

• Book Author(s):Sarah Aziza
• Publisher:Catapult Books, 2025
• ISBN-13:9781646222438

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.

https://www.middleeastmonitor.com/20251031-the-hollow-half-a-memoir-of-bodies-and-borders/