In Living a Feminist Life, writer Sarah Ahmed wrote that, “A body in touch with a world can become a body that fears the touch of the world … It is too much.”
This, of course, is why withdrawal from our troubled universe can hold incredible appeal, at least for some of us.
Aziza vividly describes the 1948 Nakba that forced her family to flee their village.
Take writer-translator-activist Sarah Aziza, whose new book, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, charts her attempt to vanish into life-threatening anorexia. Her physical decline and subsequent hospitalization reveal a psychic fracturing that intersects with the fracturing and destruction of her father’s Palestinian homeland.
Aziza vividly describes the 1948 Nakba that forced her family to move from Ibdis — what was a Palestinian village north of Gaza City — to the village of Deir al-Balah in Gaza. Although they eventually found tenuous security in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, the horrific impact of repeated displacement on grandmother Horea, grandfather Musa and their children led to years of family separation and profound economic instability. For their youngest son, Ziyad, Aziza’s dad, the allure of emigration to the United States was strong — she reports that propaganda touting America as a land of abundance and possibility was a constant in Ziyad’s childhood and adolescence. He ultimately left his family, moved to the United States, learned English, attended university, married an American Protestant, and began to assimilate.
But it was never easy.
Likewise, The Hollow Half. The book, an account of the author’s battle with a severe eating disorder, is woven into a riveting political-familial history of Palestine. A host of quotes from well-known writers and thinkers offers a kaleidoscopic overview of the social milieu that shapes life in both the United States and within the Palestinian diaspora.
In addition, Aziza offers a spare account of her heterosexual marriage and alludes to her bisexuality.
It’s an unusual, complicated, and at times, difficult mix.
Poetic and incisive, the memoir’s core centers around Aziza’s relationship with Sittoo (grandma) Horea, who spent long periods living with the family in their suburban Illinois home. The fact that Sittoo never learned English and ate while sitting on the floor irritated teenage Aziza, and she recounts cruel comments from American friends and neighbors who laughed at Sittoo’s traditions and mannerisms. Looking back, she bristles at her failure to rebuff offensive comments meant to hammer home that being of mixed race and of mixed religious heritage made her an outsider in her largely white, Christian Midwestern community.
Even decades later, Aziza finds this galling.
Deeply reflective and often touching, The Hollow Half leaves numerous unanswered questions about Aziza’s mental and physical health, sexuality, and future as an activist and writer. Indeed, she seems to be perpetually on edge and fearful of incursions that threaten her safety and security. In delineating the reasons for her precarity, she writes, “For me, girl came first, then Palestinian. Woman and queer were tangled together, one overdetermined, the other gagged. Each one of these words a border, a frontier that told me: lose yourself, or disappear.”
Aziza has done neither. Indeed, in penning The Hollow Half, she has asserted herself and affirmed her right not only to exist but to be seen and heard.
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The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
By Sarah Azizaa
Catapult Books
386 pages
