A Conversation with Sarah Aziza
BY SWATI SUDARSAN
Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Paris Review, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, the Intercept, the Guardian, and the Nation, among others.
Her first book, The Hollow Half, is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream. The book was just released from Catapult.
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Swati Sudarsan: In The Hollow Half, we enter the book at a point of silence, where you are removed from selfhood. The narrative that follows is a journey back to the self, which goes through history, ancestorhood, and the body.
At what point did you feel you had a story to tell? That there was a book in you?
Sarah Aziza: I was really surprised. I’ve been dictating stories to my mom since before I could read, which I’d staple together with drawings, and make books. But as a kid of immigrants, I didn’t think the creative arts were an option for a livelihood. My parents never forbade it, but it simply wasn’t modeled to me. Being a journalist was the closest I allowed myself to writing.
In 2019, I was coming out of the hospital after four months of treatment for anorexia, and felt completely dismantled as a person. The only thing I was really sure of was that my mind was broken, that it wasn’t something I could trust. I was afraid to speak. I was so sure that what would come out of me was stupid, or crazy, or both. Writing felt out of the question. I quit journalism and was moving into some odd jobs when the pandemic hit. I was here in New York, where the fear and lockdown were very acute, and it felt like the world was going off the rails. With all this, I began actively relapsing, as I describe in the book.
But then, I started waking up in the middle of the night and having a very visceral sense of ancestral presence and memory. In a fugue, I would find myself at my partner’s desk—I didn’t even have a desk because I was not a writer. But there I was, typing in the middle of the night, writing from around 2 am until it began to get light out. At the first sign of dawn, I’d retreat, go back to bed, because I couldn’t face the fact that I was writing. It was terrifyingly vulnerable, and I was also worried that these episodes were a sign that I was losing my mind.
But it continued, and before long, I had over 100 pages. When I forced myself to look through the document, I found common threads about Palestine and my grandmother. Reading through, I began to feel a sense of aliveness for the first time in months. It was irresistible. I began to write in the day and to actually connect with those pages. At the time, it was the only force in my life that came close to counteracting anorexia, which by that point seemed like it might overcome me again.
Still, the writing remained an extremely private thing, and I assumed it always would be. Until one day, I was on a walk with a close friend, someone who is a kindred spirit to me. I mentioned these pages to her in passing, but she replied with this gentle certainty and said—it sounds like you have a book. I was startled. I felt a jolt of electricity, this sense of that being both impossible and wildly exciting. It took another year, though, before I gathered the courage to begin to really pursue it as a book.
SS: I felt acutely by the end of the book that we had journeyed with you to this opening you’re talking about. The next stage of the journey, of a life, of the story of a person. This concept of simultaneous hope and fear comes up often. What hopes and fears did you have while writing?
SA: Both the writing and the journey encompassed in the book have left me profoundly convinced that there is a deep knowing within us that is irreducible. In my case, a lot of my eating disorder tied back to the repression, and later recognition, of my inner self. Among other things, I spent roughly twenty years trying to stifle, avoid, or cover up my Palestinian ethnicity as well as my queerness. It was terrifying to approach these things at all, let alone write about them. But it got to the point for me where it was basically: tell the truth about yourself, or die. It’s dramatic in my case, but I believe everyone has some set of choices like this.
SS: Your book tells us early on that borders are important. Of course, you explore overt borders — like those between countries, between family members, and so forth. I also felt the presence of borders of ideas: rupture and blending. Weight and empty space in the body. Hope and fear. Perfection and annihilation. Love and grief. They seemed to arrive spontaneously as dualities in the narrative, and sometimes in my body as I read. How conscious were these ideas for you?
SA: These are all beautiful questions and ideas. Thank you for setting the table with these. I’m glad you didn’t just see borders literally.
You suggest “ideas” as borders. I might have used the word “narratives,” but yes, also ideas and categories. The story begins at the far extreme: anorexia is nothing if not an infinite set of borders and lines and rules. My identity as “half and half” was another supposed binary. But this book ultimately is anti-binary, anti-borders. It wants to push beyond what we’re permitted to imagine for ourselves, whether it is gender or the amount of liberation possible, or the definition of what a successful/beautiful/correct self is . . . so yes, the real story begins in rupture, as rigid ideas of life and worth and history are collapsing. The space this created offered the opportunity to move forward into further ruptures—each one terrifying, but leading to a fuller, more complex, harder-to-define sense of self and world. And you said “blending.” I think that is wonderful. Key to this book is a sense of allowing multiple things to be, which is really the opposite of a border.
At first, I was using writing to figure all this out. I tried so many things—copying and redacting historical documents, more Arabic, less Arabic, poetry, folk tales, transcripts of oral histories . . . And, of course, writing and rewriting scenes, memories, and dreams. I was trying out different notes, like a tuning fork almost—does this note match this inner sense that I have, this thing that is asking me to trust it and give it voice? It took a long time.
But the trouble really started once I started trying to conceive of it as a book. I’m not saying it’s never been done before, but personally I hadn’t seen narratives which incorporated the ancestral, physical, intellectual, and temporal simultaneities I was experiencing. I didn’t think it was possible. But in the end, it had to be possible, because this is what feels like true self and true life, to me. I realized I had to be loyal to this, and not the “rules” of narrative. I was going to say plainly: my grandmother is here, time is not linear, the dead are with us. And I am different from the compartmentalized, disciplined person I thought I was.
Really, it was my body that first pushed me to face this as a way of being—as you know from the book, there were a lot of mysterious ways history was showing up in my physical experience, queerness pushing through, all these things teaching me new ways to think about identity, time, and memory.
SS: Etymological explorations of Arabic are important to your book. I remember when I first started talking to you about doing this interview, I thought about how it is such a generous act to share a life story. I remember I said to you, “thank you for trusting me,” and you said, “of course, I trust.” I thought about that phrasing for a long time after, with the verb at the end. After reading your book, and as our friendship has developed, I now come to think of it as a “Sarah-ism.” You say things like, “I fear.” Or “I hope.” It contrasts with how a lot of Americans speak. There is an impetus in English to carry out the sentence to a conclusive end. Instead of “I fear,” they say, “I fear (insert specific thing).”
The way you speak creates a feeling of opening and a container, not just for an idea but a world of ideas. And on a larger scale, this book itself contains so many ideas and threads. What was the process of discovering these threads and learning how to braid them into a story?
SA: Thank you, I feel very touched by that syntax observation. It reflects the way Arabic is in large part derived from verbs, and the majority of nouns carry the aura of their verb roots. There’s a viscerality to it, a sense of dynamism. My English naturally carries some of this over, but I also tried intentionally to put it in the book and not allow editors to comb out. I wanted the language to feel a little bit strange to an English-language-only speaker or reader for both aesthetic and political reasons.
I love your words “container and beginning.” I feel very seen when you say that. It’s the new way I now try to move through the world. Anti-conclusion. A more honest way to speak and look at time and living. It’s always opening.
SS: Where did language fail you?
SA: It fails a lot, and especially when writing in the midst of genocide. In the face of the worst imaginable cruelty, I felt so small in my attempts to use language at all. The dedication of the book declares this before the story even begins: To love, and to Gaza—words fail.
But even before the genocide, I began from the assumption that language will fail, and I think it is a beautiful and freeing way to relate to language. Language is the thing I love the most, but there is a type of surrender I try to practice in my writing, acknowledging that it is going to fail. Mental illness also defies language, which is why the opening section of the book is called “Silence.”
I also use white space a lot, to gesture toward opacity and privacy. At certain moments, I may want the reader to feel they’re being denied entry, either to protect myself or remind the reader the limits of knowing another person, the impossibility of truly encompassing human experience. I’m saying, I can take you no further, language can take you no further. In my mind, the book ends in silence again—originally that was the name of both the first and final chapter.
SS: Power is an important exploration in the book. I thought about it in many forms as I read. One way was through the names we are given access to. For example, your pet name is blacked out. This is powerful. When it comes to your abuser, we get the full name, and that is also very powerful. Also, you explore the seduction of false powers, such as the disfigured morality felt in anorexia, or the narrative of opportunity in immigration and diaspora, or how your blonde hair is a “performance” of power. I thought about how manipulation of existing power structures takes us away from belonging, which is its own sort of power.
What is your sensibility of power?
SA: That is a really profound thread for me personally. In one respect, I wanted to expose the hollowness of many definitions of “power” and “empowerment.” I was completely wrecked, despite having a lot of the trappings of personal empowerment. I was born in the U.S., I had a good education, I was able-bodied, and I had a lot of “willpower.” I went to the very end of what these narratives of privilege promised and there was nothing. Anorexia is also a perverted form of power. If “weakness” is need, I can be “strong” by denying myself things I need (here’s a binary), while performing, achieving—really, it’s a kind of dominance of self, and body.
Any sense of power I have now comes from the knowledge that I have a self that is immutable, that can survive without any of these trappings or performances. That’s absolutely basic, but I needed to start there.
SS: Your answer makes me think of resistence and power in genocide or pandemic, and how the act of witnessing is a type of power. Your memoir witnesses your grandmother. You talk about how she couldn’t be “the star” of her life for many reasons, and how outside of American culture, the sense of self is woven into other people and it is the weaving of souls. At the same time, you explore how in the West, we are taught to overvalue individualism. Your book invokes so many other texts, and I imagine part of the self you weave is built in part through your relationship with these many other souls. Can you tell me what it was like to witness yourself and your relationship with your grandmother?
SA: Yes, my grandmother had this beautiful sense of always reaching towards others—her stories and thoughts and hands. Culture in the West insists that the ultimate achievement is to move independently, but this is actually a terrifying prospect. In my experiences in Palestine and Jordan, I find an interwovenness, a porousness, a general sense of being held. Not to romanticize it, but I think it is a truer reflection of reality. Of course, it can also manifest in self-effacing ways—my grandmother’s selfhood was often constrained by conditions of patriarchy and poverty. At the same time she had “عزة النفس”—it comes from the same origin as my name, “Aziza.” The root means “dignity” or “esteem,” but here it is reflexive. She had a dignified soul, and you really felt that around her too. Even as an older and disabled woman, she could stand her ground, she was a force to be reckoned with when she felt wronged.
And I am grateful you bring up the texts that I cite. Everything that I am and think is part of a chorus, inherited or received, I have a thousand teachers. I’m a writer because I am a reader. I have a deep love for the citations in the book. They are homage, respect and love. It is very beautiful to let go of the idea of individuality. Now, I feel held in so many ways.
SS: I would love to know more about your research methods. You told me that you had to teach yourself how to write in order to tell your truths most effectively, which in turn taught your readers how to engage with your work. What were your most creative or unexpected research methods? Where did you find answers you weren’t even looking for?
SA: It was a journey. There was a lot of uncomfortable self-research, whether reading old diaries or requesting medical records from multiple hospitals. At the beginning, I was really questioning—how can we know ourselves? I decided to just go wild and think about all the ways a person might appear.
Of course, I was hungry to know everything about my parents, grandparents, ancestors. I spent hours asking my mother and father about their lives, which was laborious, beautiful, sometimes painful, and often healing. One jarring thing that happened was, as I interviewed my father, many things he thought he didn’t know turned out to be repressed memories, which would come back suddenly, often hours or days after we talked. I included a small snippet in the book, it was so profound and painful, I wanted to share that moment in his voice.
Eventually I had to expand out, asking older living relatives about my grandmother, about their own lives during and right after the Nakba. There are family documents, photos, and passed-down stories. I tried to exhaust these personal archives, and then moved to academic sources. With time I felt I was developing a kind of ancestral imagination, my creative abilities were collaborating with the past and there was a lot of intuition which synthesized with all my diligent reporting. I began to give myself license to leap between what I can surely know and what I spiritually and viscerally believe to represent the truth. That was maybe the most unexpected, the way that leaping began to occur, and how right it felt.
SS: While you’re doing this difficult research, you have to think of yourself as a person capable of being harmed. You could even retrigger yourself! How did you take care to be safe while writing your story?
SA: This is a constant question for me. It took me four years to write the book, not always chronologically. I was also trying to actively heal and recover, so when I felt I couldn’t push into something, I would stop. My body would tell me quickly if I went too far—I experienced all kinds of strange physical symptoms corresponding to different things I was confronting. It got very harrowing—some of this is outlined in the book.
As far as practices to take care of myself . . . some were very simple. Short walks, sitting by the dog park, feeling the sun on my face. Trying to find ways to cushion my routine with rest and quiet. Other times, I’d go to a particular, noisy intersection near my apartment. The chaos jostled back into the present, a sense of the world carrying on, all these stories outside of myself. Letting more people into my life, more deeply. I remember the first time I let a friend see me really break down, in an ugly way. I was starved for real vulnerability. I needed to be held.
When the genocide began, it felt like the world was ending every day. I was finishing the book but also writing outside of the book a lot too. I couldn’t protect myself from the extreme heartache, stress, and rage, so I tried to take care where I could: sleep was a non-negotiable, and I had to try to stay on track with food. Everything starts from the body.
SS: What remains unexplored in this book? And I’m asking this without implication—maybe this is the next project, or maybe you reached the limit on something, or maybe this is akin to the constancy of arriving. How the very thing you explore mutates and shifts as you arrive, so it always remains just out of reach.
SA: I lean towards constant arrival; I am curious and impatient to see what writing has for me next. I’m trying to trust, and be open to multiple possibilities, and retune my ears. This book had its own language, but who knows what the next project will sound like. Of course, the genocide is still ongoing, and writing is a limited facet of resistance, so I am open to the idea of doing other work in service of Palestine and liberation. I just went to Palestine a couple of months ago and came away with a profound sense that what I want to expand on is Palestinian life, possibility, futurity, even joy. We are more than any one political outcome, though some are more horrific than others. I want to resist genocide and occupation of course, but also not abandon everything that is beautiful and profound, that precedes and exceeds tragedy.
SS: My immediate next read from reading your book will be The Secret Life of Saeed by Emile Habibi. You call it “the best map of the world I had ever seen.” I yearn to witness this. For readers, what do you yearn for them to witness right after your book comes out this month?
SA: One that comes to mind is Perfect Victims by Mohammed el-Kurd. It’s really responding to this moment and speaking directly about narratives and Western complicity and poking through arguments that keep people from seeing realities. Also, three weeks after my book comes out, a poetry anthology called Heaven Looks Like Us: Palestinian Poetry, edited by George Abraham and Noor Hindi will be published. I always recommend Heavy by Kiese Laymon, and anything by June Jordan and Ghassan Kanafani. Most of all, I’d want them to follow writers and journalists who are in Gaza right now. I’d want them to start divesting from the mainstream channels of culture and news and amplify the sources that really serve the people, there and here. Donate to mutual aid. Organize your workplace, agitate for divestment. It’s such a harrowing time, but that means we need to do more, not less.
