Sarah Aziza: On the Nature of Silence, Archives of Love, Palestine, and Her Hybrid Memoir ‘The Hollow Half’

Silence is complicity—that is an idea that I’ve been grappling with for the past few weeks, as I considered how to introduce my interview with Sarah Aziza about her hybrid memoir, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders (Catapult, 2025). The book interweaves Aziza’s personal history in battling and recovering from an eating disorder with her family stories and the history of the Palestinian diaspora. Through memories that move between the spectral (perhaps exactly how they come to us in the throes of illness) and the concrete, narratives that shift between the individual and the generational, The Hollow Half is as focused as one person’s journey but as varied as the long traces of families and forces that shape us. And with deft structural choices—a wealth of footnotes and endnotes, the use of white spaces, what it offers us as well as what it holds back—the memoir reads as if one was drawn into a complex and intimate conversation with the author. A conversation where I respected the points I disagreed with and appreciated all that I was allowed to see. 

During our actual conversation, I spoke with Aziza about the choices that gave the book its unique shape. But what’s more, we spoke about what wasn’t there. We spoke about the different kinds of silence the memoir presents us. The silence that it opens with, the silence of repression. The silence that exists in the white spaces on the page and the words left unwritten: ones of horrors unspeakable, but also ones of breath and reflection—a time for the depicted’s privacy and a chance for the readers to form their own responses. We spoke about these silences within the failure of language, both in capturing the true expanses of a memory or a person, and as fresh atrocities may unfold daily. As our interview ran the gamut of the process and ethics behind the writing of The Hollow Half, I was struck by how thoughtfully Aziza has constructed her work of personal and ancestral history. I was also reminded of how each word that a writer places on the page—each decision of subject and craft—may carry a boundless echo of responsibilities. There is a limit to what words alone can accomplish, but in the end, we arrived at a question I frequently ask writers I encounter today. Writers often braver than I am. Because though writing might be one antithesis to silence, how might we persist to cross that line with real, personal consequences on the other side? A barring from home (which Aziza abruptly experienced and describes in the book), a deportation, an arrest, worse and more: costs often less visceral than the ones we speak out about, but visceral nonetheless. The answer, perhaps, I already knew. But it is always good to have the reminder, and again, and again. 

Jessica Bao: I wanted to start with the unique structure of the book, which drew my attention immediately with the footnotes, endnotes, and direct quotations—the majority of which are references but some are in your own voice. Would you speak about your research process, but also your choices of what to include where?

Sarah Aziza: Structure is such an important part of making a book, and I definitely tried a lot of different things. One thing that I knew was important going into it was finding a way to represent on the page how different temporalities and geographies and layers of thought might be operating at the same time. Extricating myself from this idea of time being linear and myself as just an individual going through her life—these very Western notions of self and agency. It was really important for me to extricate myself from that belief and move according to what I felt was closer to my reality. My reality is multi-temporal and tied to a lot of different geographies and other lives. I also wanted to represent the way that macro political and historical events are intersecting with individual lives. We’re reacting, we’re affected, we’re limited, we’re making choices in response to the events around us. 

I started out with this basketful of these different kinds of footnotes. There would be the footnotes that call into question or create tension with something I’m writing. Undermining the idea of a single author, a single narrative, was important to me. Author shares a root with authoritarian, with authority, so to be a more subversive and horizontally shaped book—I wanted to even question the author through that method. So there were those kinds of footnotes troubling or complicating my thoughts. There were other footnotes where I wanted to gesture towards my lineage, towards thinkers and writers and artists that have influenced me, because a self is built out of many inputs, many ancestors. Literal ancestors and many other kinds of ancestors. And then there were the notations about political events, some of them were meant to be incriminating. I didn’t want the story, for example, of my family’s exile from Gaza to live on the page just as a single family story. I didn’t want the reader to have any doubt that it was a specific political choice by specific powers that created that violence. So there are footnotes that quote different American presidents or Israeli prime ministers boasting about ethnic cleansing. I didn’t want this to be reduced to just a personal memoir. It’s a wider lens than that. 

Then the decision to split the footnotes up was because I didn’t want to overwhelm the page. Putting in the back the things that point more towards lineage, conversation, putting into tension different meanings in the book, so those readers who wanted to join that conversation or discover some of the treasures of these writers that aren’t always included in the Western canon—those are all the nuggets at the back. I called it diwan, which in Arabic culture is a place of gathering to settle disputes or discuss affairs. So sort of inviting the reader, if they want to, to join that gathering. Then on the bottom of the page, I left the footnotes that I didn’t want the reader to have the option to look away from. Most of the time it’s political facts, like the fact that it was a political decision by presidents and prime ministers to bomb Gaza or create the ethnic cleansing of 1948. So you get the story of my family being slaughtered or ethnically cleansed, but at the bottom you get a reminder that it was paid for by tax dollars or it was supported by Western colonial thinking. There were multiple reasons why I chose what I chose, and that’s kind of the rough distribution.

JB: In your mind, do you have a correct way of reading the book? When I was reading it, I had a separate bookmark for the endnotes and I’d just flip back-and-forth as the numbers came up. But what’s your ideal, if any?

SA: Oh, I love that. I obviously think it’s not my place to tell anyone how to read the book, but my ideal is actually what you described. It’s more work, but in my thinking, it’s much richer. The word jostling was with me a lot when I was writing. I wanted this book to jostle, to have lots of texture and complexity and to create thoughts in the reader’s mind. I didn’t want them to just be passively receiving. I wanted there to be a jostling of ideas. I also think some of the quotes create interesting echoes with the main page. So, in my mind, that’s what would be the most enriching way to read the book. But people took it all kinds of different ways, and that’s totally cool and fascinating to find out.

JB: Structure-wise, there is also an intriguing use of space throughout The Hollow Half. You put certain lines, such as questions, on a single page. For example, “Does a body carry such separations as weight or empty space?” For the line, “I feel my grandmother fall, fall, falling,” there is also that empty space all the way down the page. How did you work with this use of space?

SA: Empty space is important for me, because I felt that the book opens in silence. The first section is called silence, in that I was gesturing towards the silence of mental illness or trauma. It’s the silence of repression. Forced silence. But there are many other kinds of silence in the book. There’s the silence of mystery, the silence of reverence, the silence of rest. Sometimes the white spaces for me were a moment of rest, but a lot of the times, especially in the text that you highlighted, they were more a gesture towards the failure of language or the limits of language. The limits of one person knowing another person’s experience. My grandmother, I take a lot of steps towards her, and I felt a lot of liberty and almost collaboration with her spirit when I was writing. I thought deeply. I really meditated on her. I listened to story after story from relatives and there were moments where I felt like I could reconstruct a scene or infer an emotion. But then there were other moments where I felt like it was the most respectful and accurate to pose a question and then leave it. It’s a nod to the privacy of her experience and the privacy of each individual person. 

And then there are moments where horror overtakes language, like “I feel my grandmother fall, fall, falling,” or the empty space quote at the end of the story of my family leaving Gaza. I just felt silence and white space. The visual of Is that obliteration? Is that a slippage of language? Is that mystery? Is that the unknown? I wanted to leave a lot of that up to the reader, and I was trusting their heart to take that last step. Instead of language taking them there, I feel like the human response to some of the questions or lines might be sufficient. And if not, I wanted to respectfully bow out as the writer. 

JB: One of the things that I jotted down as I read your book was how precise and graceful the language is, but I love what you just touched upon about the failure of language. Could you speak more about this approach to language—not only with its possibilities, but also with its limits?

SA: I thought a lot about the failure of language, first from a perspective of love. The love and honor I have for these family members, or the place of Palestine, or even my past self—that’s one of the reasons I was very intimidated at first to write any of this. I think many of us have felt this feeling of wanting to write something and feeling inadequate. So there’s simply that the measure I want to do justice to a thing or a person, and then what I feel like my capacity in language is, is one type of failure. That’s an acceptance that I have to make all the time as an artist. Then there was the question of the selection. There’s so much I left out of the book, so there’s the limits of language in just a book form. 

But I think that the larger thing, or the thing that haunts me and haunted me the most, was I wrote about half of this book during the ongoing, escalating genocide after October 7th. So there’s a new scale of horror in the present that is unfolding before my eyes. Then I really felt the failure of language, because there's no way I could keep up with everything that we were losing and all of the lives that were being lost. And there’s no way I could encompass any percentage of that in my book. The book’s arc was clear to me already, even though I had a lot more writing to do. And it was very important for me to keep it small in a lot of ways, because I feel like in many ways, the most profound writing for me doesn’t try to capture everything. It tries to follow closely a few characters or a few ideas. But I had lots of moments where I thought, how dare I try to write right now when there’s so much death? It feels so futile. The dedication of the book is “[for love & for Gaza] words fail,” and that was important to me to gesture that this book won’t save Palestine. This book won’t ever contain any one of these lives in its entirety. It won’t ever do justice to a single one of these people, and it won’t ever bring back all the things I’m describing that we lost. It’s more of a tribute and a call to a fuller engagement with life right now. But it won’t compensate for the material violence that we’re seeing. It won't undo the Nakba. I hope it will help us attach ourselves more to the things we love and commit ourselves more to the struggle to make this a more livable place for all of us. But that’s the greatest hope that I can conjure, that for me falls short of what I wish I could do with language.

JB: Could you speak more about the process of writing this book, and what changed or didn’t change after October 7th, 2023?

SA: The story starts in 2019—and [goes back to] 1920 and 1948, you know—but the position where you meet me is around 2019. The writing itself started early 2020, which was a different world, and it started by accident. I had sworn off writing. After being hospitalized in a mental health institution, I really was convinced that my brain was broken. I was very humiliated and my confidence was really shaken, so the idea of writing anything or even speaking—it felt really hard to imagine ever doing that again. But what got me going was a series of dreams that I would just wake up from in the middle of the night. I was dreaming about my grandmother, literally, and sort of in this fugue state where because I’m a writer I could only process it by writing. At the time, I was actively losing the fight against relapse that I describe in the book. So I’m not doing well mentally, but there’s this one thing that’s pulling on me besides my eating disorder. That’s this remembering of my grandmother, and I was moving towards it through writing, trying to write down everything I could remember about her without really thinking about it. It was a messy Google Doc. I didn’t think it was turning into anything. So that’s how it started, and that’s how it went for months: reaching the limit of my memories very quickly and starting to collect family stories as a way of getting to know my grandmother more, which reignited this hunger to be closer to my father. And then without realizing it, it was bringing me closer to myself. 

It really wasn’t conceived of as a book until 2022, and then I was working on a proposal, and I really had to start thinking about structure. At the time, I had collected probably two hundred pages of memories, transcriptions, and I’d gone in the archive and pulled out redacted documents from the 1950s NSA and things like that. It feels like all of this is related, but this is chaos. So how do I not sacrifice complexity? Because sacrificing complexity is actually part of what drove me to be so sick, trying to reduce my reality to what was legible and approved of and demonstrated to me in culture, which is that you’re an individual, you’re safe here, you’re separate from history, history’s in the past, you’re in the present. All these things I was taking apart, but how do you make that into a book? So all that to say, I had started to settle on a thematic structure, which [was choosing] an Arabic word [for each chapter], and then I braid together a few timelines and lines of inquiry in a single chapter under the umbrella of this word. 

So I was working on that, but the last chapter was a different word, a different concept, a different direction. And after October 7th, I was just so shattered and it was so horrific. The one thing that it did do to the book is that it made me want the last chapter to be about resistance. I wanted everyone to leave the book understanding what led up to the current moment. I don’t actually go into October 7th because that didn’t feel right, but I wanted to set people up to understand the current moment and draw some ethical conclusions that I feel are very obvious if this history is presented. And a lot of times, the powers that be obfuscate and give Islamophobic, racist retellings of events rather than owning up to all the ways that peace has been undermined by the other side for so long. So that was a big shift. I wrote the last third of the book in less than a year, plus editing. So it was intense, but it felt really necessary. 

JB: I’ve spoken to a lot of writers who—though their books may seem to have been published as direct responses to pivotal current political or social moments, like the election—had actually finished writing way before then. But for you, there was a significant shift?

SA: Yeah, definitely a significant shift. I sold the book in early 2023, and I started working with my editor on the final draft in maybe May 2023. I wrote probably 30–40,000 words right before and right after October 7th. The final copy edit was December 2024, so it was really down to the wire.

JB: As I was reading The Hollow Half, I found that the self is often captured through the dissociative lens of a character—entering a story, hitting plot lines, following the tropes, etc. In a past interview, you also mentioned that while you were writing this book, you were “writing and rewriting these characters—of self, of my family members.” I’m always fascinated by how we might approach real-life people as characters and events as plot points in memoirs. As you were writing, did you encounter any shift between the kind of self-dissociation-as-character described in the book versus writing real life people as characters?

SA: In that interview, I think I was talking about building the characters on the page and figuring out ways to convey them, using parts of craft that fiction writers might use. There’s so much to a human that, putting them on the page, you have to choose what the details are that are going to give the most insight into this character. What’s the interaction that will best portray a relational dynamic? A lot of times with memoir, people think you just dump a bunch of real events on the page, and it’s just like a newspaper article, but it’s actually very crafted and there’s so many decisions. I think treating my family members like characters was not in a reductive sort of way, but just in a craft way. Building a character is a set of decisions. I have thousands of details I could have put in about each character. So the themes helped me choose, and the moments in the book that I needed for a given chapter helped determine what details I chose. 

And then describing myself like a character, hitting plot points, that’s a big part, especially at the beginning, where the character of Sarah—who is me, but not completely, there’s more to me than this character—she was realizing / I was realizing that the American dream is like a script, and every family kind of has a script for each child, and it can be a really positive one or a negative one. So the American dream / my family narrative was, Okay, we’re in this country of opportunity, you’re going to escape so many of the horrors and deprivations that your father faced in Gaza. Then as the oldest child, another narrative was, Sarah’s going to achieve great things, and we’ve sacrificed so much so she could go to college. I just had learned how to be a person in the world more based on these scripts than really being in touch with my intuition or my body’s memories. In order to stick to some of these narratives, there was a lot of assimilating and forgetting, or burying or not paying attention to Palestine or to my grandmother. Those were all sacrifices I didn’t even realize I was making. So learning to recognize the script that’s been imposed on my life was one step to deciding to diverge from it, and find a different way to live that’s more unscripted or more true to my actual experience and values. 

JB: It’s interesting that within the book, the disassociation—the character—is to be overcome in a way. But when writing a memoir, there is something to be said about treating the people as characters for the craft of it. 

The idea of the archive also recurs throughout The Hollow Half. There is its importance, especially for immigrants, which I can relate to. The files that your father carries around, my father has very thick ones too, with all the important family documents. You also talk about a private archive between your grandmother and her friend—private languages and such. But then, towards the latter half of the book, there’s almost this dark undercurrent of archives as well. There’s the village files, “the archive came for Palestine. Ravenous, arachnid. Its limbs reaching, weaving one silk strand and the next.” Would you speak more about these different sides of archives?

SA: Yeah, there’s a lot of different archives in the book. There’s the family archives, which is, a lot of times, a set of fond family memories that people always tell. The same stories about this uncle or that grandparent. A lot of us inherit a few stories. Then if we don’t inquire further, that’s our generic idea of our relatives or our homeland. My father’s archive, though, was a gesture towards how he felt so vulnerable. There’s this need to legitimize and credential ourselves as immigrants, especially as people that don’t even have a state. So there’s this idea that in the nation-state system we’re in, everything hinges on your documents. There’s an insecurity to that. But then how he kept every report card and photo that he could, scraps of this and that, it also gestured towards this sense of constantly combating erasure. Because Palestine is being erased as a land. Palestinians as identities and entities are constantly being denied. People say we don’t exist. So there’s also this idea to try to consolidate a self in a world that does not want to acknowledge your presence. So I think that’s a type of archive that many people keep consciously or unconsciously, and that was a really tender, poignant, and painful thing to notice about my father. But it also really spoke to the way I felt despite all my striving to credential and legitimate my own presence. Every time I would get my own report card—or in that passage, I’m looking at my name in the graduation program—I would stare at these external pieces of evidence that I exist, and it wouldn’t feel real. Like it was so hard to really ever feel secure as a self, and I think that’s pointing towards a similar thing that my father was experiencing, which is I’m moving in a world that’s actively erasing Palestinians. 

So there’s that almost failed archive of trying to legitimate oneself through documents. Then there’s the archives that are immaterial, like the archive of a private language between friends, or between my father and his mother. Actions can be an archive, like ritualized actions of making tea or bread. The opening of the book is her making tea and cooking bread in the way that she has for decades. In my mind, these are archives too—recipes are archives. To me those are more real than these pieces of paper that were granted or not granted, so I wanted to embody and bring into a sense of flesh and presence these small gestures that for me really make up the substance of who we are. And they show love, and when love is shown, I feel like that’s so much more of a powerful presence than, again, a piece of paper. When I started to tune into these sorts of archives, I felt so much more solid and I felt so much more placed in the world and in time. I feel so much more sense of who I am. I’m here because of these many archives of love and survival and care. 

And then, like you mentioned, “the archive came for Palestine. Ravenous, arachnid. Its limbs reaching, weaving one silk strand and the next. There was nothing too meager to become prey.” I believe Saidiya Hartman wrote about this first, but also Carmen Maria Machado. They talk about how archive comes from arkheion, the same root as monarch, so there’s this attachment to authority or ownership. And archives often came with colonization. I actually wrote a huge section that was not in the book about how the era of colonization was also when the calorie was invented, this idea of wanting to capture just every aspect of human life and change it into a data point. It’s a very colonial and violent practice. I was contrasting these archives of care and love and the ineffable with this obsession of “I want to capture in data, so that I can capture in essence or reality other people’s land, other people’s lives, other people’s livelihoods.” So there was this coldness and violence to certain archives that I was seeing a contrast with these other types of archives.

JB: I love the way that the same concept within this book can often have so many different sides to it. 

One of the book’s footnotes include this quote on “a danger in associating becoming disabled with a violent and oppressive history, because disability is already conceived of as ‘abject’ (Kristeva, 1982). — Nirmala Erevelles, Disability and Difference in Global Contexts.” As a disabled writer, sometimes I find that it’s a thin line to walk between unearthing the depth and cause of a disability or an illness versus painting with too broad a stroke or speaking about it in too negative a way.  Do you have any thoughts on walking that line?

SA: I’m so glad that you brought this up. I think it’s really important, and I appreciate you sharing that about yourself as well. I wanted to be very conscious that I didn’t reify victimhood in a lot of ways. Like, it’s so easy for: If we’re not the terrorist, we’re the victim. It felt like a lot of times those are the two options for Palestinians. And then even my grandmother’s family narrative, as a way of honoring her, a lot of people talk about her suffering. We want to honor someone’s suffering. She was disabled, and I think a lot of the literal causes did come from the violence that she saw in her life. I was also learning about how colonization and my family’s history and racism were causing a lot of my own issues. But it’s too black-and-white to just say every disability is an affliction: It’s abject, and we need to blame colonization or racism. That’s too easy and that’s too reductive. It’s also relying too much on these categories of what makes a disability and what makes an able body and which bodies are better. And there can be nuance too. Tracing the origins of my grandmother’s disability to colonization, but not repeating these narratives of Oh, poor thing, if only she had a body like X, Y, or Z. It’s such a slippery slope to declare her body less than just because she suffered. There’s a lot of nuance to what makes a disabled body and what disabled bodies bring to the world. It was really important to me that at the center of this book is a Palestinian woman. There’s resilience, there’s also brokenness. But overall, if people like her were centered, if disabled bodies were centered in the society, everyone would be more liberated, and everyone would be healthier, and the world would be more humane. 

JB: My final question is one that arose in speaking with other immigrant writers and writers of color as well. A scene in the book that really stayed with me was when you were stopped at the border by Israeli guards and prevented from returning to Palestine. It was horrific in that it was arbitrary, it was cold, it was violent, and there was a severe lack of answers. For writers whose homes and cultures might not be the same as their citizenships, but also where that home might be precarious politically—and as the American government is arresting and deporting protesters—there is a fear. As a writer, you want to speak out and you want your words to be read by more people, but there is a fear that the more visible you get, the more likely it is that you would be removed or barred from your home. I know it’s nothing compared to the people who are in these situations. Our risk is not the same, but how do you deal with writing about home while these writings can prevent you physically from home?

SA: I do wrestle with that. In the book I talk a little about not writing about Palestine at first, partially because I felt like it was so futile to try to do that in an English and specifically American context, but also because I feared not being able to go back. And I still fear that. And it’s true, it’s this tension of I do want my work to get out there, but I do want to be uncompromising. I do want to call genocide genocide, and racism racism, etc. But what might that cost here or elsewhere, really? So I just live with that fear, honestly. I live with that risk. I don’t want to be reckless, but I had to sit down and think about what my morals really ask me to do, what my ethics call me to do. I think it’s even clearer now. It’s scarier in some ways, because the repression is getting worse, but also what’s happening in Palestine is so unspeakably violent, and I would be horrified and ashamed if I ever compromised calling it what it is. I’m going to be selective about where I choose to speak and write because I want to use my energy where it’s the most useful. And I just went to Palestine in December and I was so scared. Every time I go, I’m so nervous, you know? And I don’t know what will happen next. But yeah, I live with it, because being silent is so much more horrific. I’m in the company of many, many people who are paying a price for their political beliefs. And like you said, I have a lot more privilege than a lot of Palestinians and a lot of people in the U.S. even, because I have a passport. So I’m trying to use it responsibly, but I’m trying to use it.

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Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist with roots in 'Ibdis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza. The recipient of a Fulbright fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting, she has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States. Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, The Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Lux, The Washington Post, The Intercept, The Rumpus, NPR, The Margins, and The Nation, among other publications.

Author photo by Natasha Jahchan.