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hilaryreadsbooks 's review for:
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders
by Sarah Aziza
Today, THE HOLLOW HALF (gifted by Catapult) finds its way, fully, into the world ♥️
After years of being hollowed out by illness, Aziza is hospitalized for anorexia. Meals are exactly portioned and forced down, violations are punished, communication with the outside world is limited. Illness is wiped clean of its history. Yet, history still finds her: for a moment within the hospital cafeteria, an apricot yogurt becomes a portal, a rupture, bringing along with it the realization that doctors here could not heal her. Generations of trauma and loss have made her a “fugitive from [her] own flesh,” a displacement that echoes the histories of Palestinian displacement that haunts her family. The seduction of starvation, inextricable from what has already been hollowed out inside. But just beyond displacement lies the “instinct to return.” And boldly, bravely, she does.
THE HOLLOW HALF is a return to the past, to dreaming of ghosts, to memories of when hunger was delicious, when the fullness of bodies was a cloak of safety. It is a tearing-apart of the seduction of white America, a shedding of disguise and the “beautiful life” of the American dream. It is a refutation to all the ways America promised to keep us safe. It is a return to the Palestine and Gaza that have always haunted her as shattered images on television, as vague entities that she watched fall from her father’s mouth as prayers, as photographs that always “left [her]…swimming in something [she] couldn’t name.” It is all of this, finally made physical: the texture of real, living land, alive and vibrant even as genocide seeks to destroy it—a testament to survival.
After years of being hollowed out by illness, Aziza is hospitalized for anorexia. Meals are exactly portioned and forced down, violations are punished, communication with the outside world is limited. Illness is wiped clean of its history. Yet, history still finds her: for a moment within the hospital cafeteria, an apricot yogurt becomes a portal, a rupture, bringing along with it the realization that doctors here could not heal her. Generations of trauma and loss have made her a “fugitive from [her] own flesh,” a displacement that echoes the histories of Palestinian displacement that haunts her family. The seduction of starvation, inextricable from what has already been hollowed out inside. But just beyond displacement lies the “instinct to return.” And boldly, bravely, she does.
THE HOLLOW HALF is a return to the past, to dreaming of ghosts, to memories of when hunger was delicious, when the fullness of bodies was a cloak of safety. It is a tearing-apart of the seduction of white America, a shedding of disguise and the “beautiful life” of the American dream. It is a refutation to all the ways America promised to keep us safe. It is a return to the Palestine and Gaza that have always haunted her as shattered images on television, as vague entities that she watched fall from her father’s mouth as prayers, as photographs that always “left [her]…swimming in something [she] couldn’t name.” It is all of this, finally made physical: the texture of real, living land, alive and vibrant even as genocide seeks to destroy it—a testament to survival.