The Space Between

Sarah Aziza’s The Hollow Half is not simply a memoir; it is a meditation on rupture, a lyrical mapping of grief, longing, and the liminal spaces in-between. Told across the fault lines of language and geography, it traverses multiple selves and sites—Palestinian and American, daughter and witness, exile and return—without collapsing them into false unity. Instead, Aziza offers a form that honors fragmentation as its own kind of truth.

The book follows her recovery from an eating disorder after a near-fatal hospitalization in 2019. As Aziza wrestles with her own body, she is drawn into a deeper reckoning with her Palestinian family’s history of exile and the generational trauma that shaped her. Guided by ghostly memories and the ancestral whispers of her late grandmother, she interrogates how silence shapes and unshapes the self; how love can obscure as much as it illuminates; what truths the body carries when language fails; and how English and Arabic become sites of negotiation—between intimacy and alienation, choice and inheritance.

In Aziza’s hands, even longing becomes political: an orientation toward an elsewhere that refuses erasure or closure. In doing so, she reimagines what memoir can be: not a resolution, but a space to dwell in the fracture. I spoke with Aziza earlier this month over Zoom. Our conversation has been condensed and edited for clarity.

—Abdelrahman ElGendy

Abdelrahman ElGendy: A throughline in the book was الغربة. In Arabic, ghourba means estrangement or exile—but also something more. You define it, beautifully, as absence rendered geographic, a kind of haunted distance from place, from love, from legibility. How does ghourba function in this book—not only as nostalgia but as a political and psychic condition?

Sarah Aziza: The book began as a reckoning with longing—almost subconscious, an absence without language. It was more painful and dangerous for being unnamed. The book starts with a section called “Silence” because of this difficulty in naming.

Ghourba, for me, was difficult to see or define because of the way it existed in deep tension with the narrative of privilege I grew up with. It was labeled the American Dream—I had an American passport, American education, I was “lucky” compared to my relatives in Palestine. This language smothered a deep grief. One thing I try to do is trace how longing contains profound wisdom. Does longing rupture or make us whole? I think it does both.

Especially in the more comfortable versions of ghourba, inside empire, there are constant opportunities to slip into complicity or numbness, which facilitate forgetting. In the ghourba chapter, I wrote about how ghourba teaches us the shape of what is lost. It’s the body’s mechanism for keeping alive the knowing that something is not right. That knowing points to the possibility of something otherwise—geographically, politically, psychically.

Mourid Barghouti calls ghourba a chronic illness. I don’t see it as something that can be solved. He also says displacements are always multiple. For those of us in ghourba, it’s a condition that compounds. It’s painful, but I’d rather carry this restlessness than live in false complacency.

AE: Tarjama—as translation, but also as transposition of self across registers of language, memory, and being—figures heavily in The Hollow Half. How did the tension between Arabic and English shape your sense of self, particularly as each language comes with its own grammars of intimacy, surveillance, and erasure?

SA: The book opens at a time when I was very estranged from my Arabic language. It was like a wound I didn’t know I was carrying—another longing, an ache I eventually recognized and began to move with.

It’s painful to exist between languages, but it also allows for a deep appreciation of multiplicity. 

That recognition emerged through starting this project, as I was reckoning with personal, familial, historical—even spiritual—realities. I hit a wall in my language and realized some registers could only be accessed through Arabic. More accurately, they only exist in Arabic: stories of Palestine from my father, memories of my grandmother, words like ghourba. Translation is always a failed project, but I think that’s beautiful. I believe in that failure. There are multiple worlds, and they’re not always mutually inclusive.

It’s painful to exist between languages, but it also allows for a deep appreciation of multiplicity. In my life, I’ve had varying degrees of fluency in Arabic. I grew up speaking it with my grandmother and father, but as the book shows, those relationships—and my geography—ebb and flow. Like ghourba, periods of separation from the language led me to a different kind of intimacy. The journey back into Arabic made me hyper-aware of its textures.

Arabic brings us into a poetic tradition. A relationality with nature I may sense in English too but more deeply in Arabic. Take the word house for example. We have many words in Arabic, including the word bayt, from roots meaning “to tent” or “stay the night,” or manzil, from nazala— “to descend,” once meaning to dismount and camp. For me, the desert is right there in these words.

AE: And how do you navigate the psychic and political stakes of writing Arab grief in the language of empire?

SA: I’m working toward writing in Arabic with the same fluency as in English, but I’m also negotiating on the page what I’m negotiating in life: how to make meaning inside a system that oppresses me, while resisting it—whether that’s empire, capitalism, or English.

I’m not exactly trying to break the house with the master’s tools—but maybe to break the tools themselves a bit. It’s always impure. I used to think legibility was the measure of reality. In English contexts, the parts of me that felt “real” were the ones that were legible. In my prose, I had to reconcile that it would mostly be in English. But I wanted to play with register. Readers move along and then meet a phrase in Arabic script or a phonetic Arabic spelling. It creates a moment of opacity, or intimacy, depending on who you are.

I also tried to break English syntax—to let it echo Arabic. This happens in the ways I shift sentence order or drop prepositions or verb-objects. Or I turned nouns into verbs, or vice versa—something Arabic does. I wanted the book to offer even a little freedom from the pressures of “good English,” from being a disciplined imperial subject.

AE: You’ve written of anorexia as a state of bodily erasure, of queerness as unspeakable within inherited narratives of lineage and home, and of language as a tool of denial. How did The Hollow Half allow you to transgress the silence imposed by these structures? Did writing toward wholeness require the risk of being shattered, as you write by way of Sara Ahmed?

SA: I’m so thankful I got the chance to write a book because some of these questions couldn’t be answered any more briefly. In this case, my body led me to the form the writing eventually took.

Writing toward fullness only became possible as my body came into more fullness. At my most severe, in terms of anorexia, I was pretty much absent. Life drifted through me. I describe it as being a ghost—ejected from time and space. That absence felt necessary to escape a body carrying overlapping, unbearable histories.

As I entered recovery and was being forced to eat—long before I gained weight—there was an immediate return to sensation. My brain was fed enough to feel, to think. And waiting for me was everything I’d been running from: trauma, ancestral inklings I didn’t have language for, my queerness, and even the desire to be a writer. Recovery was shattering. But the shattering was necessary, an opening. I turned to writing—not to write a book, but to process. What showed up on the page were the things I was afraid to face, nearly erased by history, trauma, or repression.

Being open means being open to pain but also to love. It hurts to be here, but I’ve known love deeply enough now that I don’t want to turn away.

AE: Your grandmother’s body, voice, and Arabic become sites of both shame and reclamation. She is at once a person and a homeland, a witness and a wound. How did your relationship to her evolve in the writing?

SA: I didn’t intend to seek my grandmother in the way I ended up doing with this five-year project, but there were inklings, like I talk about in the book, that started turning me toward her. At the beginning, I felt like I was in a dark room, getting flickers of sound, then light, just moving toward them until it got warmer, more vivid.

What initially came back were the most accessible parts of my grandmother and of Palestine: being five, making tea with her, playing cards. Warm, childlike memories, visceral and fragmented. Just enough to recall a time before trauma or the disorder had touched me. When loving Palestine was simple, not yet wrapped in language or politics.

My grandmother was one of the earliest and most potent vessels of my Palestinian identity. But as I kept writing, thinking, and going through therapy, I realized how fractional that knowing had been. I knew her as a child knows a grandmother. But now I’m a Palestinian woman in the world, and so was she. Our walks of life were different, but I wanted to relate to her this way too.

She had already passed, but I tried every possible way to meet her again: family interviews, in Arabic as much as possible, archival research, photos. Eventually, I returned to Jordan, and then Palestine. I reached a point of such deep intimacy with her memory that, at moments, the book felt like a collaboration between her—between the ancestral wisdom she carried—and myself. It was a profound, mysterious thing that now informs how I live. For me, past, present, and future are intermingled. There’s a way of enacting Palestine that I carry in my body, just by moving through the world with these memories and keeping them alive.

AE: This memoir holds many yous: three Sarahs, two Ziyads, American and Palestinian inheritances layered and sometimes contradictory. What formal strategies did you employ to reflect that multiplicity without resolving it?

SA: I wanted to resist tropes, easy resolution, and making things legible and tidy, especially in the way a Western readership might expect of a heroic ethnic narrative. I knew I wanted that, but the question of how was daunting. You’re right to invoke craft—on the granular level is where I found the most freedom.

For me, it came down to writing and rewriting these characters—of self, of my family members. When you look at any person from multiple perspectives or temporalities, you see contradiction. People change. I kept collecting details and scenes, moving them through different contexts. Writing, as this collaborative, speculative nonfiction project, became an act of listening with love and curiosity.

Being a writer is about choices. I created massive banks of details, and some struck me as essential—especially when a character revealed a truth about themselves they maybe didn’t know, often through a contradictory act. Those were the moments I preserved and placed in the narrative to show multiplicity: pain and anger, love and tenderness, shifts over time.

Another reason this exists in the book is because I needed it. So many books I read were oversimplified—about suffering or mental health recovery. Their flatness or heroism harmed me because my story didn’t match. It left me confused, ashamed, unable to see complexity in myself. So I wrote the story I needed.

AE: In a beautiful scene, you describe feeling “not Arab or American, but home.” Elsewhere, you suggest that home is not a place but a temporary confluence—a pressed wrist in the dark, a voice remembered, a body filled with mish-mish yogurt. Was this book a way of writing toward home, or was it an admission that home may only ever exist in the hollow half, the space between?

SA: I didn’t expect to write myself home. I was trying to convey my truth—that home is a transient, tenuous belonging. It’s made of moments of connection amid ongoing displacement. The book became a record of the portals I found to belonging, not a fixed state but moments of recognition: I belong to these people, this lineage, this place. I may never have that permanently, but there are ways to glimpse and connect to it.

For me, home is those glimpses. And lineage—another form of belonging—is a stance, a position. Moments of feeling home are like the taste of mish-mish or a hand pressed on a wrist. These moments of contact taught me what lineage I belong to. I say in the book: Palestine is an orientation that holds open the wound of love. Home isn’t a cathartic arrival; it’s something more durable, portable, capacious. It’s a way of being in the world.

AE: The image of wanting to be “small as a hyphen, strong as a bridge” carries in it both exhaustion and infrastructure. What are the costs of occupying that interstitial space—between languages, bodies, nations—and what happens when even that bridge begins to splinter?

SA: The cost of occupying interstitial space, at first, was almost being destroyed. I was wrecked by a narrative—“small as a hyphen, strong as a bridge”—that meant being fully self-reliant: not needing or taking up space, not relying on anyone, not being messy, and still somehow being strong.

That belief was costly. It was full of paradox and ultimately untenable. When it shattered, a new interior reality emerged—through lineage, language, and naming what I thought unspeakable. I let go of false coherence: the idea I could be both assimilated and free, deny myself and still be well, be polite and still be truthful, be closeted and thrive. Letting go of those forced contradictions—that hyphen—allowed me to enter true interstitial space, which I’m still learning to navigate.

Knowing my lineage, knowing my weight—not as burden but grounding—knowing I come from a place and a people, and naming what broke me, instead of pushing it away. That’s where shattering becomes opening. There are possibilities in that. Fascism and fundamentalism emerge when interstitial space—the in-between, the contradictory—is denied. There’s a cost, but it changes depending on how you relate to it.

AE: In a memoir so steeped in loss and dislocation, how did intimacy—romantic, familial, bodily—become a site of both subversion and repair? And what does it mean to love from within fracture, to carry the catastrophe of love as part of one’s identity?

SA: I really appreciate you highlighting that because love—this specific portrayal and the way it moves through the book—is something I worked hard to incorporate.

I worked hard on it, but it also came naturally. Like I mentioned, I just wanted to get closer to these beloveds, and writing was my mechanism for doing that. It’s always subversive to speak of true love—not commodified love, but real love—in an age steeped in transactionalism, hate, and exploitation. And especially now, to speak of Palestinian love is deeply subversive.

I began this book before the genocide escalated in 2023 but was writing within the knowledge of a century of slow and fast disappearance. I wanted the beauty of Palestinian love to move and live on the page—to show how it’s always been there, always been subversive. I talk about my grandmother snatching three children back from the disappearance intended for them. Every mother who feeds her child, every teacher who teaches a Palestinian student a poem—these are acts of love and resistance.

My father was born a refugee in Gaza and remembers his childhood with fondness because of the love around him. They couldn’t protect him from everything—I write about him experiencing the 1967 war and his sister’s death—but their love had intention. These characters did everything they could, and even what they couldn’t, to protect those they loved.

AE: You offer a deeply personal critique of Western mental health frameworks—psychiatric wards where your grief was rendered illegible, where your reactions were labeled excessive. How did you come to understand your emotional truths in a system built to pathologize them?

SA: The mental health system I encountered—especially in its more extreme form, which makes up the first section of the book—operated on binaries and partial understandings of human experience, with very limited consideration of who the patient might be.

There were rigid binaries of “sick” and “healthy,” both narrowly defined. “Healthy” meant performing the right behaviors. Anorexia was treated like a place without a history. Everyone wanted to know if my mom dieted, but no one asked where my family came from or why.

Fascism and fundamentalism emerge when interstitial space—the in-between, the contradictory—is denied.

That became an opening toward complexity. I came to recognize that my pathologies were much more complicated. I wasn’t getting better, and I blamed myself for not being able to stop the “bad” behaviors. But the symptoms were a map, pointing back to what I needed to see and move through. When the binary model of “good versus bad” shattered, I had to start listening to what was beneath it. The symptoms pointed toward a lifetime—and multiple lifetimes—of history I needed to examine, exhume. They signaled that something was deeply wrong. I wasn’t crazy; I had been born into conditions that are crazy-making, maddening, sickening.

I had reversed the order. I thought everything wrong was inside me and could be fixed with willpower or self-esteem. But once I saw it was systemic, I began to glimpse something else. As I said earlier, absence is an intimate form of knowing. Realizing how much of what I’d accepted as normal was deeply wrong allowed me to imagine who I was meant to be, or how the world could have been without those systems. And that story became the book: What is the actual horizon I was meant to be looking at?

AE: The Hollow Half is in part a story of what had to be left unsaid to survive. It is also about what needs to be unforgotten to write one’s way back to the self. You often quote the lines from Mahmoud Darwish (translated from Arabic by Paul Weinfield): “Our country is a country of words./ Speak, speak, / that we may know an end to traveling.” What did writing this book finally allow you to name, to speak into? And what, even now, remains deliberately unspoken?

SA: That quote—I think about it a lot. In a sense, the book is the answer to what it’s allowed me to speak. But what’s still unspoken is just as interesting.

Memoir is often dismissed as less crafted, especially when written by a woman or an “ethnic” person, as if it’s just trauma dumping. I wanted readers to know I was deliberately denying access to certain things—as a political or aesthetic act or to assert agency. That’s why there are white spaces, redactions, and code-switching—reminders that even my vulnerability is curated.

More importantly, there was care in handling others’ stories, like my grandmother’s and father’s. I chose not to share certain painful things out of love. I kept asking: What’s the most caring thing to do? Sometimes that meant showing flaws, not making perfect victims. Other times, it meant protecting privacy. And I wanted to acknowledge the limits of empathy. As much as I imagined into my loved ones’ experiences, I’ll never fully know what it’s like to be them. I wanted the acknowledgement of that limitation to be visible, even subtly.

What’s left out is precious. Holding it back is a form of keeping—of saving something for ourselves.

AE: What was it like to write and revise this book in real time with the ongoing, U.S.-funded Israeli genocide in Gaza, alongside that unfolding horror against your people, your family members?

SA: That’s the subtext, right? For everything now, for all of us. I don’t mean to sound self-aggrandizing, but I honestly don’t know how I did it, just like I don’t know how any of us are doing anything right now. It’s the most unbearable, horrifying, grief-drenched period of my life and many of our lives. It exceeded words before this, and now it really does.

Every day, I sat down to work as the genocide unfolded. I lost dozens of family members in the first months, over two hundred since. I had to sit with futility. How could I justify laboring over sentences—even about Palestine—while something so apocalyptic was happening? I don’t have an answer, except that the project had already found me. I began it in love and felt committed to it. I wanted to finish it for the people I was trying to reach toward—for my grandmother, even if I couldn’t recover her, maybe I could craft language that touched a fraction of who she was. That would be an offering. The grief only deepened my care—for the language, the stories, the political imagination I was working through.

I hoped readers would understand the long history of oppression and resistance in Palestine. Afterward, it became even more urgent that no one leave the book confused about how what we call the genocide—as if it began in 2023—is a horrifying amplification but not new. I wanted to show resistance as something ongoing—intimate, interpersonal, political, and organized—since long before 1948.

Ending the book felt impossible. How do you end something still unfolding? Even without the genocide in Gaza, it would’ve been a hard question. But now, when every day feels like the end of the world—how do you write an ending? I didn’t want resolution. I wanted to leave an opening in the midst of despair.

The way our souls cry out proves we haven’t succumbed. We can still imagine and know otherwise.