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Sarah Aziza Won’t Disappear

But before the Palestinian American author could write ‘The Hollow Half,’ she had to come back to life.
The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, by Sarah Aziza

When Palestinian American Sarah Aziza participated in her first public action for Palestine as a college student, an angry white woman approached her to say, “Palestinians aren’t real.”

In The Hollow Half, Aziza writes that she was “unprepared to be erased ... this woman [was] the first of many strangers who would declare my existence both unreal and offensive.”

Aziza’s genre-bending memoir sits at the intersection of trauma, grappling with her experience as a Palestinian growing up in the U.S., her struggle with anorexia, surviving sexual assault, and her journey toward accepting her queerness. She shows her chops as a journalist, poet, essayist, and translator. But before Aziza could write The Hollow Half, she had to come back to life.

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