The Hollow Half Quotes

“And so it was White America my father spoke to, slicing his name to a single innocuous syllable. It was white America that he emulated, from the bill of his Cubs baseball cap down to ivory Reeboks. It was white America that he saluted as he stood in the front yard, waving a garden hose over his lawn, a palm raised to neighbors with an unironic ‘Howdy!’. And it was white American my devout father had in mind when he suggested, sotto voice, that I didn’t need to wear a hijab— because Americans might not understand.

What I heard: that American must exclude so much of us, that their approval is how we know who to be. A self, he seemed to say, could be reverse engineered. Belonging not inherent but achieved. And so my first grooves of self-rejection were carved by a hopeful blade. A few trims here. A chop, a prune. Eager, edging on disappearance, rest always-almost in sight.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

“One way to tell the story of a life: list the order and number of ways you learned you were unsafe. For me, girl came first, then Palestinian. Woman and queer were tangled together, one overdetermined, the other gagged. Each one of these words a border, a frontier that told me: Lose yourself, or disappear.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

“Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing, writes Jose Esteban Munoz, describing queerness not only as a set of acts or dispositions but an ideality … A loving recklessness, freely renouncing a reality that has never been home…

What if the first word hope utters is no ? What if this word is not only a negation but an opening? After all, if this word is forbidden, can any choice be free?
[Refusal] expresses our unwillingness to be conscripted to man’s project or world… the propertied earth. And if the first field of knowledge is the body, / no may be the sound of our deepest knowing, calling from the far side of the wall.

Gaza is devoted to rejection, wrote Mahmoud Darwish
hunger and rejection, thirst and rejection, displacement and rejection,
Torture and rejection, siege and rejection, death and rejection
Enemies might triumph over Gaza…
They might break its bones
They might implant tanks on the insides of its children and women.
They might throw it into the sea, sand or blood.
But it will not repeat lies and say “Yes” to invaders.”

…Setenced to this unlife, Gaza can only exist as no . This no is total; she is long past the appeasement or appeal. Gaza, called المقاومة أم, mother of resistance, daily births her refusal to succumb or disappear. The relationship of resistance to the people of Gaza] is that of skin to bones.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

“They think we’re bad people, Habibti, my father said, and always continued, but if they get to know us, they’ll see thats not true.

His eagerness to resist our poor reputation made sense to me. It hurt to imagine my gentle family so accused. But I internalized his words as an instruction to make my life an advertisement for our humanity.

It was an objective that seemed at odds with Palestinian resistance. In the pursuit of liberal empathy, merit was afforded to those who proved themselves civilized. Any act of Arab unruliness — and especially any act or armed struggle — instantly disqualified us from the esteem of our European and American arbiters. Thus excluded, we were declared unworthy — or at least incapable of handling — the privileges awarded the more enlightened nations: self-determination, freedom, and never, ironically, military force.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders

“Asked again to peel back our scabs, to bare our festering places, hanging our heads over the blood. We were not asked who had cut us, or why the injuries went uncleaned.”
― Sarah Aziza, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders