On Monday, Sept. 29, students, faculty, and guests filled the Intercultural Dome to hear Sarah Aziza — Palestinian American writer, translator, and artist — discuss and read excerpts from her recently published memoir, “The Hollow Half.” Aziza was joined by Swarthmore Assistant Professor of History (and her good friend) Elise Mitchell.
Aziza was invited to kick off Swarthmore’s collaboration with the William J. Cooper Foundation for a series of lectures titled “War, Power, Culture” within this year’s larger Cooper Series. This subseries intends to engage with intellectuals exploring the impacts violence (particularly in the Middle East) has on global and personal histories.
The lecture began with Mitchell reminiscing on her graduate school days with Aziza at New York University, where they frequently discussed feminist theory. Following a glowing introduction of Aziza, Mitchell gave a concise overview of “The Hollow Half,” which was published in April and named a finalist for the Palestine Book Awards. Aziza’s memoir begins in 2019 as she recovers from a severe eating disorder and incorporates the story of her family. Through this braided approach, she unearths the buried history of her family and the generational trauma enacted by Israel’s violent occupation of Palestine. It is with this exploration that Aziza found fortitude.
After Mitchell’s introduction, Aziza rose to a burst of applause and began to read from a tattered, dog-eared copy of her memoir. Starting from the beginning, Aziza narrated her hospitalization for a life-threatening eating disorder. Almost immediately, the focus shifted to her father.
“Sitting across from a corpse, he asked for permission not to see,” she read. Slowly, flipping through different passages, cyclically jumping from present to past, she came to the story of her grandmother and the brutalities faced by Palestinians in the founding of the Israeli state.
“In the realm of maps and records,” Aziza read, “[my grandmother’s] trace has always been slight. Born without a birth certificate, her name was first written in 1955. A UN worker made the inscription — once in English, once in French — and handed her the paper slip. Her name, a token traded for sugar and wheat, in languages she couldn’t read. She would have been roughly thirty then: a refugee of seven years, mother to a daughter and three sons.”
Narrating, Aziza’s voice was clear and lucid, yet vulnerable. The prose is fragmented: personal, yet collective. During the conversation, Aziza called her memoir a narration on “the simultaneity of time,” composing a “porous” history. Ending the reading, Aziza posed the question, “Does a body carry such separations as weight or empty space?”
After reading, Mitchell joined Aziza in conversation to discuss what Aziza remarked as “big beautiful questions.” Aziza responded with eloquent precision. Halfway through the conversation, topics had already ranged from the utility of history in reproducing power, the importance of alienating the anglophone reader through the intentional inclusion of Arabic text, Aziza’s personal reading practice, and finding support in community both inside and outside the pages.
Being a historian, Mitchell’s questions progressively veered towards time, narration, history, and the archive. In their conversation, Aziza highlighted the idea of time and history as nonlinear, an entanglement of past and present, and of the individual and collective. Returning to “The Hollow Half,” Aziza likened her memoir to a reckoning of the entanglements of her personal diasporic history and the active erasure of Palestine. Uncovering these web-like histories, Aziza argued, is an act of fortifying identity and, in itself, is inherently a form of political resistance.
Before opening the discussion to attendees, grasping onto the idea of resistance, Mitchell posed a final question: “What is the role of resistance in collective healing?” “Resistance,” Aziza remarked, “is love, and love is human, something never too small to matter.” She ended on a hopeful note: “Resistance is moving out of sync with the old world towards a new better one.” Aziza added, “New worlds are always possible.”
During the Q&A, it was mainly students who asked questions, all of which pertained to the role they could play in Palestine’s liberation. Students expressed their discontent with the college’s handling of protesting on campus and asked what they could do to support and resist. Aziza told them that resistance doesn’t need to be a big, visible spectacle — rather, it is how we pick our battles and engage with others. To Aziza, love after all is resistance.
