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Good afternoon and welcome to the City Club of Cleveland, where we are devoted to conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, September 18th, and I'm Kortney Morrow, program director of the Anisfeld-Wolf Book Awards.

The Book Awards were founded in 1935 by poet and philanthropist Edith Anisfield Wolf to reflect her family's commitment to social justice.

Over the years, the awards have celebrated hundreds of groundbreaking authors and remains the only American book prize that recognizes books that have made significant contributions to our understanding of racism and human diversity.

Today, the awards are administered by the Cleveland Foundation, and we are proud to partner with the City Club as part of Cleveland Book Fest and hear from this year's Anisfeld-Wolf Book Award winner in memoir, Sarah Aziza, a Palestinian-American writer, translator, and artist with roots in Ibis and Deir al-Balah, Gaza.

Sarah's memoir, The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders, is a genre-bending, multi-generational memoir which weaves the lives of 3 Palestinians from Gaza to the Midwest, to New York City, and beyond.

In 2019, Sarah Aziza nearly lost her life after being hospitalized for an eating disorder.

Along the process of recovery, Aziza begins to uncover her Palestinian roots.

The daughter and granddaughter of Gazan refugees, Sarah's story is blazing with honesty, urgency, and poetry.

It's a stunning debut memoir with probing themes of erasure, mental health, and a fearless call to imagine both the self and the world anew.

Sarah is the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship and numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting.

She has lived and worked in Saudi Arabia, Algeria, Jordan, South Africa, the West Bank, and the United States.

Her award-winning journalism, poetry, essays, and experimental nonfiction have appeared in The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, Mizna, The Washington Post, NPR, and The Nation, among other publications.

Also joining us on stage and moderating the conversation is Nadine Abusada, reporter at News 5 Cleveland, where she covers Cuyahoga County and immigration.

A reminder for our livestream and radio audience: if you have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to to 330-541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join me in welcoming Sarah Aziza and Nadine Abusada.

Welcome.

So I actually thought we should just read the book for them.

What do you think?

Thank you, Sarah, for joining us.

Another round of applause for an incredible Palestinian writer woman.

And I know we have some special guests in the audience.

Can we shout out your parents?

Yeah.

Hi, Baba.

Hi, Mama.

Ziad and Kathy.

He loves— So it's crazy.

I remember I told you earlier, when you walked up to your dad and you were like, hi, Baba, I was like, oh my God.

She's me.

She's a Palestinian girl running to her dad.

And I feel like that's how so many of us felt reading this.

I don't know if all of you have made it through the book.

I'm going to remove my bookmark so you can't see where I'm at.

But before we get into this, I want to ask first, how is your family, especially in Gaza?

How are they doing?

Thank you for asking.

Yeah, that's the Palestinian way.

I guess we have to start there.

Yeah, I mean, alhamdulillah, they're getting by in Gaza.

You know, it's still incredibly hard.

Israel's still blocking life-saving aid.

I have family members who are suffering from medical conditions who can't get treatment that they need.

One of my cousins is losing her eyesight because she hasn't had electricity to read and study with, but she's been still trying to make her way through her curriculum.

So it's hard.

It's really hard.

And I think what's the most challenging is feeling like the world is forgetting them.

So events like this, your attention, everyone, and your care and your questions means a lot to them.

And so thank you for asking.

That's how they're doing.

Of course, it almost is— you get that question of, how are they doing?

How are they doing?

But it's your normal at some point.

It's like trying to respond.

Now, obviously, we're here because of this.

Just look, this is a beautiful book.

Let's just start with that.

What made you get to that point that said, I want to tell my story, I want to tell my family's story, and I want to put it to paper, and I want to share it with the world?

I think I could not have started if I had started there, honestly.

I think what happened was I, it was the pandemic, it was 2020.

I was caught inside.

I had just gotten out of the hospital.There was a lot that I didn't understand about what was happening.

It felt like I had come to the end of a road in a way, at a moment when I was a young woman with a lot of opportunity.

I felt like something in me had become trapped, almost like a light had gone out.

And I think because I had so much time on my hands, I was indoors, and I was beginning to have these strange dreams where I was seeing my grandmother from Gaza, someone who had passed away years before and who I hadn't been very close to geographically for years.

It stirred me to start reflecting on her life and my connection to her.

And I started writing it down just because that's how I process.

And the more I wrote, the more I realized I had questions, and the more I yearned to know her life as a woman, as a person who had a long arc and who wasn't just the grandmother that I knew as a little girl, who was an amazing cook and I played cards with.

But who is she as a mother?Who i And the more the questions built, the more the writing continued to grow.

And eventually it had compiled into a few hundred pages, and that's when I realized, like, I think we're going somewhere.

Now, we talked about this earlier too, and I'm going to let you decide how you want to answer this.

Why the hollow half?

Like, for me, I know you joked in the book about— and during interviews— nos, nos, nos, nos, and your identity.

But why the hollow half?

Yeah, I love that question because I meet people who are very sure of the answer all the time, and they're all different interpretations.It's something that— it's one of those moments in the creative process that's just really mysterious.

It was, you know, there were so many points along the way that I was like, will this be a book?

What am I doing?

This, like, experimental form, is this going to work?

But I never questioned the title.

The title just came to me, and I just knew that was the title.

And the more I wrote and created this book, the more the name and its meaning unfolded to me.

And I think there are some things I'll tell you about it, and then I also will say, like, I love to leave a little mystery there.

But there's the hollowness of anorexia, the hunger.

There's the hollowness beneath that, that's the hunger for full steam.

I was here a lot of my life living as an immigrant's daughter in the US, assimilating and getting by in the American English environment that I was in.

I could pass, I could move smoothly, but there was a hunger beneath that because I don't actually belong here and I don't actually I can't actually live an individual life separate from my people in Palestine who are not yet free.

So there's the hollowness of the American dream, honestly.There's something missing there.

And then the halfness, there's also this idea of like you're half American, you're half Palestinian.

And I end up rejecting that idea, spoiler.

I don't think that people are fractions.

I think that's a violent way to understand identity.

That's a very colonizer-type mindset.

And, you know, it's an embrace of a fullness of Palestine that is not, you know, erasing the privilege I have as an American, but also an insistence that people are whole.

We will make Palestine whole, and I won't be a part of, you know, that fragmentation.

Amen to that.

And it's funny because I said this to her, and I say this to every single one of you in the room.

50%, 25%, 10%, you're Palestinian, you're Palestinian, top to bottom.

fa'alat hat There is no fraction to that.

And your homework for all of you is give her your interpretation of the hollow half when you get your book signed, because now you get to hear it.

Now, I mean, this book is so intimate from your journey with an eating disorder, your grandmother's journey, your father's journey, you living in the U.S., then the Saudiya, then all of these different parts of the world.

How do you connect specifically pushing through with the eating disorder and your ancestry, how do you connect those two?

I know that's a very deep-loaded question.

You basically wrote a whole book about it.

But how would you summarize that connection?

Because I think a lot of people don't realize everyday life as a Palestinian, no matter where you are in the diaspora, somehow ends up connecting to that lineage, that ancestry.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a, it's a really profound question.

And yes, it took me like years and a whole book to sort of work through that.

But one thing I'll definitely be able to say sort of like in, in a concise way is that, you know, the Palestinian battle for the last 100-plus years has been a battle against erasure.

Anorexia is an act of sort of self-erasure.

And there are a few reasons that I think that was sort of like the way that my pain and my intergenerational trauma sort of gravitated.

It's, you know, it can manifest in so many different ways.

But for me, I think it was this ability in one sense to occupy my place as an American citizen of Palestinian descent, But my body and something deep in my soul was rejecting that.

It was, I didn't want to and I shouldn't be here participating in a system that at the same time is perpetuating violence on my own people.

There was something intuitive beneath the surface, beneath the script I was given of pray for Palestine, but continue just putting one foot in front of the other and take care of yourself and avail yourself of opportunity.

That's not really a Palestinian way to think about it.

We're not individual.

We bel— and I don't think individuals exist.

I think people are this way.

We belong to each other, and what's going on in the earth— there's violence happening against the environment.

I think all of us feel a deep wound, whether we have words for it or not.

There's violence going on in Palestine.

I couldn't get away from that hurt.

And there's something about the act of not being seen that sort of— I internalized and started erasing myself.

But there was also this dissonance that I couldn't reconcile, and because I didn't have language for it, Anorexia was a way to sort of continue to retreat from what I really felt, because anorexia, at a certain point, you start to go numb physically and emotionally.

So it was a way to sort of numb myself to this deep— what's the word?

What's the word?

Not traction.

It was grating, you know?

Like, my existence was grating against the truth, and it was painful.

And I started to try to buffer myself through the hunger.

If that makes sense.

On that train of thought of anorexia, for those— I mean, for me, I did not know a lot of things about people that deal with an eating disorder.

You educated me in a lot of ways.

What would be some misnomers?

What would be some things you would want to make sure the public knows, especially, I mean, in Arab culture where, I mean, mental health, a lot of these things are not talked about?

Yeah, thank you.

That's a good question.

Yeah, mental health is such a taboo in so many different ways, and even when we do have on the surface some more discourse about mental health, there are a lot of conceptions.

So I think the main thing that, you know, it seems basic 101, but it's worth saying over and over that eating disorders aren't really about food.

There's something beneath it.

So there's not— it's not a matter of just, just eat, you know, or you don't, you don't really— like, you're not fat, you don't need to diet, things like that.

Even though unfortunately, like, our culture is shifting back into this, like, hyper, you know, thin ideal, which is not healthy.

It has so much more to do with emotions, with coping with feelings that are unutterable.

Because I do think that the body, the mind, and the spirit are so integral that you push something out of one part of you, it'll manifest somewhere else.

And eating disorders can take all kinds of forms.

It doesn't just look like starving.

It can look like so many different things.

And I think a lot of it has to do with people's relationship to abuse or Yeah, just things that you feel you don't have the language or the space to cope with.

So it really, it's something that you can't get through on your own.

It's not an individual disorder.

That's the other thing I'll say is societies, cultures, and histories all play a role.

And I think in the West, maybe they talk about mental health more, but it's in such an individualistic way that I don't know if it's that much better than a more communal society that does understand that care is a more horizontal thing.

Even if there's less language in some of these cultures, there is that horizontal communal attitude, and we need both.

We need more language, we need more education, we need more funding for research, and then we need more community and societal engagement with it.

For sure.

And I mean, educating— even if it's a loved one, educating yourself so you can make sure you can be there for them the right way, love them in the right way.

Now, and I'm going to go back to something else you talked about earlier.

That you called in the book, you said, learning of the Palestinian wound.

You talked about the yes of a mother, and you talked about Ghassan Kanafani and his son asking his mom, am I Palestinian?

And that heartbreak, and it's like the Nakba becoming personal.

For you, when was that yes?

When was that awakening?

I mean, because growing up as a Palestinian, so many of these things are in the background, but we don't realize what it is.

It's like, putting on the glasses to see what that blur was.

When was that yes for you to realize where you came from, the history, the ancestry?

Thank you.

Thank you for asking me that.

That's my favorite part of the book is that chapter where it's this unfolding.

So what she's referring to is Ghassan Kanafani.

He's one of the most famous Palestinians.

He was a revolutionary.

He wrote many books.

He was married to a Danish woman, actually.

So I think about that, like his kids were mixed, quote unquote, but he is like the godfather of like all of us, like a very important Palestinian figure.

His little son at like 6 or 7 as she says, yes, baby, you're Palestinian.

And he hears his son start crying because they were living in Lebanon.

It was more like in front of his little boy Fayaz's eyes like that to be Palestinian is not only tragic, but it does involve a lot of tragedy and heartbreak.

And then when you're in a further diaspora, like myself, a lot of my life in Saudi Arabia, but also Chicago area, it's easier to look away.

It's easier to have that buffer where it's like, well, what's happening in Gaza or Palestine?

Like, you know, alhamdulillah, we're here, we're safer.

And in a way we are.

I don't want to ever say like my suffering is equated to my family in Gaza, but there's also that separation is false.

So for me, it was sort of a coming of age and like The second-to-last chapter kind of is the story of my— it kind of accrued.

It accumulated.

It was— I understood— I would see my grandmother sort of crying and not know why.

Or I would hear little bits and pieces about Palestine.

I would feel my body go cold when relatives would talk about certain things about Palestine.

Or then I would see the Intifada on the news, and I would see tanks and children.

And then, oh, the adults would change the channel because it's too violent for the children to see.

But it started to seep into me.

But it really— what really sort of my yes was first as a young woman going to stay a few times in the West Bank by myself and seeing serious violence, seeing my people like crossing the wrong street onto like a settler side of the road and being slammed into the asphalt and dragged into a police car and disappearing.

Or, you know, I was on the border and the Israelis sent me back in the middle of the night walking across an international border and I was almost killed.

And that was just, you know, it was just one, like, Palestinian they just kind of, like, threw into the dark.

And this is someone with an American passport.

So it was really coming to understand that I love this land and really connect to it as, like, a complicated, real place, and then also understand how tenuous that is and how if I really love this place, I'm going to have a broken heart until Palestine is free.

And eventually I come to accept I will choose to live with this broken heart.

I will choose to try to lay down or use my privilege in the ways that I can to work for our freedom and just sort of, yeah, dedicate my life to that love and understand that my heart's gonna be broken until Palestine is free.

So I'm gonna lighten it up a little bit about Palestine because Palestine will find that place.

And you talked about your first visit to Palestine, and of course for the Palestinians in the room and the Arabs in the room or anyone that just likes cuisine, she talked about a knafeh, and I would hope all of you know about a knafeh.

And you talk about going to Nablus, you got your knafeh in the khubzeh, in the bread, But you wrote something that was really profound to me, and you said, I did not realize how exhausted we were, assimilated differences so internalized they felt like instinct.

And you talked about how finally being whole in the land, walking in, Arabic is the normal language.

Talk to me about what does it feel like, or what does it mean to go to Palestine and feel that sense of home?

Because especially so many, I can look around this room, I know have never had that feeling.

Have never been able to walk into Palestine and say, I'm home?

Yeah, such a— sorry, deep questions today, guys.

No, it's— I love it.

I really appreciate it.

I love it.

Yeah, it was this amazing feeling to— especially my first visit to Palestine.

Like you said, I was 18 or 19.

I'd lived in the Middle East, but never Palestine.

And so just walking into these spaces and seeing, like, oh, the gestures, the lahija, the dialect, the food, like, this is just baseline.

Whereas before it was like, oh, this is some exotic thing that we do in our house, and when white people come in, they, like, think it smells weird or looks weird, or, like, I hide it.

Or, like, when I go out into the world, it's just automatically, like, all of that gets kind of, like, put into, like, standby mode.

And because who's gonna understand?

Who's gonna, like, you know, I didn't understand how much I stuttered because I would— a word would come in Arabic, I would have to pause, I would insert English, and then speak.

And that's exhausting, but I didn't know anything else.

So just like the ease, like the micro choreographies of assimilation that like so many of us carry, it's so exhausting and so automatic.

So just to go into a space like that, it's like taking off your shoes to go into a home.

It's just this comfort and ease.

And yeah, I kind of— I quote Mourid Barghouti, who wrote, the goal of an occupation is to change the homeland into a bouquet of symbols.

Instead of a real place.

And he says, give us back not the Jerusalem of the sky, the Jerusalem that we talk about as like this mythic place, or the— or not even Palestinians, like other people turn Jerusalem into this like mythic place.

But for us, he said Jerusalem for him was the cobblestones and the clotheslines.

And he's like, we shouldn't have to fight to get the ordinary, but that's what homeland really is.

And to be free is to have the luxury of the mundane, just to, just to Be there.

I love the reactions from the audience right now.

I don't know if you hear them.

I'm like, is the food that good?

Yum.

And that kind of leans into the ghorba.

And in this book, you really intertwine.

And for the— raise your hand if you've started reading the book.

You don't have to have read the whole thing.

Oh, wow.

Masha'Allah.

So good job, guys.

So like in the book, you notice there's a lot of Arabic.

It's English, Arabic, and there's words— and I always used to say, um, the ghurba— there's words in Arabic that are more powerful and more deep, have more meaning than English.

What made you decide, okay, I'm gonna throw in some Arabic in here?

I want them also to learn English and Arabic with me.

Well, I know you know the Arabic already.

Thank you.

This question, I really enjoy answering this question because there's a few answers.

For one, it was the process of writing this book, especially in the beginning when I didn't know I was writing a book.

I was just like, what if I finally— 'cause I went to journalism school, I was a good English literature student in college, I know all the rules, I know that you're supposed to make writing accessible and hold the reader's hand and bring them in, especially if you're trying to talk about another culture, you basically are supposed to be like a tour guide.

And I just talked about the assimilation and how much erasure is involved in that and how exhausting it is.

So on the page, I was just like having fun, like giving myself— again, this was— I felt like I was in like a little laboratory experimenting.

I was like, what would it look like if I just wrote the world as I felt it and saw it and heard it?

And I write from my ear.

I don't know, like, not literally, but like I hear the writing as it comes in and I hear the world through a multilingual tenor.

And so it always felt a little false to translate certain things.

And so there's that.

I was like, part of my anorexia came from this inability to just occupy the world in a natural state.

I was always feeling like there was parts of me to put away.

So there was this just freedom of experimenting on the page as an artist, but then there was also this idea of, well, it's kind of incredible the amount of entitlement that Anglophone readers, like, move around with a lot of the time.

So many— I mean, I know at least 20% of the United States speaks Spanish as a first language, I believe.

And then there's all many, many other languages, of course, including Arabic.

So that means, like, there are millions of people who are moving through their day catering to English, right?

And so if someone moves through their world only speaking English and never hitting a snag, They— it's probably invisible to them how many people are going a distance to accommodate them.

So what would it feel like for a reader like that to just hit one word that they don't automatically receive on their terms?

It's probably a good exercise to maybe irritate that a little and make them think.

I just want you guys to know, if you have not read the book, you gotta read it.

If you're enjoying this, guys, Do you know how many times I did it on Audible?

I had to rewind.

I had to rewind.

I'm like, wow, that was profound.

But no, I agree.

I agree.

And I don't think— there were so many moments you put words to feelings I could never explain.

You put words to reality, what it was like to exist as a Palestinian in so many places in the diaspora.

You did that.

Now we have a few more minutes.

I'm going to get this last one in.

You guys get ready for your questions.

Now, in this time, I know we talk about October 7th, but let's go deeper.

I mean, this is your entire life.

This is our entire lives.

There is that moment of feeling defeated, helpless, overwhelmed, a scale of pain and suffering that you can't bear.

But you had a chapter you called Thicken, and you talked about the memories, and you used the history.

I mean, at one point we're talking about the Balfour Declaration.

I'm like, wait, and then we're back in the hospital room.

But you use those memories as a way to keep fighting, as a way not only to battle your eating disorder, but also to be an active voice for Palestinians.

I'm gonna read a line that you wrote, and you said, by my collapse, but all that we have survived.

I conjure lineage, recalling disaster and our flawed feats of carrying on.

Just wow.

How does remembering the past and the present of what our people are going through keep you going?

Yeah, I could ask you the same thing, right?

Like, that's every Palestinian's journey.

Yeah, I think that it is this, again, the project of erasure that so many colonized people face is that the colonizer is always interested in starting the history where they begin, right?

And then we're constantly put on the defensive or the back foot of just sort of trying to answer and defend and sort of, yeah, we're on their terms, right?

But it's, I mean, not to be cliché, but the idea of being rooted, the idea of I come from Falahayn, farmers, we're agricultural people, like just the roots of the land and just really that connection and knowing that every Palestinian, every, every person I hope has some sort of relationship to some version of this where there is a place and a belonging and a language for a lot of us that is so much more ancient and so much more vast than like this moment in history.

And my friend Tareq like talks about how many different colonizers have been through our land in the centuries, and this is a moment in time.

So there's There's just sort of like this embodied, this sturdiness.

You know the word samud, which is this like steadfastness and staying on the land?

The root of that is heaviness, which is an interesting counterweight to anorexia, right?

So like the rootedness, the solid— the solidity of coming from a place and people and not getting sort of like reduced to the rhetoric, to the attacks, to the, to the like bad faith like tellings of history that begin wherever the colonizer arrives and not where we begin, which is a lot deeper and a lot more rich.

And yeah, I mean, the assimilated identity and even like the liberal way that people are often represented as sort of like icons of a culture versus, again, the complexity.

That's why every character in this book is also flawed, right?

We're human.

We're not also like heroes and saints who can just suffer and have resilience.

We're human beings.

I think humanizing ourselves by talking about our pain is also a way to be more truly resilient, which is giving ourselves space and grace to tend to those wounds instead of just pushing through them.

Last question before I open it up to the floor.

I told you guys we're getting deep today.

What is your favorite part about being Palestinian?

I know you talked about at one point you were like, I'm Nuss-Nuss, but I don't care about the other side.

What is your favorite part about being a Palestinian?

Wow.

That's a great question.

That's a new question for me.

I think, although I was thinking about it today, I think that what My favorite part about it is that it doesn't allow you to take anything for granted.

It doesn't allow you to ever— and I talked about how I tried to sort of just begin in the present, begin where I was born and live my one life.

But it actually, it doesn't allow that.

Because the Palestinian story and struggle is still so open-ended and so exposed, it makes you sensitive to the fact that, like, history is still being contested, that there are so many unfinished liberation struggles.

And that the world has to change.

The world has to change for Palestine, but also for basically everyone else and for the planet.

Like, it's not, it's not going well out there.

And I think most Palestinians don't have the luxury of a delusion that things are okay.

And we can try to numb ourselves to that fact, but I'm grateful that Palestine has opened me.

And an opening is a wound, but an opening is also It's such a gift.

It allows the world and others to enter in, and and it keeps me connected to to something greater than me.

Wow!

Round of applause, guys.

I just thank you.

It's funny.

I have so many questions.

It's I and I told her this.

You told you this on the call, and I told you this back there.

I could talk to you for hours.

I have so many questions.

But I can't be selfish up here.

Ooh, I'm sorry, guys.

I can't be selfish up here.

I know you all have questions too.

Now we're gonna begin our Q&A.

Again, guys, for those that are just tuning in, I'm Nadeen Abusada.

I'm a news reporter with Channel 5, and I am sitting here with the Sarah Aziza, the author of The Hollow Half: A Memoir of Bodies and Borders.

And shout-out to the parents in the room, because I— listen, I'm proud for you.

So— now we welcome questions.

From everyone.

This is also being played live on 89.7 WKSU, Ideastream Public Media.

Now if you have a question, let's say you don't want to come to the stand, you can also text.

Here's the number: 330-541-5794.

I'm gonna say it again just in case: 330-541-5794.

And I believe it should be popping up on the screen.

There you go.

All right, we're gonna start With— I'm gonna go— we're gonna go right here.

You know, the shirt's just so pretty with the colors.

We'll start— Malaka, you're next, but we're coming here.

Thank you.

So we're gonna start with a text question.

It reads, another writer might have told the story in the more traditional straightforward form of commercial nonfiction.

Why did you choose this unique form for your book, and how does the structure contribute to the themes of your story?

That's a really good question.

It sounds like a writer asked that question.

Um, yeah, I think the first reason was because I think that I suffered from the— I suffered from the lie of the linear arc of a story.

I think that like the linear arc, the beginning, middle, and end, is not how life or history works.

It's not how the human soul works.

And what I was learning through my recovery and the idea that like what I was going through in 2019 had so much to do 1919, like, this was becoming a reality for me, and the porousness of time, like, the fact that my grandmother was a living presence after her death, and that I felt like there was like a— there was a porousness to time.

I wanted to sort of break that linearity.

It's a very Western, very modern idea that a life, a character moves like this only.

And I also think that that's how I learned the world, and how I think we need to find ways to sort of begin dismantling and rebuilding the world is to understand the way that human— sorry, not human— history is present tense.

The Nakba, the catastrophe, is ongoing, as we see in Gaza today, the erasure, the ethnic cleansing.

So I wanted the book to sort of embody that, and I tried a lot of different ways to do it until I sort of landed on a thematic structure that I hope keeps the reader oriented, but also sort of unsettles the idea of time and single characters as well.

I became convinced that my individuality is not an insular phenomenon, but that I'm a host for different times and different souls, and that there's a porousness to personhood as well.

So I wanted the book to try to embody that.

I think it did, and also speaks volumes of like being an immigrant, being an immigrant in a different land, being an immigrant where you don't have a first home, and you talk about that.

All right, we're going to go this way to Malak.

Hello, thank you so much for being here.

Sorry, Dan, I just have to say this, so don't be mad at me.

Thank you to the City Club and the Anisfield Book Awards, and especially it's very special to have you here.

I'm Palestinian myself, so we don't get a lot of opportunities to have someone speak as freely as you, and it's very special.

I've been emotional this whole conversation, so thanks to everyone for making this happen.

You know, how do you write about inherited grief, which is a piece of Palestinian identity, without letting grief become the whole entire story of the Palestinian identity?

Wow.

Thank you.

Take your time.

Good question.

Hmm.

In this moment, you can browse your table.

I see some cheesecake that hasn't been touched.

Mm, enjoy.

How do we write about Palestinian grief without making it the entirety of the story?

It's more challenging every day, I think.

As I warm up to answering this question, let me think about specific craft questions or craft decisions I made.

For example, I don't illustrate a lot of violence.

I allude to it, but I think that, for example, it's not just Palestinians.

I actually learned this from— like, I was a student actually as an activist.

Like, I got involved in activism and social justice first through the Movement for Black Lives.

And I remember like learning from my colleagues, like discussions around sharing images of Black bodies being brutalized and how there's this dialectic between you need to expose the violence of a system, but you also want to protect the dignity of that body and not contribute to this sort of like normalizing of certain bodies we only see broken and only see shot and only see dead.

Because I even received so many images of Palestinian bodies early in my life as little boys throwing stones at tanks or, you know, just, you know, horrific things.

So I— my dealing with violence was definitely like something I thought a lot about.

There's very few dead bodies in this book, but I also feel like I did— I tried to imbue the grief not of generic tragedy, but helping people get to know specific characters in their flaws and their detailed dimensions, and then watch them suffer loss, be erased, be cut short.

And I think that the most dignified and maybe the most powerful way to talk about Palestinian grief is in specificity.

So I hope that people who read this book who maybe aren't Palestinian, don't know any Palestinians, like, if they finish my book, I hope that they never can think of Palestinian as just some abstract category, because that category is probably filled by what?

If you don't know a real Palestinian, it's probably you're getting it from the news, you're getting it from rhetoric.

So how are you going to feel and understand what it means that Palestinians are being evicted from their homes, Palestinians are being forced to demolish their homes with their own hands because Israelis will charge them money if they bulldoze— if they arrive and they say, we're going to bulldoze your house and you're paying for it, or you're going to bulldoze your own house, or you're going to, like, dismantle your own house.

If you— if Palestinians are abstract, you know, if Black teenagers are abstract categories, and the only time you hear about them is because something horrible has happened, how are you going to be moved?

How are you going to actually, on your— the level of your humanity, have that touch you.

So a few characters rendered with love and flaws and tragedy, as well as dignity and dreams and love and attempts and failures and attempts, is how I would like to convey what it means to be Palestinian, which includes tragedy but isn't limited to tragedy.

It's the idea that you can't have one without the other.

We have our dabke, we have our tatreez, we have our cuisine, We also have our pain.

And it's like, and I always am like, you can't just enjoy the good things but not acknowledge the other.

And vice versa, you can't just acknowledge the bad but acknowledge who we are too.

It's often one or the other.

And the publishing industry also usually wants one or the other.

They want like the cute grandma with the food, or they want the suffering victim.

And it's not just Palestinians, right?

It's like immigrant stories.

It's, you know.

And you know, that's what I appreciated that you did in here.

One second we're talking about your teta and her breakfast with the jam and this, but we're talking about you going through a checkpoint, because that is the reality of our life.

It's not one or the other, it is both.

Very beautiful.

Again, I'm gonna— now we're gonna go to questions again.

Who do we have over here?

Of course.

Okay, so I feel like you started answering this a little bit, but I wanted to know specifically, like, after getting to go to Palestine, how that affected your outlook on how intersexual are experiences and our struggles are?

Yeah, thank you, thank you so much.

Yeah, that's such a good question, the intersectionality of these struggles.

Again, like I said, like my first protest was after Trayvon Martin was killed in college, and I skipped class to do it too, which is like, there's just so many things happening once.

I'm a good immigrant's daughter, I like, I go to class.

I've never been to protests because I'm scared, because you have to be a good citizen, because It's very tenuous, and you need to behave.

But so yeah, it was in that first march, I remember seeing the Philadelphia police in their riot gear.

And I had a flashback immediately to the West Bank.

I'm like, that's what the soldiers look like there.

And lo and behold, digging up the documents, many cities in the US send their police to Israel to be trained.

And the Israelis send their military to apartheid South Africa during apartheid be trained, and it's actually really out in the open in some ways.

There's so many tactics and strategies and forms of organizing and resistance that we have to learn from each other.

So it's both that we're being oppressed by intersectional and interlocking oppressions and systems, and it's also that the ways that we fight are so intertwined.

The Native American struggle, of course, is ongoing and unfinished.

There are many nations that are still represented on this land that is called the United States or Turtle Island.

And that— the longevity of that struggle, it's multiple times the length of the Palestinian struggle against British and then Zionist occupation.

So we have so much to learn from them.

And I could go on and on, of course.

I mean, I learned a lot from Christina Sharpe, who talks about in the wake of the Middle Passage and how the wake of the slave ships still ripples through time.

And she's taught me so much about how to think about catastrophe that started hundreds of years ago but is present tense.

So I couldn't think, I couldn't move without these many other teachers that come from so many other traditions.

So I think it's just a— at a certain point, it just became not just like, oh, I understand it as intersectional, but I can't even go on unless I'm thinking intersectionally.

I need all of these people alongside, and I want to be alongside them.

Because we're fighting the same fights in some ways, not to collapse them, but also as Palestine, like a world with a free Palestine is a world in which so many other people are liberated.

A world that is led by like Black feminist abolitionists is a world where Palestine is free, right?

Like as we fight these many fights.

Inshallah.

I really enjoyed reading your book.

It's fascinating and very descriptive, which fascinates me.

But the passage that caught my attention that I want you to explain further is, if the state doesn't exist, therefore you don't exist.

Can you elaborate on that?

If the state— of Palestine?

Yeah.

I mean, in the book you mentioned that since people think Palestine doesn't exist, therefore you don't exist as a person, a Palestinian.

Thank you.

Yeah, yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah, I think that it's interesting.

Sometimes I think, oh, I'm only a writer.

I just, I move words around on a page, and there's people who are starving, and there's people who are losing their homes, and And there are people facing incredible violence.

But language and what happens in the material world are so intertwined.

And anytime I question that, I think about how many Palestinian writers and journalists and artists have been assassinated just in the last few years.

They've killed over 200 Palestinian journalists, targeted assassinations.

So I think about— how if someone says a place doesn't exist, if someone erases you in words and language, it is a precursor, it is a paving away, it is a flattening of the ground to make genocide that much easier.

And Marit Barghouti said linguistic genocide comes and then literal genocide comes.

So I think even though sometimes I think language is is not as important as other parts of the struggle.

And, you know, depends on the day, maybe I think it isn't quite as important, but it's very important nonetheless.

And there's a reason why saying free Palestine gets— makes national news when someone says it during an Ed Sheeran concert, you know, like, it means something to say that Palestine exists, you know, and I've had soldiers Look me in the eye and say Palestine doesn't exist.

You don't exist, and they've been saying that for like over 100 years.

I wonder.

I wonder why they're so caught up on that.

It must be because it challenges the very core of their narrative, which is this land belongs to us because it was empty and we took it.

So I'm not as attached to a state as I am to place and land, and yaeni like watan or like the the homeland, the belonging.

I think the nation-state, we need to talk about that.

But yeah, I think it's offensive.

I think it's an offense against many people that are perpetrated.

Just like we were just talking in the green room about how someone told a Native friend of ours that they didn't even realize that there were any left.

So yeah, we need to keep fighting to be made visible.

I hope it's OK I shared that.

So the fight continues.

I hope that made sense.

There was a saying I heard, and it was a story in Palestine where the man was trying to take dirt.

And in one of the Masrach plays, it's actually the line in the play.

The man was trying to take the dirt, and the older gentleman, it's his home, and someone's trying to take it.

He said, you could take all the dirt you want, but you will never have the land.

Talked about how it's just, it's not just the land, it's in our hearts, it's who we are.

And I feel like that speaks volumes to that.

Next question.

Thanks for coming and taking advantage of the largest, longest citadel for free speech here at the City Club.

You talk about history, you talk about history being before the Nakba.

I wonder if you're able to also acknowledge the centuries of history that the Jewish people have to the land as well.

Yeah, fully acknowledged.

Yeah, there's a— there are Jewish Palestinians.

Judaism is a longstanding part of the land of Palestine.

And there are, there are many indigenous communities in Palestine that have Judaism or Jewish heritage as part of their history, including in Gaza.

And as someone who's very close to and has, you know, deep relationships with many Jewish people, I live in New York City, have many comrades there, I know what they say is that Zionism is a violence against their Judaism, against their Jewish heritage.

And for them, it is this violent fusing of a culture and/or religion and long history with a violent and now genocidal state project.

It also caused exiles of Iraqi Jews, Yemeni Jews, North African Jews because of the way that it destabilized the geopolitics and pitted Arabness against Jewishness, which is not an indigenous conflict.

It is not a longstanding conflict.

It's a modern conflict that was created by colonization.

So yes, I absolutely acknowledge, you know, and, and Ahed Tamimi, The famous now young woman from Palestine, Palestinian woman who, she was famous, she was a little girl who was like, you know, like swinging her fist as a little girl against like Israeli soldiers.

She was arrested recently, released from jail, and she says, you know what, Jewish history is Palestinian history.

Jewish history is my history.

She's not Jewish, but she's Palestinian.

She said, how dare Zionism try to take my connection with my sisters and brothers who are Jewish in the land of Palestine?

I've got a text question here to share.

Earlier, you noted that eating disorders aren't actually about food.

The tragedy there is that the disorder cuts the individual off from one of the very things that makes us human, food from our culture and food as a way to connect with cultures of others.

Could you talk about how that felt for you?

Yeah, thank you.

That's such a deep question in the way it acknowledges the connection that food offers.

So it's like the flip side, right?

And I think about how intimate eating is.

You're taking material that eventually, like, you trace it all the way back, it comes from the land, it comes from the sun.

I forget which poet it was who talks about, like, we all eat the sun.

Like, everything comes from the sun to the plants, to our bodies or to the plants, to the animals, to our body.

So it is a connection to the cosmos, to the land, to each other.

And so there is this, again, I think maybe a sense of isolation and alienation from yourself can also translate into this.

You don't know how to connect to other people or to your own human experience.

So there is a very deep isolation that I think many mental illnesses will bring you to, including eating disorders, where Yeah, you're really cut off.

You're violating your own body.

And like I mentioned earlier, I've come to understand, like, this body isn't just me, me, Sarah.

Like, I look like my grandmother, I'm told.

I look like I carry other people I've never met and all of the sunshine in Palestine that they ate and grew.

And so cutting myself off and destroying that body was like a deep violence that I didn't understand, like, how painful it was to be internalizing and perpetrating it.

Because that's what colonizing and colonizers, racism, all these things, it's so insidious.

It can get into our own practices and the way that we look at ourselves or treat ourselves.

And slowly undoing that, and it's an ongoing journey, I'm still undoing that, is a way of connecting.

And sometimes I think it's like, oh my God, also my grandmother was an amazing cook and always pressing food on me.

And I think there's a way in which when you're coming back to life from a mental illness, that like the world comes at you, even the good stuff can feel like too much at once.

So it's like, it's very overwhelming.

It's a learning how to stay grounded and to accept and receive.

It's ongoing.

I agree.

Now, I didn't ask you this question.

Oh, there is someone there.

I'm gonna ask this one real quick and I'll come to you.

I didn't ask you this earlier.

You talk about how you're nosnos.

What was it like to have— you really are down the middle.

You have a Christian American mother who we love, a Muslim Palestinian father who we love.

And that is what you were raised in, really right down the middle.

And I know a lot of Palestinians are that half and half.

What was that like for you?

What were the beautiful moments but also the challenges?

And then we're going to come to you.

Oh, well, there's a lot of answers to that question.

But I think, I think it was, you know, I, like I said, I reject fractions now, but If we're to take that, it is true that I had that household.

That was both.

It was presented to me as a good thing.

It brought a lot of complications that I think I'm still— I had to unpack myself.

But on the good days, it was a beautiful invitation to embrace— I was telling you, my Baba, who's Muslim, loves Christmas.

There's a lot of sweet little ways in which, in the best-case scenario, you do have more than 2.

Like, you do, in a way— wait, that was a typo in my brain, but it's true.

You have more than 2.

You have, like, a bigger, more expansive world, and you kind of understand how fluid these identities can be and sort of, like, the creative generation that that can bring.So, we're going to come over here.

Sarah, I want you to know that your niece who couldn't come today is listening.

On the livestream.

So if you want to say hi to her.

I think that's the best question we've got yet.

No one's anybody.

Oh wait, there's more.

Like, what is your hope for her future?

And maybe you can talk a little bit about her name and the significance.

Yeah, that's a great question.

I know we're going to run out of time, so I'll jump right in.

Thank you.

That's my mom.

Whom we love.

We do love.

Yes, yes.

So Bahia is my little niece that I'm obsessed with, and she's 8 months now.

Just turned 8 months.

Can I see?

Yeah.

Oh, she's like, yeah, the love of my life now.

So her name, I'll start there, was a name that sort of wasn't really a name that we talked about or mentioned in my family, but she was my My father's sister, who he never met, she was born before him in Gaza and only lived a few months.

And because they had— it was right after the Nakba, they were refugees, they didn't have a stable home, she actually passed away from the measles, which is like one of those diseases that you don't even think is like in circulation.

By the way, in Gaza, people are now contracting polio and tuberculosis because Israel's contaminated the water and held back so much medical supplies that people are contracting diseases from other centuries.

So anyway, Bahia, the first Bahia, passed away as an infant in Gaza, is buried in Gaza.

So that was my father's sister who he never met, and my grandmother's only daughter.

So that name kind of— I uncovered it in the process of this, the research for this book.

It wasn't really— it wasn't hidden, but it wasn't talked about, as you can understand, very, very painful.

So I made sure her name was written in this book, and I think that that is where my brother and sister-in-law got got the idea to name her after bringing that life back.

So I love her.

My dream for her future, I could go on and on.

I know there's a clock right there of like a few seconds, but Minutes, you have time.

Obviously, obviously.I mean, I wrote her a letter like the day that she was being born that I haven't given to her yet, but there's time.

I want her, of course, to see a free Palestine, but More than that, I want her to see a world, like I mentioned earlier, that's like oriented in such a way that a free Palestine makes sense.

And it's a world in which like borders are starting to come down, in which like we are starting to wake up as a civilization.

I think there's many awake people, but in a way in which like the powers that be, we call them into attention, we bring them to heel, and we begin to build a world in which like we center also nature and the earth.That's like where my head is at a lot these days.

It's like, what are we going to do to make amends to our more-than-human community and stop the violences that we're perpetuating on the earth and each other?

And that she can live again, and, you know, in a way that's in harmony with the land, with others, and with her own body.

I hope that she grows up in a world in which whatever gender, whatever shape and size and color, like, there is actual embrace and love and affirmation around her at all times.

Inshallah.

We have 2 minutes left, and I want you, with this book, this intimate book that you've really— like, when I walked into the room, I was like, I feel like I know your whole life.

What would be your message to to Palestinians, to those that are allies, to those that are in the diaspora, maybe their cause isn't Palestine, they have other causes, to those battling eating disorders, what would be your message?

And we talked about this earlier, what is your goal with this and what would be your message to close this out?

You got 2 minutes.

Well, I mentioned one goal, which is that if you read this book, you'll never walk away thinking of Palestinians as an abstract, but that you'll have specific names and faces and stories because I really, stories are So stories are how I learned I was a human being, and how I continue to know that I'm a human being is story.

Another thing that I would say is just I hope that people— what this book is an embodiment of and what I try to continue to embody is an ever-growing trust in myself, in the voice and the knowing inside.

And one of my favorite quotes in the whole world is Dionne Brand, who's who's an incredible poet, who says, what would it mean to talk as if the world you know is the world?

And if we were all doing that, if we were all even in a place where we knew who you were, like, do you know who you are?

Or are people telling you who you are?

And then are you in a place where you're tuned in enough to you that you know your world?

Or are you living according to the world that's being dictated to you?

So what would it mean if we were all actually speaking as if the world we knew were the world and we were listening to each other?

Same time.

So my book, this is my first attempt to do it.

I'm still trying, and I hope just more and more people are beginning to speak their worlds.

Wow.

Sarah Aziza, guys.

Sarah Aziza.

Thank you.

Alrighty, thank you guys for joining us in this conversation.

Thank you, Sarah, for sharing so much amazing intellect and wisdom and experience from you.

Sarah, you joined us today for the City Clubs Luncheon that we all love.

Thank you.

Forums like this are made possible.

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You can learn more about how to become a member of the City Club at cityclub.org.

Today's forum is presented in partnership with Anisfield Wolf Book Awards and in part of City Club's Authors and Conversations series.

Today's forum is also the Ibn Sina Society Forum at the City Club of Cleveland, made possible by generous endowment gifts from Ibn Sina Society.

The City Club appreciates their ongoing support of City Club programming.

The City Club would also like to welcome guests at the tables hosted by AAC, the Arab Americans of Cleveland, the Cleveland Foundation, Cleveland Public Theater, and Masra Cleveland al Arabi.

And of course, you can't forget the Cuyahoga County Public Library.

Thank you once again, the Sarah Aziza, and of course, the members of Friends of the City Club.

I'm Nadina Abusada.

And this is adjourned.

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