Sarah Aziza

“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