Status Updates From The Hollow Half: A Memoir o...

“Out of the queerest of spaces, the ugliest of beings, the most extreme forms of abjection, beauty and revolution abound,” notes Palestinian writer Tareq Baconi about Gaza.

Perhaps we will find a relentless woman digging thorns out of her field. “No,” her weapon and her seed. Banished from the brutal order, mother of resistance, of those who dream beyond.

She’s murdering me, folks

“There were many sorrows he had names for... But he had not understood that these were only shadows, the inverted silhouette of the life he might have lived.

For a few hours [in ‘Ibdis], he walked in the light of what almost, but never, was.

There was no sign of construction or cultivation; this land had been razed to desecrate, to break the traces of Arab lineage & all suggestion of return.”

This anger is armor, the defensive snarl of a girl whose flesh had become a site of fear. It was not just my grandmother's body Katie had rejected — but mine too.

Revulsion trapped me inside a secret: that I, too, felt at home on the floor or squatting by the stove. That I relished filling my mouth with ورق عنب [grape leaves] & wiggling to Fairouz. I felt continuous w/ a body I had come to see as scorned.

The life they rebuilt as refugees in Jeddah was narrow, pinned in the seam between hunger and enough.

…Bellies full but with expired cheese, apricot jam gone brown.

Ziyad & his mother wept separately, their private griefs a weight each hoped the other would be spared. Burying the memory of [Gaza's silver sea], Ziyad learned to love football, and, when Saudi boys mocked Falasteen, discovered how to throw a fist.

israel is so evil wow

wow, this book is a mess

“To live with anorexia is to live in a fascist state of being, one ruled by a cruel. and illogical board of Kafkaesque tyrants... a rule inexplicably coalesces from nothingness and turns into gospel in a matter of milliseconds,” writes Kelsey Osgood in How to Disappear Completely.