Uncrafted #2: An Interview with Sarah Aziza

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Mizna Online

February 26, 2025

Uncrafted #2: An Interview with Sarah Aziza

by Hazem Fahmy

In the past few decades, as liberal cultural institutions have grown more dastardly effective at co-opting and defanging the political potential of writers and artists from historically marginalized backgrounds, the amorphous imperative to “witness” continuously re-emerges in the face of unceasing tragedy wrought about by the United States, its ruling class, and its ghastly allies across the globe. We are implored to “witness” atrocity after atrocity, but never as more than bystanders, contributing nothing beyond sympathy, and even then, only for the “perfect victim.” I am drawn to Sara Aziza’s stunning blending of form precisely because it refuses this hijacking, asking us instead to unravel the dangerous language with which we understand and articulate the victims of empire from within it.

– Hazem Fahmy, Uncrafted Column Editor

HAZEM FAHMY

Broadly speaking, how do you think about your relationship with craft as a term and a concept? And in what ways have you encountered it, institutionally or pedagogically?

SARAH AZIZA

I was definitely brought up with a lot of conventional American English craft. In high school, all of the readings I can remember doing were Hawthorne or Shakespeare—very white Anglo-American canon. I remember learning to write the five paragraph essay, and book reports, and things like that—being directed when examining literature to identify themes and answer questions and to believe that there’s a one-to-one correspondence between symbols. Usually there’s some latent Christian messaging as well. Funnily enough, I didn’t feel very keen on poetry until adulthood because the poetry I’d been exposed to before then just felt very mechanical, sort of transactional, like you’re extracting meaning.

Then I studied comparative literature in college, which was a little better because we were looking at literatures from multiple languages and nations, but still in a bit of an abstracted way. I was expected to theoretically examine texts according to a few frameworks, whether it’s Adorno or Althusser, and literature was very much presented as this capturable, break-downable thing. And I never personally experienced literature that way at all. I experienced it as a very mysterious, undefinable power that evaded simple categorization.

I was really interested in what felt interstitial, what was in the shadows, or the gaps, or the white spaces. There seemed to me to be an aura around the literature that most moved me, an aura that was supra-linguistic; a thrill and danger that was more than the sum of its parts. And yet, writing and literature were so often broken down into parts, given to me as formulas or rules. So it took me a long time to actually become a creative writer because when I followed craft directions, it seemed to be taking me parallel to the literature that I experienced as a reader.

Later,I went to journalism school. Journalism has its own set of rules and conventions that also felt completely evacuated of humanity. It’s much more formulaic and has a more explicit commercial aspect to it in the U.S., where formulas are basically derived based on what is believed to sell to readers with diminishing attentions. So that was also a really suffocating kind of space to write in, one that felt very mercenary. I was trying to cover topics like Syrian refugees, or the Arab-American community, or women’s issues, and I constantly had to flatten and diminish the humanity, power, and political import of what I was writing about because of the craft conventions of journalism.

So from both sides, academia and journalism, I just felt like I never had that many satisfying writing experiences. That changed when I dropped off from any writing for a while. When the pandemic hit, it was a time to seclude, and by then my disgust with American journalism had grown to the point that I basically swore off writing altogether. I was silent for a period of months.

My eventual return to writing meant forgetting craft in a lot of ways, and finding this intensely private space. I was actually waking up in the middle of the night—like I was having these ancestral dreams—and then waking up and writing almost in a hypnotic state. Those moments were a gift, circumventing or short-circuiting all my training. I was writing only half-consciously, just in accordance to what felt good, and what I felt like saying. Conventional craft would have never gotten me there. I was using language in all kinds of experimental ways to try find some clarity, maybe some memory as well.

I did that for long enough that when I finally woke up and was writing by choice and not hypnosis anymore, my body had a new sense of what writing could feel like. I was writing from a more instinctive, intuitive place. I was smashing syntax and eschewing grammar. Eventually, it became a very political practice where I recognized craft as discipline. I decided my language had to be feral after that—it had been very domesticated up to that point, and I wanted to maintain more of a sense of the independent, the angry, and the defiant.

I wanted to go back to your point about literature’s capacity for mystery and the undefinable. As vital as it is to center an unambiguously political critique of institutionalized ideas of craft, for me it is also a question of pleasure. For example, there’s been much conversation about the “MFA novel” or the “workshop poem,” these really formulaic ideas of what a sentence should look like, or how a project should be structured—the kinds of characters and concerns that a work can be fixated on. Of course, these are also very political choices, involving what you can and can’t criticize or forefront, but it’s also about narrowing down what is enjoyable.

I do connect those two a lot: pleasure and mystery. I think about Audre Lorde’s approach to the erotic as the source of our greatest power. I see the erotic as the space in which you are working, or living, or loving from a place of abundant truth and aliveness. That’s certainly different for everyone. But for me—from a very, very young age—I had this sense of life being so exhilarating, so vivid. It’s so hard to access that feeling right now, if I’m honest—in a time of genocide, of course, and generally as an adult.

But as a child, I had this sense of wonder, this joyful feeling of the world exceeding one’s understanding, both bewildering and benevolent.. Every day, life gave itself and unfolded, and I really loved being alive. Still, pleasure for me in its simplest form is when I feel like I am learning something new, or am being challenged, put in a place to feel strange, even. Obviously right now, in the shadow of genocide, mystery for me takes on a much heavier undertone. I wasn’t naive a year and a half ago, of course. I was in the middle of writing a book about the Nakba. But now, my vision is so often saturated with the immediate, with material conditions, and I am bewildered in a much more menacing sense—how could it possibly be that this genocide has gone on for fourteen months?

When I can, I push back on my despair by thinking about human goodness, love, and community I witness firsthand. It’s another source of mystery. And I guess there’s still something in me that believes in the worthwhileness of being here. Even when it feels like I can’t locate that in myself, I see it in people in Gaza, in my family there; the desire to continue living, to continue loving, to continue having children.

To connect it back to writing—the mystery of literature for me does its best work when it cuts through, in the sense of what Roland Barthes called the punctum in photography. It’s different for every person, but he writes about how, when looking at a photograph, we might encounter some detail that pierces—through the mundane, through expectation, to the heart—and makes an imprint. For me, it’s through those moments of piercing, whether in beauty or grief, that the universe, life, and the erotic flood in. And it fills in a way that nothing else fills. Whatever it is that floods in that moment is the only thing, at the end of the day, that keeps me going. It revives in a way that basic necessities like food and water don’t. I’m seeking that for myself first and foremost when I write, and I really am dazzled and humbled if anything I write in pursuit of that ends up being meaningful for someone else. There’s definitely a shortage of it. That’s why, as idealistic as it might feel to say in a moment of genocide, art still remains essential. Beauty remains essential.

You mentioned earlier that initially your relationship to poetry—like that of many people, certainly mine—felt very distant, like something that couldn’t speak to you. When did it, to use Barthes’s term, puncture through for you?

There would be moments as a young adult, early teens to early twenties, where I would stumble across a line or two of poetry and it would take my breath away, but I was still more disciplined in those moments, so poetry also scared me. I remember Emily Dickinson’s poems terrified me. And she’s not even the most formally experimental, but there was something dangerous in her poems because of the way she strangles language.

So while I stayed away from poems that seemed too easy to capture, I also stayed away from poems that felt wild. It was only in 2020 when I was in that period of torpor that poetry really became important to me because it, at its best, colors outside the lines, and can reflect urgency in a way that longer forms don’t. To name a few, in that moment, Solmaz Sharif, Kaveh Akbar, Dionne Brand, Mahmoud Darwish, and June Jordan were particularly nourishing and instructive for me.

I love poetry that feels like it has broken edges, because I think that language should always spill into silence. I think that silence is much more important than words—language can so often exclude, or attempt to control, but silence is abundant in its emptiness. Poetry has more of a capacity to respect silence, to gesture toward all that exceeds us

It seems to me like what you found in poetry during this period was the opposite of what had been pushed on you in journalism school. Journalism in the West in general, but particularly in the U.S., is obsessed with this idea of objectivity, which we’ve seen being put to particularly violent uses since October of last year. For you, to what degree was moving toward poetry moving away from journalism?

I now feel like I’m always going through poetry with everything. I make a distinction now that might seem unimportant, but to me, it’s critical—I tell people: I’m not a journalist, I’m a writer. Because I refuse that myth of objectivity now. I only dwell in nonfiction because I’m invested in the possibilities of reclaiming it. It’s also definitely easier to categorize my work as nonfiction instead of journalism, but both of these categories have this sheen of supposed truth because it’s “not fiction.” Leaving journalism was very much due to my outrage at having to flatten the stories I was covering, whether of Syrian refugees in Jordan, or the Yemeni population here in New York City. Editors wanted an Arab-American journalist, but only to translate, in every sense of the word, for an American audience. I was hyper-conscious of the fact that any warmth, color, or anger in my language would all be chocked up to bias, and likely cut. And yet, my editors were also asking me to basically victimize my subjects, to portray them as victims. They wanted me to confirm their biases, in my Arab voice.

I’m assuming they were also asking you to translate very particular narratives that a liberal American audience would find palatable.

Absolutely. Even though my characters really didn’t belong inside those narratives. For example, I remember being sent to cover women’s issues in Saudi Arabia and meeting vibrant, ambitious Saudi women—but they weren’t allowed to exist that way on the page when I came back to write for American audiences. It was infuriating and demoralizing. I only managed to eke out a handful of stories in that mode before I just felt so disgusted and done. I didn’t write about Palestine at all during this time, because I felt like there was no way to write about it in a remotely humane or politicized way without being accused of being rampantly biased. There’s an argument to be made for trying anyway, but at the time, my soul couldn’t take writing Palestine for liberal white audiences. In general, I’d argue Palestine is the most disciplined subject in American journalism.

So I was moving toward poetry around 2020 as I was also severing my allegiance to any audience, but especially the white American audience. At the time, I was not saturating myself with just any poetry, but particularly with work by writers of color and queer writers; writers who I was realizing I belonged with.

Besides losing my interest in either earning or keeping an audience, I was trying to figure out what I actually wanted to say and who I came to speak for and to. Those questions had all just been decided for me at the beginning of my pedagogy, without me even realizing it. There was an implied audience and an implied set of subjects and ways to speak about them that I had inherited and hadn’t questioned sufficiently. The poets and other writers I was reading were helping me think through that.

I’m curious about your feelings about the term nonfiction. I personally always hated it because I find it to be a nonterm; the thing that is not fiction, when it actually refers to such a wide and rich constellation of forms, sensibilities, and approaches.

It’s so funny what people bring to that term. Like I said before, it has the potential to slip into some of the dangers that come with saying that journalism is “objective,” as if “nonfiction” has no invention in it. I don’t know what the root of the word “fiction” is—I assume it has to do with fabrication, but I think anyone who’s honest knows that we’re all living our personal narratives all the time. All of reality is created by imagination. Of course, we could also talk about emotional truth versus “factuality.” Since 2016 especially, people have made so much of the idea that we’re “post-truth” or that we now have “alternative facts.” I haven’t wasted that much breath trying to enter that conversation.

When I started writing my book, I was trying to figure out a way to tell my reality, which is penetrated by multiple temporalities—ancestors, the future, the dead—and in this midst, glimpses of a self that is changing from one moment to the next. I was trying to grapple with all of these dimensions, unknowns, and silences—all of these modes and geographies, my imperfect Arabic and my imperial English—all of that happening at once.

Attempting to represent all of that on the page, I tried out all kinds of different forms. I was mixing language, using devices like redactions and footnotes, and weaving in ghost stories; stories of my grandmother’s ghost, which felt so real to me that it did belong in “nonfiction.” I was trying to narrativize history in a way that mingled with archival work, reported fact, imagination, and ancestral intuition. I decided I needed all of those things to approach what I thought was the truth, which did not boil down to the strictest definition of “nonfiction.” That’s what art offers.

The book exists, but it hasn’t been published yet, so we’ll see what people will think—but I have a peace of mind knowing that what I wrote was my best attempt to approximate that multiplicity, vastness, and mystery.

The politics of knowledge is very contiguous in the context of Palestine and the West. The Nakba couldn’t be a legitimate term and history here until “brave” Israeli historians cracked open the archive and got the documents, until aging Zionist war criminals felt comfortable enough to proudly confess what they’d done in memoirs and documentaries. But Palestinians, of course, have always known what happened. There were always survivors and their descendants who knew and relayed what happened. Obviously, it’s not to say we don’t need the careful archival and historical work, but there’s a much larger issue here on who gets the “permission to narrate,” as Edward Said would put it.

Empire is really stupid because of how narrowly it defines legible knowledge. One source of hope for me is the continued refusal of empire to actually exhibit real interest in its own survival, like refusing to take cues from nature, indigenous people, or history itself. When thinking about writing against empire, I think about emergency, about “resistance” in its many forms. But I also think about the desire to preserve who we are in our wholeness and beauty, our desires and interests and curiosities and idiosyncrasies; our uniqueness in the midst of resisting.

In thinking about my relationship with English and English education, I started taking apart my syntax. I would download declassified documents from the 1950s and redact or appropriate the language and mess with it. It felt like there were lots of ways to be insurgent. I’m thinking about Look by Solmaz Sharif, for example, and how she takes the military dictionary and uses it as a starting point to craft poems against the US military industrial complex. But her next book, Customs, was also very different. So as much as resistance is a really fruitful and important place for me, I never want my craft, art, humanity, or existence to just end there. That would allow for too much of my life to be shaped by oppression.

I want to write against, but I also want to write without. I always ask myself: what art would I create if I’m not even thinking about the oppressor? What can I write that the despots and fascists could never grasp or understand?

I think a lot as well about Édouard Glissant and opacity when it comes to how stupid and limited imperial knowledge is. I love the moments where art, or even just human friendship, revel in themselves, in what the enemy can never know about us. I think that can be so beautiful, abundant, sustaining, and powerful. And it does work against empire because it begins to build, even if just on the page, or in a space, or for an evening, a different reality. It’s practicing, moving us toward the future that is the reason for our resistance. We resist in order to get to a place where we no longer need to resist.

Before we get into Mourid Barghouti’s work, as we planned for this conversation, I wanted to ask you about memoir writing more broadly. As the author of one yourself, are there particular considerations of craft for you when it comes to this form?

For starters, I’m very suspicious of conventional notions of narrative, the idea that you have to have rising action and climax, or a beginning, middle, and end. That’s very dangerous to me, especially because I’ve been writing a memoir that has to do with trauma, the Nakba, and recovery. I wanted to be very careful. For instance,I didn’t want it to be a straightforward narrative of “resilience”—I’m very suspicious of this term as it’s packaged and sold in the mainstream, based on simplistic ideas of redemption and clear binaries. On the other hand, when I was talking to agents and editors, most of them fixated on my female body and its experiences of ancestral and sexual trauma. Many wanted to lean into that in a very lurid sense. They looked for emotional, almost erotic descriptions of my fragility, my shrinking flesh. It’s a conscious choice to resist this fetishizing appetite for the trauma of certain people; queer trauma and female trauma, but obviously also Palestinian trauma, or that of the colonized subject more broadly.

When I started writing about my grandmother, I was very sensitive to these considerations. I wanted her suffering and loss to be reclaimed, to be thoughtfully, faithfully presented in language. On a personal level, too, this was so important for me—because her trauma also informs the story of who I became and what my struggles were. Yet, I didn’t want to write about her in a way that implied she, or those like her, are just destined to suffer.

To just be a perfect victim.

Yeah, like Mohamed el-Kurd talks about. It was important for me to show her rage, to show my own rage. A quote from el-Kurd that I really like is: “we have a right to contempt.” It’s a little spin on Glissant, who’d said: “we have the right to opacity.” In that same sense, we have a right to contempt, anger, and messy feelings. I didn’t want my book to just be a shallow valley of suffering, one trauma after another, and I didn’t want it to be tied up neatly in a bow of “resilience.” I wanted my grandmother—a brown, disabled woman—and all my people to be granted the complexity, fallibility, and nuance that has been afforded to white, male characters for centuries. And I wanted to begin and end in irresolution—because that is how I experience the world, and because our liberation is incomplete.

I was also thinking a lot about the responsibility of handling another person’s story. I was writing a personal memoir, but also a family memoir, so I thought a lot about the privacy of my grandmother and father, whose stories I was trying to approach and tell. I wanted to know as much as I possibly could—from other relatives, from photo albums and family records—in order to render their stories faithfully. I learned a lot from Saidiya Hartman’s words about writing into the archive while also respecting the sovereignty of those characters’ stories. There were things that I gave myself license to render on the page, and others that I felt belonged to no one but my grandmother, so I kept them out. I wanted her to be understood, but I didn’t want her to be exposed.

This actually leads quite smoothly to another question I wanted to ask you, which is that of ethics in the memoir, especially as it’s one of the forms where this concern is most pressing.

It was central for me. Besides what I’ve just mentioned, I was thinking a lot about how to approach putting less flattering things in the book because some of the people who harmed me were fellow Arabs. My grandfather, as well, was a complicated character. But as we were saying earlier, I didn’t want to write a story in which we were perfect victims. Because of what Palestinians are currently facing, I often felt this pressure that because I have a mic I have to show the best of us. I really struggled with that sometimes because I just don’t want to give anyone any more reason to disparage Palestinians, or more specifically Palestinian or Muslim or Arab men.

But then I realized that that’s also dehumanizing because that’s not allowing us to be human, i.e. inherently complicated, fallible, and often misguided. It’s also desecrating our love and relationality. Because in reality, love is always fucking up. We make mistakes and harm one another. I was trying to find a way to welcome in some of that messiness because that’s also our birthright. We deserve to be full.

Sara Ahmed talks about the risks of bringing up stories of trauma, specifically sexual trauma, perpetuated from within our own communities because white audiences are so primed to clutch to those things and say: “See? Look at these barbaric men!” But she also talks about the harm of rendering these things secrets—so it’s important to tell them with care. She’s another person I took ethical cues from when deciding to include certain things that ran the risk of being used against us. But in general, I just think it’s more important to write toward our fullness than to preemptively flatten and hollow ourselves out. That’s already done for us so much.

Agreed, and to that point, I think there’s also a huge difference between someone writing about the experience of patriarchy, misogyny, or gendered violence in the particular context in which they have experienced it versus writing about how a racialized group is exceptionally or inherently violent. Plus, there will simply always be racist who are just waiting for anything to cling to in order to justify their racism against Arabs, Muslims, or whoever else.

Exactly, and so I didn’t want to just be writing against them, just to prove that we’re not those things. That’s why I started writing toward other women or queer people, or even men in our community who are both deeply flawed and also abundantly beautiful and full of love. Writing against the oppressor’s expectation of me in that instance would have only reified it.

I’m now thinking about how Barghouti, in I Was Born There, I Was Born Here, writes the histories that “history” won’t record for him. He writes: “I want to deal with my unimportant feelings that the world will never hear. I want to put on record my right to passing anxieties, simple sorrows, small desires and feelings that flare briefly in my heart and then disappear.” A little later, he goes: “We shall retell history as a history of our fears and anxieties, our patients, our pillow lusts, and our improvised courage. . . We shall make the two hour electricity cuts to our houses important events because they are important events.”

I love how he focuses on the social mundanity of Palestinian lives. This is another ethos that I bring into writing. I really like the humility and the softness with which he writes and then has these moments of surging political feeling, as well.

Something that strikes me about his book, which you alluded to earlier in yours, is that he seems uninterested in giving a linear account of his life, but is much more focused on these vignettes that tell a larger story of life in and outside of Palestine.

Yeah, my book definitely weaves multiple timelines, and it is fragmentary in a way. Because Palestine is such an overdetermined category, his book was a breakthrough for me. It showed me you can take something as small as a single taxi drive, a single conversation, and write about Palestine through that. He talks about how “politics is the number of coffee cups on a table.” There’s such humility and boldness in zooming in on very simple details like that, especially because after ’67, his family couldn’t be in one place because of the occupation. I Saw Ramallah, for instance, opens on him standing at the crossing between Jordan and Palestine, and it’s just a moment-by-moment inching through this ordeal of crossing the border. It’s very simple and understated.

He also didn’t just write with a global audience in mind, but very much with his village, as well. He’s constantly cracking jokes at his own expense. He’s constantly questioning if he’s the right person to write about Palestine. And he’s coming from this place writing poetry in a time when it was trending toward the very ornate and abstracted, whereas he wanted to write with a simplicity that did not equate shallowness, or a lack of seriousness, power, and love. It was very freeing for me to realize that I could write about Palestine in any decibl, that I didn’t have to shout, and it didn’t have to be dramatic. Adania Shibli shows this so well in her book Minor Detail, how the occupation is experienced in the little things. Barghouti talks all the time about how the meaning of the occupation is witnessed in some absurd or obnoxious thing, like how two teenage lovers can’t meet.

In terms of the mundane, he’s also not really trying to tell a grand familial narrative. The book is really focused on the painful and absurd experience of fatherhood in exile, in his case a double exile since he also had to leave Egypt eventually. Radwa Ashour and Tamim Barghouti, his wife and son who are also very accomplished and respected writers in their own regard, are very present throughout, but they also appear in these very humble and simple ways. For example, there’s a chapter about Tamim being a kid and throwing tantrums because he was done with whichever European metropolis they were living in at the time.

Yeah he’s not trying to project these big meanings of being Palestinian. He allows those meanings to accrete through a faithful, unassuming telling of his story. It’s very powerful and poetic at the same time. He stays in touch with what it means to move through the world as a father and a husband in exile, wrestling with things like occupation and chronic illness. When he talks about the wall dividing the West Bank, he talks about how it disrupts all these small aspects of daily life. He says that in his moments of despair, he feels like it will never fall. But he also knows that it will fall because “of our astonishment at its existence.” It gives me hope that, so long as we remain shocked by the unnaturalness of settler-colonialism, we have a chance of defeating it. Trying to stay astonished at evil, I think, is another thing that art can do, or help us do.

In the final chapter of the book, after imploring Palestinians and other Arabs to reject the corruption and cowardice of comprador regimes like the Palestinian Authority (among many others in the region), he demands that: “Palestinians must repossess the moral significance of resistance, cling to its legitimacy, and rid it of the bane of constant improvisation, chaos, and ugliness. The oppressed only wins if he’s essentially more beautiful than his oppressor.”

I do think that Palestinians have had a lot of practice in remaining more beautiful than the colonizer. Resistance takes many forms, but here, I see it as this commitment to one’s self-grounded beauty. Only from there can we truly appreciate the astonishing affront that is colonization, exploitation, war. I imagine that, for Palestinians in Palestine, being on and having a relationship with the land is deeply instructive, and renewing. For me in the diaspora, I must find other ways to remain awake to the fact that the reality in which I live is not natural. We all have a route within us to beauty. Mine is through human touch and relationality. All this requires defending, and it takes practice. So beauty propels our resistance, and through resistance we remain beautiful, moving toward the more natural reality— our future, freed.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity and represents the first in a new interview series Hazem Fahmy is editing with Mizna Online titled Uncrafted, exploring intersections of literary craft and anti-imperial thought.

Sarah Aziza is a Palestinian American writer and translator. Her essays, journalism, poetry, and creative nonfiction have appeared in the New Yorker, the Baffler, Harper’s Magazine, Mizna, Jewish Currents, Lux Magazine, the Intercept, NPR, and the Nation, among others. She is the recipient of numerous grants from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a 2022 resident at Tin House Books and a 2023 Margins Fellow at the Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Her book, The Hollow Half (April 2025), is a hybrid work of memoir, lyricism, and oral history exploring the intertwined legacies of diaspora, colonialism, and the American dream.

Hazem Fahmy is a writer and critic from Cairo. A PhD student in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University, he is the author of three chapbooks: Red//Jild//Prayer (2017) from Diode Editions, Waiting for Frank Ocean in Cairo (2022) from Half-Mystic Press, and At the Gates (2023) from Akashik Books’ New-Generation African Poets series. He is a Watering Hole Fellow, and his writing has appeared, or is forthcoming in The Boston Review, Prairie Schooner, Mubi Notebook, Reverse Shot, and Mizna.