🔗 Share this article

The young poet was eating lunch in her household’s coastal refuge, which had become their latest safe haven in Gaza City, when a projectile struck a nearby coffee shop. This occurred on the final day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window trembled,” she recalls. In a flash, many of people of all ages were dead, in an atrocity that received international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the detachment of someone numbed by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won recognition from renowned literary figures. She has devoted her whole being to creating a language for the unspeakable, one that can articulate both the surrealism and illogic of life in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday losses.

In her verses, rockets are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the involvement of external powers and a history of annihilation; an street seller sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, holding the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a used ceasefire (she fails, because the price keeps rising). The book itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Personal Loss

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and another personal tragedy. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier in the spring, a month before the premiere of a film about her life. Fatma loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and sunsets, the night before she was killed. “I now question whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Soon, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her primary editor.

{Before the genocide, I often grumbled about my life. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and constantly complaining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in magazines and collections. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to render her own work, even though she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she pasted a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a degree in English literature and language translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when militants launched its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with boredom,” opens one, which ends, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she lamented “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was no routine about the killing of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a young relative questions in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face again and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the collection, with body parts calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from looters, while the remainder of the family relocated to a shelter in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Ring Finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After composing the poems in her native language, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed together. “These are not direct translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being torn apart, and through translation she came to terms with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to build my personality,” she comments. “The move from the north to the southern zone with just my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are less fortunate. “I survive while countless others perish / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, highlighting the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the other side of the symbol.

Equipped with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has begun instructing young children, and has even started to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a devastated society – was deemed very risky in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It helped me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”