🔗 Share this article

The young poet was enjoying a midday meal in her family’s seaside refuge, which had become their newest shelter in Gaza City, when a projectile hit a adjacent cafe. It was the last day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she recalls. In a flash, many of men, women and children were lost, in an tragic event that received international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the detachment of someone desensitized by ongoing horror.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching chroniclers, whose debut book of poems has already earned praise from prominent writers. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her poems, rockets are launched from military aircraft, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells the dead to dogs; a female figure wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used ceasefire (she fails, because the price increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a kilogram of her own weight. “I see my poems to be an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one left to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a teenager and another personal loss. One of her close friends, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier in the spring, a month before the premiere of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, the night before she was killed. “Now I wonder whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She started writing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the genocide, I used to complain about my situation. Then I found myself just running and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and always whining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in journals and anthologies. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now uses it fluently enough to translate her own work, even though she has never left Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English studies and language translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when Hamas initiated its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who often to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” opens one, which ends, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the killing of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a young relative asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face again and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a constant motif in the book, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the road near their home as he walked from one building to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no medical help. My mother said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in north Gaza to guard their home from thieves, while the rest of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

Once writing the poems in her native language, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two editions are presented side by side. “These are not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another version of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to shape my character,” she comments. “The relocation from the north to the southern zone with just my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their old home was demolished, the family chose during the brief truce in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem called Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, making concrete the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Equipped with her recent confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has begun teaching young children, and has even started to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was deemed far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you need not be that courteous person always. It aided me greatly with becoming the individual that I am today.”