🔗 Share this article

The young poet was having lunch in her family’s coastal home, which had become their latest safe haven in the city, when a rocket targeted a nearby coffee shop. This occurred on the final day of June, an usual Monday in the region. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she recalls. In a flash, scores of people of all ages were lost, in an atrocity that received worldwide coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the detachment of someone numbed by ongoing danger.

Yet, this outward composure is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting chroniclers, whose debut poetry collection has already won praise from renowned writers. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a means of expression for atrocities, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure wanders the streets, holding the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a secondhand truce (she cannot, because the cost increases). The collection itself is called 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing 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 killed and there nobody remaining to bury me.”

Personal Loss

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and another personal loss. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier in the spring, a month before the premiere of a documentary about her life. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the evening before she was killed. “Now I wonder whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she says. Before long, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary editor.

{Before the war, I often grumbled about my life. Then I found myself just running and trying to survive|In the past, I was spoilt and constantly whining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and separate poems began being published in journals and collections. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now uses it confidently enough to translate her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She enrolled in a program in English studies and translation at the local 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 spoilt girl who often to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the privileges of normalcy assumed, is present in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a young relative questions in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a constant motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one building to another. “We heard the cries of a woman and no one dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. Mum 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 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 did everything on a open flame,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was always angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After writing the poems in her native language, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are presented side by side. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another aspect of me – the newer one.”

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

Although their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the brief truce in January this year to go back to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are less fortunate. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she writes in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read horizontally or vertically, highlighting the gap between the surviving artist and the victims on the opposite end of the symbol.

Equipped with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study online, has begun instructing kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was considered very risky in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be blunt, which is beneficial. It means you can use strong language with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It helped me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”