🔗 Share this article

The young poet was enjoying a midday meal in her family’s coastal apartment, which had become their most recent safe haven in the city, when a projectile targeted a close by cafe. This occurred on the last day of June, an typical Monday in the region. “I was holding a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she recalls. Immediately, many of men, women and children were killed, in an horrific incident that received international attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the detachment of someone desensitized by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching observers, whose first poetry collection has already earned recognition from prominent literary figures. She has devoted her whole being to finding a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can convey both the surrealism and absurdity of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the role of external powers and a history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor offers frozen corpses to dogs; a woman roams the streets, holding the dying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a secondhand ceasefire (she fails, because the price increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one left to bury me.”

Personal Loss

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the style of a teenager and another deep loss. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month before the debut of a film about her life. She adored rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the evening before she died. “I now question whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children born into a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer 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 telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that needed to be cultivated. Her mother has since then been her first reader.

{Before the genocide, I used to complain about my life. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was spoilt and always complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and separate poems began being published in magazines and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now speaks it confidently enough to render her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To motivate herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a degree in English studies and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who often to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This theme, of the luxuries of normalcy taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which ends, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as casual 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 questions in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the collection, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the street outside their home as he moved from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one ventured to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father remained in the northern part to protect their home from thieves, while the rest of the family moved to a shelter in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was always frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period depicts a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

After composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed together. “These are not direct translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another aspect of me – the newer one.”

In a preface to the book, she elaborates on this, noting that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she came to terms with death. “I think the conflict helped to build my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the north to the southern zone with just my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the brief truce in January this year to go back to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read horizontally or downwards, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has continued to study 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 destroyed society – was deemed far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be blunt, which is good. It implies you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It helped me greatly with being the person that I am today.”