🔗 Share this article

Batool Abu Akleen was having a midday meal in her household’s seaside refuge, which had become their most recent safe haven in the city, when a rocket struck a adjacent cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she recalls. Immediately, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that gained global attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant violence.

However, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already earned recognition from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a language for the unspeakable, one that can convey both the surrealism and illogic of life in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are launched from military aircraft, 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 wanders the streets, holding the dying city in her arms and trying to purchase a used truce (she fails, because the cost keeps rising). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. The title, 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 an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there nobody remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a teenager and yet another deep loss. One of her dear companions, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier in the spring, a month prior to the premiere of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and sunsets, the evening before she was killed. “I now question whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She began composing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Soon, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her first editor.

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

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and separate poems began being printed in journals and collections. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled 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 study at Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a program in English studies and language translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when militants initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which concludes, begging, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a granddaughter questions in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face again and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring theme in the collection, with body parts crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one building to another. “We heard the screams 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 to 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 south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was always frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who misplaced 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 Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two versions are displayed together. “These are not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more assurance: it’s a different version of me – the newer one.”

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being torn apart, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “I think the genocide helped to build my character,” she says. “The relocation from the northern area to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family chose during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I survive while countless others perish / I have food as my father goes hungry / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has begun instructing kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was deemed very risky in the past. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I acquired the skill 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 courteous person all the time. It aided me so much with being the individual that I am today.”