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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her household’s coastal home, which had become their latest shelter in Gaza City, when a missile targeted a nearby cafe. This occurred on the final day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “I was holding a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window trembled,” she states. Immediately, scores of people of all ages were lost, in an tragic event that received worldwide attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the detachment of someone numbed by constant violence.

However, this outward composure is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting chroniclers, whose debut poetry collection has already earned accolades from renowned literary figures. She has devoted her whole being to finding a means of expression for atrocities, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her poems, rockets are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the role of external powers and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure wanders the roads, holding the decaying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a secondhand ceasefire (she cannot, because the price keeps rising). The collection itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was destroyed and there nobody remaining to lay to rest me.”

Personal Loss

During a videocall, Abu Akleen appears well-attired in checkered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the style of a young woman and another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier in the spring, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She adored rings, notes 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 wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children from a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she says. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has since then been her primary editor.

{Before the genocide, I used to complain about my life. Then I ended up just running and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and constantly whining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and individual poems began being printed in magazines and anthologies. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now speaks it confidently enough to translate 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 motivate herself, she pasted a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when Hamas initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This theme, of the luxuries of normalcy assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with boredom,” begins one, which concludes, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a granddaughter questions in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face again 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 decided to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and no one ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to protect their home from looters, while the remainder of the family moved to a refugee camp in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Ring Finger I lend 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 displayed together. “These are not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They hold more sorrow. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing 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 move from the north to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their previous house was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived truce in January last winter to return to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are not so lucky. “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 explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or vertically, making concrete the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Armed with her recent confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn online, has started instructing kids, and has even begun to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was deemed very risky in the past. Also, she says, unexpectedly, “I learned to be rude, 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 so much with being the individual that I am today.”