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The young poet was eating lunch in her household’s coastal home, which had become their newest shelter in the city, when a rocket struck a adjacent cafe. This occurred on the final day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “I was holding a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she states. Immediately, dozens of men, women and children were lost, in an horrific incident that gained global attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the calmness of someone desensitized by ongoing horror.

Yet, this outward composure is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching witnesses, whose debut book of poems has already won recognition from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her whole being to finding a means of expression for indescribable events, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in Gaza, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are launched from military aircraft, subtly hinting at both the role of foreign nations and a legacy of annihilation; an street seller 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 fails, 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 see my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there nobody left to bury me.”

Personal Loss

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears well-attired 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, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She adored rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, 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 oldest of five children from a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her first reader.

{Before the conflict, I often grumbled about my life. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and always whining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and individual poems began being published in journals and collections. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. 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 traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she pasted a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She enrolled in a program in English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her second year when Hamas launched its October 7 attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who often to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This idea, of the luxuries of peace taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker once occupied 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 mourned “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 kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring theme in the collection, with body parts crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the crowds fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and nobody dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of months, her father remained in north Gaza to guard their home from looters, while the remainder of the family moved to a refugee camp in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet reached me / Ring Finger I lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I hated 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. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another version of me – the more recent one.”

In a preface to the book, she elaborates on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being dismembered, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “I think the conflict contributed to build my character,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their old home was destroyed, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January this year to go back to Gaza City, renting the apartment 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 have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she pens in a poem called Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, highlighting the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Armed with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study remotely, has begun teaching kids, and has even started to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was considered far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be rude, which is beneficial. It means you can use bad words with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that courteous person all the time. It helped me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”