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The young poet was enjoying a midday meal in her family’s seaside home, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a projectile targeted a adjacent coffee shop. It was the final day of June, an typical Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she explains. In a flash, dozens of men, women and children were killed, in an atrocity that gained global attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the detachment of someone desensitized by constant danger.

However, this outward composure is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already earned praise from renowned authors. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a means of expression for atrocities, one that can convey both the surrealism and illogic of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her poems, rockets are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the role of external powers and a legacy of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor offers frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a used ceasefire (she fails, because the price 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 body mass. “I consider my poems to be an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was killed and there was no one left to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling rings on her fingers that show both the style of a teenager and another personal loss. One of her close friends, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month before the premiere of a film about her life. She adored rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the night 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 oldest of five children from a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing 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 cultivated. Her mother has since then been her primary critic.

{Before the genocide, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I found myself just running and trying to survive|Previously, I was spoilt and constantly whining about my life. Then suddenly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in journals and anthologies. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now uses it fluently enough to render her own work, even though she has never left Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she stuck a message 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 local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when militants launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with monotony,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the killing of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs 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 crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one building to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody dared to look out 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 nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to guard their home from looters, while the remainder of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the southern area. “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 used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Ring Finger I offer 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 side by side. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold 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 expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she made peace with death. “I think the genocide contributed to shape my character,” she says. “The relocation from the north to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they now 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 eat & my father starves / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study online, has begun instructing young children, and has even started to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a devastated society – was deemed far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you need not be that courteous person all the time. It helped me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”