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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her household’s seaside apartment, which had become their most recent safe haven in the city, when a missile hit a nearby restaurant. This occurred on the last day of June, an typical Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. Immediately, scores of men, women and children were lost, in an atrocity that received worldwide coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant horror.

However, this calm exterior is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose first book of poems has already earned accolades from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her whole being to creating a language for the unspeakable, one that can articulate both the surrealism and absurdity of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her poems, rockets are fired from military aircraft, briefly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells the dead to dogs; a woman roams the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used ceasefire (she cannot, because the price increases). The book 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 see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered 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 well-attired in checkered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and yet another deep loss. One of her dear companions, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the premiere of a film about her life. Fatma adored rings, says 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 keeping on my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children born into a educated 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 made sense,” she recalls. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her first critic.

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

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and separate poems began being printed in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well in English, and now uses it confidently 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 says. To motivate herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English studies and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her second year when Hamas initiated its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to complain about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the luxuries of normalcy assumed, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which ends, begging, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine 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 back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a constant motif in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the crowds fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the road near their home as he moved from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from looters, while the rest of the family relocated to a shelter 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 often frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After writing the poems in her native language, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two versions are displayed side by side. “These are not translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another aspect of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she came to terms with death. “I think the conflict helped to build my character,” she says. “The relocation from the north to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their previous house was destroyed, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they currently live, with a vista of the sea. Under 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 writes in a poem called Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two columns which can be read linearly or vertically, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has begun instructing young children, and has even begun to move around 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 acquired the skill to be blunt, which is good. It means you can use strong language with those who harm you; you need not be that polite person always. It helped me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”