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Batool Abu Akleen was eating lunch in her family’s seaside home, which had become their latest safe haven in Gaza City, when a projectile targeted a adjacent restaurant. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in the region. “In my hand was a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she states. Within an instant, scores of men, women and children were lost, in an horrific incident that gained international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won recognition from prominent literary figures. She has devoted her entire self to finding a means of expression for atrocities, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly referencing both the involvement of external powers and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers the dead to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a used truce (she fails, because the price increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was killed and there nobody left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and another personal tragedy. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month before the debut of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, 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 eldest of five children born into a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She started writing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she says. Soon, a teacher was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her primary reader.

{Before the genocide, I used to complain 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 fleeing for survival.

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

Studies and Survival

She enrolled in a program in English studies and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when Hamas initiated its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” 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 survive.” This theme, of the luxuries of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with boredom,” 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 casual as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Dismemberment is a constant theme in the collection, with severed limbs calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the crowds fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the road near their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from looters, while the remainder of the family relocated to a shelter in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often angry and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet reached me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Pinky will make my peace / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

After composing the poems in her native language, she recreated nearly all in English. The two versions are presented side by side. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words altered,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another version of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being torn apart, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “I think the conflict contributed to build my character,” she comments. “The move from the north to the southern zone with just my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their old home was demolished, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, highlighting the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the other side of the ampersand.

Equipped with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to study remotely, has begun teaching kids, and has even started to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a devastated society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is beneficial. It means you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that courteous person all the time. It aided me greatly with being the person that I am today.”