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Batool Abu Akleen was enjoying a midday meal in her household’s coastal refuge, which had become their newest shelter in the city, when a missile targeted a adjacent cafe. This occurred on the final day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window trembled,” she explains. In a flash, dozens of people of all ages were lost, in an horrific incident that received worldwide coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant danger.

However, this calm exterior is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already earned recognition from prominent writers. She has dedicated her whole being to finding a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of life in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her poems, rockets are launched from military aircraft, subtly referencing both the involvement of external powers and a history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor offers the dead to dogs; a female figure roams the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a used truce (she fails, because the price keeps rising). The book itself is called 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one left 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 yet another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier this year, a month before the debut of a documentary about her life. Fatma loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the night before she was killed. “I now question whether I ought to honor her by wearing my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she says. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the war, I often grumbled about my life. Then I ended up just running 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 received first prize in an global poetry competition and individual poems began being published in journals and anthologies. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now uses it fluently enough to render her own work, although she has never left Gaza. “I used to have 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 enrolled in a degree in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when militants launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who often to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This idea, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which concludes, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a young relative questions 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 cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he moved from one building to another. “We heard the cries of a woman and no one ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no medical help. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to guard their home from thieves, while the remainder of the family relocated to a shelter in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two versions are presented side by side. “These are not translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They hold more sorrow. The English ones have more assurance: it’s a different version of me – the newer one.”

In a preface to the book, she elaborates 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 helped to shape my character,” she comments. “The move from the north to the southern zone with just my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their old home was demolished, the family decided during the short-lived truce in January this year to go back to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they currently live, with a vista of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are less fortunate. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Equipped with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has begun instructing young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was considered very risky in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is good. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that polite person all the time. It helped me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”