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The young poet was having a midday meal in her family’s coastal refuge, which had become their latest safe haven in Gaza City, when a rocket struck a adjacent restaurant. This occurred on the final day of June, an ordinary Monday in the region. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she explains. Within an instant, dozens of people of all ages were lost, in an horrific incident that gained international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the resignation of someone desensitized by constant violence.

However, this outward composure is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unstinting chroniclers, whose first book of poems has already earned recognition from prominent literary figures. She has devoted her entire self to creating a language for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in Gaza, as well as its everyday losses.

In her poems, rockets are launched from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a history of annihilation; an street seller sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a secondhand ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, 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 gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one left to bury me.”

Personal Loss

In a videocall, Abu Akleen appears well-attired in checkered black and white, twiddling rings on her fingers that show both the style of a teenager and yet another personal loss. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the premiere of a film about her life. She loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were talking 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 taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest 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 began composing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Soon, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional gift that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the conflict, I used to complain about my life. Then I found myself just running and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and constantly complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be printed in magazines and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now uses it fluently enough to translate her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She opted for a program in English studies and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her second year when Hamas initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker once occupied our street with monotony,” begins one, which ends, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls 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 killing 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 again and bid farewell one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring theme in the collection, with severed limbs calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was struck 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 nobody ventured to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father remained in the northern part to guard their home from looters, while the rest of the family moved to a refugee camp in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time shows a woman sacrificing 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 / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are presented together. “They’re not direct translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words altered,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another aspect of me – the newer one.”

In a preface to the book, she elaborates on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through translation she came to terms with death. “In my view the genocide contributed to shape my character,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the south with only my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived truce in January this year to return 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 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 writes in a poem titled Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, highlighting the divide between the surviving artist and the victims on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn online, has started instructing young children, and has even begun to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that courteous person all the time. It aided me so much with becoming the individual that I am today.”