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The young poet was having lunch in her family’s coastal home, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a missile targeted a adjacent coffee shop. This occurred on 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 explains. In a flash, many of people of all ages were dead, in an tragic event that gained international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the calmness of someone numbed by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting observers, whose first book of poems has already earned accolades from prominent writers. She has devoted her whole being to finding a language for atrocities, one that can articulate both the surrealism and illogic of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, rockets are fired from military aircraft, briefly hinting at both the role of foreign nations and a legacy of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells the dead to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, holding the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a secondhand ceasefire (she fails, because the cost keeps rising). 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 an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one remaining to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the style of a young woman and another personal tragedy. One of her close friends, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month before the debut of a documentary about her life. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the night before she died. “I now question whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or removing them.”

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 site engineer. She started writing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Soon, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary editor.

{Before the genocide, I often grumbled about my life. Then I ended up just running and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was pampered and always whining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in magazines and anthologies. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well 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 says. To motivate herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a program in English studies and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her second year when militants initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to complain about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the luxuries of peace taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with monotony,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a young relative asks in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face again and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a constant theme in the collection, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody ventured to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father remained in north Gaza to guard their home from thieves, while the rest of the family relocated to a shelter in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

After composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two versions are presented side by side. “These are not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words altered,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry 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 elaborates on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she came to terms with death. “I think the genocide contributed to shape my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the north to the southern zone with only my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their previous house was destroyed, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to go back to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Below 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 titled Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or vertically, highlighting the gap between the surviving artist and the victims on the other side of the ampersand.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued 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 considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that courteous person all the time. It helped me greatly with becoming the individual that I am today.”