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The young poet was having a midday meal in her household’s coastal refuge, which had become their newest shelter in the city, when a projectile hit a adjacent restaurant. This occurred on the last day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she recalls. Within an instant, scores of people of all ages were lost, in an tragic event that gained worldwide coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant horror.

Yet, this calm exterior is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching observers, whose first book of poems has already earned praise from prominent writers. She has dedicated her whole being to finding a language for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its daily losses.

In her poems, rockets are fired from military aircraft, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a legacy of annihilation; an street seller sells the dead to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a used ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost keeps rising). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the style of a young woman and another personal loss. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month prior to the premiere of a film about her life. Fatma adored rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the evening before she died. “Now I wonder whether I ought to honor her by keeping on 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 lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary reader.

{Before the genocide, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was spoilt and always complaining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in journals and collections. 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, even though she has never left Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a program in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start 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 grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This theme, of the privileges of peace taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker once occupied our street with boredom,” opens one, which concludes, begging, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the killing of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show 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 recurring motif in the book, with body parts crying out to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the hordes escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the street near their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the screams of a woman and no one dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to 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 remainder of the family relocated to a shelter in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time shows a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once writing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed together. “These are not translations, they’re recreations, with some words altered,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different aspect of me – the newer one.”

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to shape my personality,” she says. “The move from the north to the south with only my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their previous house was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived truce in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Under 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 addresses her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two sections which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the other side of the ampersand.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has begun teaching kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was considered very risky in the past. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is good. It means you can use bad words with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that courteous person always. It aided me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”