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The young poet was enjoying a midday meal in her family’s seaside refuge, which had become their newest safe haven in Gaza City, when a rocket struck a adjacent cafe. This occurred on the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window vibrated,” she states. Within an instant, dozens of people of all ages were killed, in an atrocity that received international attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the resignation of someone desensitized by constant violence.

Yet, this outward composure is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting observers, whose first poetry collection has already earned praise from renowned writers. She has devoted her whole being to creating a language for atrocities, one that can express both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily losses.

In her poems, missiles are launched from military aircraft, subtly hinting at both the involvement of external powers and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers the dead to dogs; a female figure wanders the streets, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was killed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen appears well-attired in checkered black and white, twiddling rings on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a teenager and yet another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the night before she was killed. “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 at age 10 “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that must be cultivated. Her mother has since then been her first editor.

{Before the conflict, I often grumbled about my life. Then I found myself just running and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was pampered and always whining about my life. Then abruptly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and separate poems began being published in magazines and collections. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now uses it fluently enough to translate her own work, even though she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she stuck a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She opted for a program in English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when militants launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This idea, of the luxuries of normalcy assumed, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which ends, begging, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary 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 young relative 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 book, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour 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 no one dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to guard their home from looters, while the rest of the family relocated to a shelter in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often angry and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time depicts a woman sacrificing all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

Once writing the poems in her native language, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are presented together. “These are not translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different version of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction to the book, she elaborates on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being torn apart, and through translation she made peace with death. “I think the genocide contributed to shape my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the north to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their previous house was destroyed, the family chose during the brief truce in January last winter to go back to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are less fortunate. “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 sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, highlighting the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study remotely, has begun teaching kids, and has even begun to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was considered very risky in the past. Also, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is beneficial. It means 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 so much with becoming the individual that I am today.”