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Batool Abu Akleen was having a midday meal in her household’s coastal home, which had become their newest safe haven in Gaza City, when a rocket hit a adjacent coffee shop. This occurred on the last day of June, an typical Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she recalls. Immediately, dozens of men, women and children were killed, in an horrific incident that received global coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the detachment of someone desensitized by ongoing violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching witnesses, whose first book of poems has already earned accolades from renowned writers. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a language for the unspeakable, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in Gaza, as well as its daily suffering.

In her verses, rockets are launched from military aircraft, briefly hinting at both the involvement of external powers and a legacy of destruction; an street seller offers the dead to dogs; a woman roams the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to acquire a secondhand truce (she cannot, because the price keeps rising). The book itself is called 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that show both the fashion of a young woman and another deep loss. One of her close friends, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier in the spring, a month prior to the premiere of a documentary about her life. Fatma adored 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 wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Soon, a teacher was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional gift that must be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her primary critic.

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

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and individual poems began being published in magazines and collections. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to translate 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 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 literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when Hamas launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This theme, of the luxuries of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the killing of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the book, with severed limbs calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the hordes fleeing 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 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. My mother said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father remained in north Gaza to protect their home from looters, while the remainder of the family moved to a shelter in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything 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 often angry and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift 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 / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once writing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two versions are displayed side by side. “They’re not translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words changed,” she says. “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 introduction to the book, she expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “I think the genocide contributed to build my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the northern area to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their previous house was demolished, the family chose during the brief truce in January this year to go back to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they now 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 have food as my father goes hungry / 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 horizontally or downwards, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the opposite end of the symbol.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has begun teaching kids, and has even started to travel 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 says, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is good. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you need not be that polite person always. It aided me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”