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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her family’s coastal home, which had become their newest shelter in Gaza City, when a projectile struck a close by restaurant. It was 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 dead, in an tragic event that received international coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the detachment of someone desensitized by ongoing violence.

Yet, this outward composure is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching witnesses, whose first poetry collection has already earned accolades from renowned literary figures. She has devoted her entire self to finding a language for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday tragedies.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly referencing both the role of foreign nations and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure wanders the streets, holding the dying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used truce (she fails, because the price keeps rising). The book 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 see my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was killed and there nobody left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed 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 talking about them, and sunsets, the evening 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 from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She started writing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she says. Soon, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the genocide, I used to complain about my situation. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to survive|In the past, I was spoilt and always complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled in English, and now uses it confidently enough to render 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 motivate herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a degree in English studies and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when militants initiated its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a spoilt girl who often to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the luxuries of peace taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the killing of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter questions in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a constant theme in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the street near 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 communication, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to guard their home from thieves, while the remainder of the family moved to a refugee camp in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that period depicts a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet reached me / Ring Finger I offer to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are presented together. “They’re not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more assurance: 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 dismembered, and through translation she made peace with death. “In my view the conflict helped to shape my personality,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the southern zone with only my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January this year to return to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read horizontally or downwards, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study remotely, has started 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 deemed far too dangerous in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, surprisingly, “I learned to be blunt, which is beneficial. It means you can use strong language with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that courteous person always. It helped me greatly with becoming the individual that I am today.”