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Batool Abu Akleen was having a midday meal in her family’s coastal apartment, which had become their newest safe haven in Gaza City, when a rocket hit a nearby coffee shop. It was the final day of June, an typical Monday in the region. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window trembled,” she states. Immediately, dozens of men, women and children were killed, in an horrific incident that received international attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting chroniclers, whose debut book of poems has already won recognition from renowned literary figures. She has devoted her entire self to creating a means of expression for atrocities, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in Gaza, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her verses, missiles are fired from military aircraft, briefly referencing both the role of external powers and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells the dead to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a used ceasefire (she fails, because the cost keeps rising). The collection itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there nobody remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a teenager and another personal tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier in the spring, a month before 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 was killed. “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 born into a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Soon, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has since then been her primary critic.

{Before the war, I often grumbled about my life. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to survive|In the past, I was pampered and always whining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. 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 study at Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she pasted a message to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a degree in English literature and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when militants launched its October 7 attack on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a pampered 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 normalcy taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with boredom,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she mourned “in poems as casual 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 stitch her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “We heard the cries of a woman and nobody dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Alright, 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 rest of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period shows a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After writing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are presented side by side. “They’re not direct translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “I think the conflict helped to build my character,” she says. “The relocation from the northern area 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 chose during the short-lived truce in January last winter to return to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they currently live, with a vista of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters 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 pens in a poem called Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two sections which can be read linearly or vertically, highlighting the gap between the surviving artist and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has begun instructing young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was deemed far too dangerous in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with bad people; you don’t have to be that courteous person always. It helped me so much with becoming the individual that I am today.”