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The young poet was having a midday meal in her household’s seaside refuge, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a rocket struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in the region. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window vibrated,” she explains. Within an instant, scores of men, women and children were lost, in an horrific incident that gained global attention. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the detachment of someone desensitized by constant violence.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already earned accolades from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a language for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, rockets are fired from military aircraft, subtly hinting at both the role of external powers and a legacy of annihilation; an street seller sells the dead to dogs; a female figure wanders the roads, holding the dying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a secondhand ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost keeps rising). The book itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one remaining to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that show both the fashion of a young woman and another personal loss. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier in the spring, a month before the premiere of a documentary about her life. She adored rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, 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 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 started writing at age 10 “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional gift that must be cultivated. Her mother has since then been her first reader.

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

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems started to be published in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled in English, and now uses it confidently enough to translate her own work, although she has never left Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She opted for a program in English studies and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when Hamas initiated its 7 October attack on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who used always to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This idea, of the luxuries of normalcy assumed, is present in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was no routine 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 stitch her grandmother’s face again and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring theme in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the hordes escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road outside their home as he moved 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 communication, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For several 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 did everything on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle 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 reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After composing the poems in her native language, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two editions are presented together. “They’re not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words altered,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she elaborates on this, noting that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being dismembered, and through translation she made peace with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to shape my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the northern area to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived truce in January this year to return to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem titled Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Equipped with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has started instructing young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was considered far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I learned to be rude, which is beneficial. It means you can use bad words with bad people; you need not be that courteous person always. It aided me greatly with being the individual that I am today.”