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The young poet was having lunch in her household’s coastal home, which had become their newest safe haven in the city, when a rocket struck a adjacent cafe. 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 vibrated,” she states. Immediately, scores of people of all ages were dead, in an tragic event that received worldwide attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the resignation of someone numbed by ongoing danger.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching chroniclers, whose debut poetry collection has already won praise from prominent writers. She has devoted her entire self to creating a language for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in Gaza, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her poems, rockets are fired from military aircraft, briefly referencing both the role of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a secondhand truce (she fails, because the price keeps rising). The book itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one left to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears well-attired in checkered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that show both the fashion of a teenager and another personal loss. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier this year, 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 night before she died. “Now I wonder whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into 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 made sense,” she says. Before long, a teacher was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the conflict, I used to complain about my life. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to survive|Previously, I was pampered and constantly 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 started to be published in journals and anthologies. 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 used to have big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English studies and language translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when militants launched its 7 October attack 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 theme, of the privileges of peace taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with boredom,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder 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 bid farewell one more time. Dismemberment is a constant theme in the collection, with body parts 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 near their home as he walked from one building to another. “There came 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. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of months, her father remained in north Gaza to guard their home from looters, while the remainder of the family moved to a refugee camp in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she recalls. “Sadly 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 based on that period shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached 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 writing the poems in her native language, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are presented together. “These are not 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 newer one.”

In a preface 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. “I think the genocide helped to shape my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the northern area to the southern zone with only my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their previous house was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived ceasefire in January last winter to go back to Gaza City, renting the residence in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are less fortunate. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she pens in a poem called Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Armed with her recent confidence, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has begun teaching kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is beneficial. It implies you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that courteous person all the time. It aided me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”