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Batool Abu Akleen was eating a midday meal in her household’s seaside home, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a missile hit a close by coffee shop. It was the final day of June, an usual Monday in the region. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. In a flash, dozens of men, women and children were lost, in an horrific incident that received global coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she notes, with the resignation of someone numbed by ongoing danger.

However, this calm exterior is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already earned recognition from renowned literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a means of expression for atrocities, one that can convey both the surrealism and illogic of life in Gaza, as well as its everyday losses.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a legacy of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman roams the roads, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to acquire a secondhand ceasefire (she cannot, because the price keeps rising). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 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 collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the style of a teenager and another deep tragedy. One of her dear companions, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier in the spring, a month prior to the debut of a film about her life. She loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting 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 eldest of five children from a educated 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 says. Before long, a teacher was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her first reader.

{Before the conflict, I used to complain about my life. Then I ended up just running and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and always whining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in journals and collections. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to translate her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a degree in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when militants initiated its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the privileges of normalcy assumed, is present in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with boredom,” begins one, which ends, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a constant theme in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was struck by two missiles in the road near their home as he moved from one structure to another. “We heard 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 medical help. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father remained in the northern part to guard their home from looters, while the remainder of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time depicts a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Third finger I lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

After composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are presented together. “These are not direct translations, they’re recreations, with some words altered,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more sorrow. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another version of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “I think the conflict helped to build my personality,” she comments. “The relocation from the north to the south with just my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family chose during the short-lived truce in January this year to go back to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I survive while countless others perish / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, highlighting the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Equipped with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study remotely, has started instructing young children, 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 past. Also, she says, unexpectedly, “I learned to be rude, which is beneficial. It means you can use strong language with bad people; you need not be that polite person all the time. It helped me greatly with being the person that I am today.”