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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her household’s coastal apartment, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a projectile hit a close by cafe. This occurred on the final day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she explains. Within an instant, many of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that gained worldwide coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the detachment of someone numbed by ongoing horror.

However, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching observers, whose first poetry collection has already won praise from renowned literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a means of expression for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in Gaza, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, rockets are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the role of external powers and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the roads, carrying the dying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a used truce (she fails, because the cost increases). The book itself is called 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I see my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was destroyed and there nobody remaining to lay to rest me.”

Personal Loss

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling rings on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and yet another personal tragedy. One of her close friends, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier in the spring, a month before the debut of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, the night before she died. “I now question whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or taking them off.”

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 site engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she recalls. Soon, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her first critic.

{Before the war, I used to complain about my life. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive|In the past, I was pampered and always complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate poems began being printed in journals and collections. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to translate her own work, even though she has never left Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that read: “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 Hamas launched its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “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 luxuries of normalcy assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” opens one, which ends, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she lamented “in poems as casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a young relative questions in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face again and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the collection, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the hordes escaping Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he moved from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere 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 southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet reached 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 hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

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

In a introduction 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. “In my view the conflict helped to shape my personality,” she comments. “The move from the north to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family chose during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to go back to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they currently live, with a view 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 writes in a poem called Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or vertically, highlighting the divide between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her recent assertiveness, 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 devastated society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is good. It implies you can use bad words with bad people; you need not be that courteous person all the time. It helped me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”