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Batool Abu Akleen was enjoying lunch in her household’s seaside apartment, which had become their latest safe haven in the city, when a missile targeted a adjacent restaurant. This occurred on the last day of June, an typical Monday in Gaza. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. Within an instant, dozens of people of all ages were lost, in an horrific incident that received international attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the calmness of someone desensitized by ongoing violence.

However, this outward composure is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already earned praise from prominent literary figures. She has devoted her whole being to finding a language for the unspeakable, one that can express both the surrealism and illogic of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its daily suffering.

In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly referencing both the role of external powers and a legacy of destruction; an street seller sells the dead to dogs; a female figure wanders the roads, carrying the dying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a secondhand truce (she fails, because the cost increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it includes 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own weight. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Personal Loss

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, twiddling rings on her fingers that reflect 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 debut of a film about her life. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and sunsets, the night before she was killed. “Now I wonder whether I should remember 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 attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her first reader.

{Before the war, I used to complain about my situation. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and constantly whining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and individual poems began being published in journals and collections. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to render her own work, even though she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for 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 offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who often to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This theme, of the luxuries of peace taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A busker once occupied our street with monotony,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine 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 questions in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one building to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one dared to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from thieves, 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 wood fire,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that time shows a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

After writing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed together. “These are not translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words changed,” 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 losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to shape my character,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the south with only my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m more confident now.”

Though their old home was demolished, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January last winter 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 less fortunate. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her survivor’s guilt. It is structured in two columns which can be read horizontally or vertically, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the other side of the symbol.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, 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 deemed far too dangerous in the past. Also, she remarks, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is good. It means you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It aided me greatly with being the individual that I am today.”