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Batool Abu Akleen was eating a midday meal in her family’s seaside apartment, which had become their newest shelter in the city, when a missile targeted a adjacent restaurant. It was the final day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. Immediately, dozens of people of all ages were killed, in an horrific incident that received global attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the resignation of someone desensitized by ongoing violence.

Yet, this outward composure is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already won accolades from prominent writers. She has devoted her entire self to creating a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in Gaza, as well as its daily losses.

In her verses, rockets are launched from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the role of external powers and a legacy of destruction; an street seller sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used truce (she cannot, because the price increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a kilogram of her own weight. “I see my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was killed and there was no one left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that show both the fashion of a teenager and yet another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the evening before she was killed. “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 professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a site engineer. She began composing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she says. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her first reader.

{Before the war, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was pampered and always whining about my life. Then abruptly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in magazines and collections. When she did not write, she painted. 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 used to have 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.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a program in English studies and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” 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,” begins one, which ends, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “routine 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 missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a young relative asks in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face again and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one structure to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For a number of 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. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Ring Finger I lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Writing and Identity

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

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, noting that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being torn apart, and through translation she made peace with death. “In my view the genocide contributed to build my personality,” she comments. “The move from the north to the south with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their old home was demolished, the family chose during the brief truce in January last winter to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are less fortunate. “I survive while countless others perish / I eat & my father starves / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she writes in a poem titled Sin, which explores her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read linearly or vertically, making concrete the divide between the surviving artist and the casualties on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Equipped with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has continued to learn online, has started teaching kids, and has even started to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was deemed far too dangerous in the past. Also, she remarks, unexpectedly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It helped me so much with becoming the individual that I am today.”