Batool Abu Akleen was having lunch in the seaside apartment that has become the latest refuge for her family of seven, when a missile struck a nearby cafe. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza City. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she says. Within an instant, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an atrocity that was reported around the world. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the nonchalance of someone numbed by living with horror.
But this impression is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is becoming one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting witnesses, whose debut poetry collection has already won accolades from the novelist Anne Michaels, the playwright Caryl Churchill and the poet Hasib Hourani, among others. She has thrown her whole being into finding a language for the unspeakable, one capable of articulating its surrealism and absurdity as well as its daily tragedies.
In her poems, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, fleetingly referencing both the US’s role and its history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to buy a secondhand ceasefire (she can’t, because the price keeps going up). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it consists of 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one there to bury me.”
We are talking via videocall to a workhub near her home. Abu Akleen is elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, twiddling rings on two fingers that testify both to the fashion sense of someone barely out of her teens and to yet another catastrophe. One of her close friends, the photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike this spring, a month before the Cannes film festival premiere of a documentary about her life, Put Your Soul on Your Hand and Walk. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the night before she died. “Now I wonder whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”
Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing aged 10 “and it just clicked”, she says. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an exceptional talent that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her first reader and editor.
At 15 she won an international poetry competition and individual poems started to be published in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled at English, and now speaks it fluently enough to be able to translate her own work, although she has never ventured beyond Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. To egg herself on she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”
She settled for a degree in English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas launched its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly 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 busker used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which ends, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, 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 haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a constant motif in the collection, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.
Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he walked from one building 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 phone signal, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”
For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to protect their home from looters, while the rest of the family moved to a refugee camp in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she recalls. “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 melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Ring Finger I lend to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I hated to eat.”
After composing the poems in Arabic, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two versions are presented side by side. “They’re not translations, they’re recreations, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another version of me – the more recent one.”
In a preface to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through translation she made peace with death. “I think the genocide helped to build my personality,” she says. “The move from the north to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”
Though their old home was destroyed, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January this year 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 not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I eat & my father starves / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which negotiates her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read horizontally or vertically, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the ampersand.
Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study online, has started teaching young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was considered far too dangerous in the good old days. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is good. It means you can use bad words with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person all the time. It helped me so much with being the person that I am today.”
As a child she had to be cajoled into reading. Still, she says, “I read the world more than I read books.” In the imagery of her own poetry, the horrors she has witnessed have put an old head on young shoulders. “This is what happens when death is chasing after you,” she says. “You run so fast through life to live as much as you can, because you know you don’t have the luxury of being young and making mistakes.”
• 48Kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated in collaboration with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti and Yasmin Zaher, is published by Tenement.
