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Batool Abu Akleen was having a midday meal in her household’s seaside apartment, which had become their newest safe haven in Gaza City, when a projectile struck a close by restaurant. This occurred on the last day of June, an usual Monday in Gaza. “I was holding a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she explains. In a flash, scores of men, women and children were lost, in an atrocity that received global coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the detachment of someone desensitized by ongoing violence.

Yet, this outward composure is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unflinching observers, whose first book of poems has already earned praise from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a means of expression for atrocities, one that can express both the surrealism and absurdity of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday suffering.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the role of foreign nations and a history of annihilation; an street seller offers the dead to dogs; a female figure wanders the streets, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to acquire a secondhand truce (she cannot, because the cost increases). The book itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I gathered my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears well-attired in checkered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the style of a teenager and another personal loss. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a bombing earlier in the spring, a month before the premiere of a film about her life. She adored rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, the night before she was killed. “Now I wonder whether I should remember her by keeping on my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children from a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a attorney and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional gift that needed to be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the war, I used to complain about my life. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to survive|Previously, I was pampered and constantly complaining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in magazines and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now uses 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 says. To encourage herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a degree in English studies and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when militants launched its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to grumble about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the privileges of peace assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with monotony,” begins one, which ends, 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 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 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 severed limbs crying out to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the hordes escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the street near their home as he walked from one building 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: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father remained in the northern part to guard their home from looters, while the rest of the family moved to a refugee camp in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Ring Finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

After writing the poems in her native language, she recreated all but a few in English. The two versions are presented together. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different version of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she elaborates on this, noting that in Arabic she was losing herself to a terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “In my view the genocide helped to build my character,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January last winter to go back 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 explores her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two columns which can be read horizontally or downwards, highlighting the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the other side of the symbol.

Equipped with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to study online, has begun teaching young children, and has even begun to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a devastated society – was considered very risky in the past. Additionally, she remarks, surprisingly, “I learned to be blunt, 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 individual that I am today.”