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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her family’s seaside home, which had become their most recent safe haven in the city, when a projectile targeted a nearby coffee shop. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she recalls. Immediately, many of people of all ages were lost, in an atrocity that received worldwide attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the calmness of someone numbed by constant danger.

Yet, this calm exterior is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching witnesses, whose debut book of poems has already won accolades from renowned literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a language for the unspeakable, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and illogic of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily suffering.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the involvement of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an street seller offers the dead to dogs; a woman wanders the roads, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used ceasefire (she cannot, because the price keeps rising). The book 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 an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was killed and there was no one remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the style of a young woman and another deep tragedy. One of her dear companions, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a bombing earlier this year, a month before the premiere of a film about her life. Fatma loved rings, notes Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and evening skies, the evening before she was killed. “I now question whether I should remember 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 lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she says. Soon, a educator was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary editor.

{Before the conflict, I used to complain about my situation. Then I ended up just running and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was pampered and constantly complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and individual poems began being published in magazines and collections. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who excelled in English, and now uses it fluently enough to translate her own work, even though she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she pasted a message to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She opted for a degree in English literature and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to start her sophomore year when Hamas initiated its October 7 attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This theme, of the luxuries of normalcy taken for granted, is present in her poems: “A busker once occupied our street with boredom,” begins one, which concludes, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, 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 questions in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face again and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a constant theme in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the street near their home as he walked from one structure to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and no one ventured 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 where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from looters, while the remainder of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Middle Finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet hit me / Ring Finger I offer 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

After composing the poems in her native language, she rewrote nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed side by side. “They’re not translations, they’re recreations, with some words altered,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different version of me – the more recent one.”

In a preface to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “In my view the genocide contributed to build my personality,” she says. “The relocation from the north to the south with only my mother implied 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 this year to return to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they now live, with a vista 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 have food as my father goes hungry / I compose verses as explosions injure my neighbor,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which addresses her survivor’s guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the gap between the surviving artist and the victims on the other side of the symbol.

Equipped with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn online, has begun instructing young children, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was deemed 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 those who harm you; you don’t have to be that polite person all the time. It aided me greatly with becoming the person that I am today.”