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Batool Abu Akleen was having a midday meal in her family’s coastal refuge, which had become their newest shelter in Gaza City, when a rocket targeted a nearby coffee shop. It was the final day of June, an ordinary Monday in the region. “I was holding a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window shook,” she recalls. In a flash, many of men, women and children were lost, in an horrific incident that gained global attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the detachment of someone desensitized by constant danger.

However, this outward composure is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching chroniclers, whose first poetry collection has already earned accolades from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of life in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday losses.

In her verses, missiles are launched from Apache helicopters, subtly hinting at both the role of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers the dead to dogs; a female figure roams the streets, carrying the decaying city in her arms and trying to acquire a used ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost increases). The book itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a kilogram of her own body mass. “I consider my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there was no one remaining to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, twiddling jewelry on her fingers that show both the fashion of a young woman and another deep loss. One of her dear companions, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier in the spring, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She loved rings, says 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 wearing my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children born into a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a construction engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she says. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that must be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her primary critic.

{Before the conflict, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive|In the past, I was pampered and always complaining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she won an global poetry competition and separate poems began being published in magazines and anthologies. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to translate her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to study at Oxford,” she says. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Studies and Survival

She opted for a degree in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when militants initiated its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a spoilt girl who used always to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of peace assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician once occupied our street with monotony,” opens one, which concludes, pleading, “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 casual as your death”.

There was nothing casual about the murder of her grandmother, in a bombing on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show me to sew?” a young relative asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face again and bid farewell one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring motif in the collection, with body parts crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to follow the crowds fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was hit by two missiles in the street outside their home as he moved from one building to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and nobody 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 to where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to guard their home from looters, while the remainder of the family moved to a shelter in the southern area. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often angry 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 lend to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Writing and Identity

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are presented side by side. “They’re not translations, they’re reimaginings, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different aspect 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 terror of being torn apart, and through rewriting she came to terms with death. “In my view the genocide helped to shape my character,” she says. “The move from the north to the southern zone with only my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the short-lived ceasefire in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents of those who are not so lucky. “I survive while countless others perish / I have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she pens in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her feelings of guilt. It is structured in two columns which can be read linearly or vertically, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the opposite end of the symbol.

Equipped with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn online, has begun instructing kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was deemed very risky in the good old days. Also, 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 courteous person always. It helped me greatly with being the individual that I am today.”