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The young poet was eating a midday meal in her household’s coastal refuge, which had become their most recent shelter in the city, when a rocket struck a adjacent restaurant. This occurred on the last day of June, an typical Monday in the region. “I was holding a sandwich and looking out of the window, and the window shook,” she states. In a flash, dozens of men, women and children were dead, in an horrific incident that received worldwide coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the resignation of someone numbed by ongoing danger.

However, this outward composure is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unstinting observers, whose first poetry collection has already earned recognition from prominent literary figures. She has devoted her whole being to creating a means of expression for atrocities, one that can articulate both the surrealism and illogic of life in Gaza, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her poems, missiles are launched from Apache helicopters, briefly hinting at both the involvement of external powers and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor offers frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to purchase a secondhand truce (she cannot, because the cost increases). The collection itself is titled 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there was no one left to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears 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, photojournalist Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a film about her life. She adored rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the night before she was killed. “Now I wonder whether I ought to honor her by keeping on my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children from 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 recalls. 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 first critic.

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

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and individual poems began being published in journals and anthologies. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now uses it confidently enough to render her own work, although she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she says. 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 translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas launched its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who used always to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This idea, of the privileges of normalcy assumed, is evident in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, begging, “let monotony return to our streets”. Another remembers the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, 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 back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a recurring theme in the collection, with body parts crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the crowds escaping Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road near their home as he moved from one building to another. “There came the screams of a woman and nobody ventured to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to protect their home from thieves, while the rest of the family relocated to a shelter in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she recalls. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always frustrated and injuring my fingers.” A poem based on that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “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 hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated all but a few in English. The two versions are displayed together. “These are not translations, they’re recreations, with certain words altered,” she states. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They carry more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s a different aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a terror of being torn apart, and through translation she made peace with death. “In my view the conflict helped to shape my personality,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the southern zone with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the brief truce in January this year to return to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they currently live, with a vista of the sea. Under 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 feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two columns which can be read horizontally or downwards, making concrete the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the other side of the ampersand.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn online, has started instructing young children, and has even started to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was considered far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she says, unexpectedly, “I learned to be rude, which is beneficial. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you need not be that polite person always. It helped me so much with becoming the individual that I am today.”