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Batool Abu Akleen was enjoying a midday meal in her family’s coastal refuge, which had become their latest shelter in Gaza City, when a projectile struck a close by cafe. It was the last day of June, an typical Monday in the region. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she explains. In a flash, scores of men, women and children were dead, in an horrific incident that gained international coverage. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the calmness of someone numbed by ongoing horror.

Yet, this outward composure is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unstinting observers, whose first book of poems has already won praise from renowned writers. She has devoted her whole being to finding a means of expression for atrocities, one that can articulate both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its daily tragedies.

In her verses, rockets are fired from military aircraft, subtly referencing both the role of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an street seller sells the dead to dogs; a woman roams the roads, holding the decaying city in her arms and trying to purchase a used truce (she cannot, because the cost keeps rising). The book itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I consider my poems to be an extension of myself, so I gathered my body, in case I was smashed and there nobody left to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a young woman and another personal loss. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the premiere of a film about her life. She adored rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the night before she died. “Now I wonder whether I should remember her by keeping on 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 site engineer. She started writing when she was ten “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a educator was informing her parents that their daughter had an remarkable gift that needed to be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her primary critic.

{Before the genocide, I often grumbled about my life. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive|Previously, I was spoilt and constantly complaining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and individual poems started to be printed in magazines and collections. When she did not write, she created art. She was also a “nerd”, who did well in English, and now uses it confidently 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 study at Oxford,” she says. To encourage herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English literature and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when militants initiated its October 7 attack on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a pampered girl who often to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This theme, of the privileges of normalcy taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with monotony,” begins one, which concludes, pleading, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “routine hospital death” of her grandfather, who had memory loss, which she mourned “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the killing of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why didn’t you show 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 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 fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the road near their home as he moved from one structure to another. “There came the cries of a woman and no one ventured to look out of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Alright, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had no place to go.”

For a number of months, her father stayed in the northern part to protect their home from thieves, while the remainder of the family moved to a shelter in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a open flame,” she remembers. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was often angry and injuring my fingers.” A poem inspired by that period shows a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who misplaced her hand & her husband / Pinky will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Creation and Self

Once writing the poems in her native language, she rewrote all but a few in English. The two versions are presented together. “These are not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome 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 preface to the book, she elaborates on this, noting that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she came to terms with death. “In my view the conflict contributed to shape my personality,” she says. “The relocation from the north to the south with just my mother meant that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January this year to go back to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Under their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are not so lucky. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem titled Sin, which addresses her survivor’s guilt. It is structured in two columns which can be read horizontally or vertically, highlighting the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the casualties on the other side of the ampersand.

Armed with her new assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to study online, has begun instructing kids, and has even begun to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the illogical reality of a destroyed society – was considered far too dangerous in the past. Additionally, she remarks, surprisingly, “I learned to be rude, which is beneficial. It means you can use strong language 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.”