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The young poet was having lunch in her family’s seaside home, which had become their most recent shelter in the city, when a rocket struck a nearby coffee shop. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in Gaza. “I was holding a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window vibrated,” she explains. Immediately, many of people of all ages were dead, in an tragic event that received worldwide attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she notes, with the detachment of someone desensitized by ongoing danger.

However, this outward composure is misleading. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching witnesses, whose first poetry collection has already won recognition from prominent authors. She has dedicated her entire self to finding a means of expression for atrocities, one that can convey both the surrealism and absurdity of life in the conflict zone, as well as its daily losses.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, briefly referencing both the involvement of external powers and a history of destruction; an street seller offers frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the roads, holding the dying city in her arms and attempting to acquire a secondhand ceasefire (she fails, because the cost keeps rising). The book itself is titled 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each symbolizing a kilogram 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 lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen is seen elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the style of a young woman and another deep tragedy. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a film about her life. She 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 ought to honor her by wearing my rings or removing them.”

Abu Akleen is the oldest of five children from a professional family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She started writing at age 10 “and it just clicked,” she recalls. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that needed to be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary editor.

{Before the war, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive|Previously, I was spoilt and constantly whining about my life. Then suddenly, I was running for my life.

At 15 she received first prize in an international poetry competition and individual poems began being published in journals and anthologies. When she wasn’t writing, she created art. She was also a “bookworm”, who did well in English, and now uses it fluently enough to render her own work, even though she has never left Gaza. “I once held big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To encourage herself, she pasted a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English literature and language translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas initiated its October 7 attack on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she explains, “I was a pampered girl who often to complain about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just fleeing and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the luxuries of peace assumed, is evident in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with boredom,” begins one, which ends, begging, “let monotony 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 no routine 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 sew her grandmother’s face back together and kiss it one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring theme in the book, with severed limbs crying out to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family chose to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the street outside their home as he moved from one structure to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and no one ventured to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no medical help. My mother said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father stayed in north Gaza to protect their home from looters, while the rest of the family moved to a shelter in the south. “There was no gas cooker, so we did everything on a open flame,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I would bake the bread. I was often frustrated and burning my fingers.” A poem inspired by that time depicts a woman melting all her fingers one by one. “Index finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that hasn’t yet reached me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Creation and Self

After composing the poems in her native language, she recreated nearly all in English. The two editions are displayed together. “They’re not translations, they’re reimaginings, with some words changed,” she says. “The Arabic ones are heavier for me. They hold more sorrow. The English ones have more confidence: it’s another version of me – the newer one.”

In a introduction 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 made peace with death. “I think the genocide helped to build my character,” she comments. “The relocation from the northern area to the south with just my mother implied that I felt I was holding my family. I’m less timid now.”

Although their previous house was destroyed, the family decided during the short-lived ceasefire in January last winter to return to Gaza City, renting the apartment in which they currently live, with a vista of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are less fortunate. “I survive while countless others perish / 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 structured in two columns which can be read linearly or downwards, making concrete the divide between the surviving artist and the victims on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Equipped with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has continued to study remotely, has begun teaching kids, and has even begun to travel 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 acquired the skill to be blunt, which is good. It means you can use strong language with bad people; you need not be that polite person all the time. It aided me so much with becoming the person that I am today.”