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Batool Abu Akleen was eating lunch in her family’s coastal home, which had become their most recent shelter in the city, when a missile hit a adjacent coffee shop. It was the last day of June, an typical Monday in the region. “I was holding a falafel wrap and looking out of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. Immediately, many of men, women and children were killed, in an tragic event that gained global coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the detachment of someone numbed by ongoing danger.

However, this calm exterior is misleading. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most vivid and unflinching observers, whose debut poetry collection has already earned accolades from prominent literary figures. She has dedicated her entire self to creating a means of expression for indescribable events, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and absurdity of existence in Gaza, as well as its everyday losses.

In her verses, missiles are fired from Apache helicopters, subtly referencing both the involvement of foreign nations and a history of annihilation; an ice-cream vendor sells the dead to dogs; a woman wanders the streets, carrying the dying city in her arms and trying to purchase a secondhand truce (she fails, because the price keeps rising). The book itself is called 48Kg. The title, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own weight. “I see my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was destroyed and there nobody remaining to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

During a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in checkered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that reflect both the fashion of a young woman and yet another personal loss. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier this year, a month before the debut of a film about her life. Fatma loved rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and evening skies, the night before she was killed. “I now question whether I should remember her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children born into a educated 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. Before long, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be nurtured. Her mother has since then been her first critic.

{Before the war, I used to complain about my life. Then I ended up just running and trying to stay alive|In the past, I was pampered and always whining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she won an international poetry competition and separate 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 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 admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She opted for a program in English studies and language translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her sophomore year when Hamas launched its October 7 offensive on Israel. “Prior to the war,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who often to complain about my life. Then suddenly I found myself just running and trying to stay alive.” This idea, of the luxuries of peace assumed, is present in her poems: “A street musician used to fill our street with boredom,” opens one, which ends, begging, “may boredom return to our streets”. Another recalls the “casual hospital death” of her grandfather, who had dementia, which she lamented “in poems as ordinary as your death”.

There was no routine about the murder of her grandmother, in a missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a young relative asks in a poem, so she could sew her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Dismemberment is a recurring motif in the collection, 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 near their home as he moved 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 phone signal, no ambulance. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But where? We had nowhere to go.”

For several months, her father remained in the northern part to protect their home from thieves, while the remainder of the family moved to a shelter in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we did everything on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Unfortunately my mother’s eyes were sensitive to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period shows a woman sacrificing all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I lift between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Third finger I offer to the woman / who lost her hand & her husband / Little Finger will reconcile me / with all the food I hated to eat.”

Writing and Identity

Once writing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two versions are displayed together. “They’re not translations, they’re recreations, with some words altered,” she states. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They carry more pain. The English ones have more assurance: it’s another aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she elaborates on this, writing that in Arabic she was succumbing to a fear of being torn apart, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “In my view the genocide contributed to build my character,” she comments. “The move from the north to the southern zone with only my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their old home was destroyed, the family chose during the brief ceasefire in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they now live, with a vista of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the tents 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 pens in a poem called Sin, which explores 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 other side of the symbol.

Armed with her recent confidence, Abu Akleen has continued to learn remotely, has started teaching young children, and has even started to move around a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a destroyed society – was deemed very risky in the past. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is good. It implies 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.”