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The young poet was eating lunch in her family’s coastal home, which had become their latest shelter in the city, when a missile hit a adjacent restaurant. It was the last day of June, an ordinary Monday in the region. “In my hand was a sandwich and gazing of the window, and the window vibrated,” she recalls. Within an instant, many of people of all ages were killed, in an horrific incident that gained global attention. “It doesn’t feel real sometimes,” she adds, with the detachment of someone numbed by constant horror.

However, this calm exterior is deceptive. At just 20 years old, Abu Akleen is rising as one of Gaza’s most powerful and unflinching observers, whose debut book of poems has already earned accolades from prominent writers. She has dedicated her whole being to creating a means of expression for the unspeakable, one that can convey both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its everyday losses.

In her poems, rockets are launched from Apache helicopters, briefly referencing both the involvement of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a woman wanders the roads, holding the decaying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a used ceasefire (she fails, because the cost keeps rising). The collection itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen explains, is because it contains 48 poems, each representing a kilogram of her own body mass. “I consider my poems to be part of my flesh, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed and there nobody remaining to bury me.”

Grief and Memory

In a videocall, Abu Akleen is seen well-attired in chequered black and white, adjusting jewelry on her fingers that show both the style of a young woman and another deep loss. One of her dear companions, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was died in a strike earlier this year, a month before the premiere of a documentary about her life. Fatma adored rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were chatting about them, and sunsets, the night before she was killed. “I now question whether I ought to honor her by wearing my rings or taking them off.”

Abu Akleen is the eldest of five children from 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 made sense,” she recalls. Soon, a teacher was telling her parents that their daughter had an remarkable talent that must be cultivated. Her mother has ever since been her primary critic.

{Before the conflict, I often grumbled about my situation. Then I ended up just fleeing and trying to survive|In the past, I was pampered and constantly whining about my circumstances. Then suddenly, I was fleeing for survival.

At 15 she received first prize in an global poetry competition and individual poems started to be published in magazines and collections. When she did not write, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled 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 go to Oxford,” she says. To motivate herself, she stuck a message to her desk that read: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a program in English studies and translation at the Islamic University of Gaza, and was about to start her second year when Hamas initiated its 7 October attack on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt 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 taken for granted, is evident in her poems: “A busker used to fill our street with boredom,” opens 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 missile strike on her uncle’s home. “Why haven’t you taught me to sew?” a granddaughter asks in a poem, so she could stitch her grandmother’s face back together and bid farewell one more time. Severed limbs is a constant theme in the collection, with severed limbs calling to each other across the destroyed streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to follow the crowds fleeing Gaza City after a neighbor was hit by two missiles in the road near their home as he walked from one structure to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and nobody dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no phone signal, no ambulance. My mother said: ‘Alright, 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 remainder of the family moved to a refugee camp in the southern area. “There was no gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she remembers. “Sadly 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 individually. “Index finger I raise between the eyes / of the bomb that did not yet hit me / Ring 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.”

Creation and Self

Once composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated nearly all in English. The two versions are presented together. “They’re not direct translations, they’re recreations, with certain words changed,” she states. “The Arabic ones are more burdensome for me. They carry 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, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through rewriting she made peace with death. “In my view the genocide helped to build my character,” she comments. “The move from the north to the south with only my mother implied that I felt I was supporting my family. I’m less timid now.”

Though their previous house was destroyed, the family decided during the brief ceasefire in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the apartment in which they now live, with a view of the sea. Below their window, Abu Akleen can see the shelters of those who are less fortunate. “I live & a thousand martyrs fall / I have food as my father goes hungry / I write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she pens in a poem called Sin, which addresses her feelings of 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 symbol.

Armed with her new confidence, Abu Akleen has persisted to study online, has begun teaching kids, and has even started to travel a bit on her own in Gaza, which – with the broken logic of a devastated society – was deemed far too dangerous in the good old days. Additionally, she remarks, surprisingly, “I acquired the skill to be rude, which is good. It implies you can use strong language with bad people; you don’t have to be that polite person always. It helped me so much with being the person that I am today.”