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Batool Abu Akleen was eating a midday meal in her family’s coastal apartment, which had become their latest safe haven in the city, when a projectile targeted a adjacent cafe. This occurred on the last day of June, an usual Monday in the region. “In my hand was a falafel wrap and gazing of the window, and the window trembled,” she explains. Immediately, many of people of all ages were lost, in an atrocity that gained worldwide coverage. “At times, it seems unreal,” she adds, with the detachment of someone numbed by ongoing violence.

However, this outward composure is deceptive. At only 20 years old, Abu Akleen is emerging as one of Gaza’s most graphic and unstinting witnesses, whose first book of poems has already earned praise from prominent authors. She has devoted her whole being to creating a means of expression for indescribable events, one that can express both the bizarre nature and illogic of existence in the conflict zone, as well as its daily losses.

In her verses, missiles are launched from military aircraft, briefly hinting at both the role of foreign nations and a history of destruction; an ice-cream vendor sells frozen corpses to dogs; a female figure roams the streets, holding the dying city in her arms and attempting to purchase a secondhand ceasefire (she cannot, because the cost keeps rising). The collection itself is called 48Kg. This, Abu Akleen clarifies, is because it includes 48 poems, each representing a unit of weight of her own body mass. “I consider my poems to be an extension of myself, so I collected my body, in case I was smashed and there nobody left to lay to rest me.”

Grief and Memory

In a online conversation, Abu Akleen appears elegantly dressed in chequered black and white, adjusting rings on her fingers that show both the fashion of a teenager and yet another deep tragedy. One of her close friends, photographer Fatma Hassouna, was killed in a strike earlier this year, a month prior to the debut of a documentary about her life. She adored rings, says Abu Akleen. The two were talking about them, and sunsets, the evening before she died. “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 born into a educated family in Gaza City. Her father is a lawyer and her mother worked as a site engineer. She began composing when she was ten “and it just made sense,” she says. Soon, a teacher was informing her parents that their daughter had an exceptional gift that must be nurtured. Her mother has ever since been her primary editor.

{Before the conflict, I used to complain about my situation. Then I found myself just fleeing and trying to survive|Previously, I was pampered and constantly complaining about my circumstances. Then abruptly, 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 wasn’t writing, she painted. She was also a “nerd”, who excelled in English, and now speaks it fluently enough to translate her own work, even though she has never traveled outside Gaza. “I used to have big dreams and one of them was to go to Oxford,” she admits. To motivate herself, she stuck a notice to her desk that said: “Oxford is waiting for you.”

Education and Escape

She enrolled in a degree in English literature and translation at the local university of Gaza, and was about to begin her second year when Hamas launched its 7 October offensive on Israel. “Before the genocide,” she says, “I was a spoilt girl who often to grumble about my life. Then abruptly I found myself just running and trying to survive.” This idea, of the privileges of peace assumed, is evident in her poems: “A busker once occupied our street with boredom,” 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 ordinary as your death”.

There was nothing casual 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 again and kiss it one more time. Severed limbs is a constant motif in the book, with body parts calling to each other across the cratered streets.

Abu Akleen’s family decided to join the hordes fleeing Gaza City after a neighbour was struck by two missiles in the road near their home as he walked from one building to another. “We heard the screams of a woman and no one dared to peer of the window to see what had happened; there was no communication, no medical help. Mum said: ‘Right, we’re going to leave.’ But to where? We had no place to go.”

For several months, her father remained in north Gaza to guard their home from looters, while the rest of the family relocated to a refugee camp in the south. “We lacked a gas cooker, so we cooked all meals on a wood fire,” she recalls. “Sadly my mother’s eyes were allergic to the smoke so I used to bake the bread. I was always angry and burning my fingers.” A poem based on that period depicts a woman melting all her fingers individually. “Middle Finger I lift 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 / Pinky will make my peace / with all the food I disliked to eat.”

Writing and Identity

After composing the poems in Arabic, she recreated all but a few in English. The two versions are displayed side by side. “These are 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 confidence: it’s another aspect of me – the more recent one.”

In a introduction to the book, she expands on this, writing that in Arabic she was losing herself to a fear of being dismembered, and through translation she came to terms with death. “I think the genocide contributed to shape my character,” she says. “The move from the northern area to the southern zone with just my mother meant that I felt I was holding my family. I’m more confident now.”

Although their previous house was demolished, the family decided during the brief truce in January this year to return to Gaza City, leasing the residence in which they currently live, with a view of the sea. Below 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 write & shelling shatters my neighbour’s hand,” she writes in a poem called Sin, which explores her feelings of guilt. It is laid out in two sections which can be read horizontally or vertically, highlighting the gap between the living, writing, eating poet and the victims on the opposite end of the ampersand.

Armed with her recent assertiveness, Abu Akleen has persisted to learn remotely, has started instructing young children, 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. Also, she says, surprisingly, “I acquired the skill to be blunt, which is good. It implies you can use bad words with those who harm you; you need not be that courteous person always. It helped me so much with being the individual that I am today.”