“If you live in Gaza, you die many times,” writes Mosab Abu Toha in his new collection Forest of Noise: Poems, which comes out October 15 – eight days after the first anniversary of the start of the war.
I ask the poet – whose work has been praised for its harrowing and vivid descriptions of life under Israeli occupation – to elaborate.
“There are several levels,” he explains. “If you live in Gaza, you die many times because you could have died in an airstrike, but only luck saved you. Plus, losing so many family members is death for you. And lose hope.
“Every night is a new life for us. You sleep and you are sure: “Maybe this time it’s my time to die with my family.” Then you die several times, because you count yourself among the dead every night.
He tells me this via Zoom from his new home in upstate New York, after being evacuated from Gaza late last year, fleeing with his family first to Egypt before moving on in the United States. I ask him what he thinks of his new life there. He thinks, then shakes his head, a grim expression on his face.
“I wouldn’t call it a new life,” he says, explaining that he feels like a part of him is still back in Gaza with the loved ones he left behind. “But it’s good to have food – not for me, but for the children.” If I were in Gaza, I would have to queue for four hours – just like my other friends and family do now – to get water for my children to drink. Here I can go to the store and buy them ice cream, which is something.
Abu Toha tells me that the lives of his three children were marked by violence.
“My youngest son – aged four – knows what war means,” he explains. “He knows what a plane means. He knows what a bomb means. An airstrike. An explosion. What a drone means. What an F-16 means.
He describes how, during an airstrike, while his daughter was desperate to hide from the bombs, his six-year-old son tried to protect her with a blanket – “the only thing he could do to protect his sister “. In Forest of Noise, Abu Toha depicted the scene in the poem My Son Throws a Blanket Over His Sister, writing:
Our backs bang against the walls
every time the house shakes.
We look at each other’s faces,
scared but happy
that so far our lives have been spared.
“Children don’t learn to paint, to color, to ride a bike,” he told me. “Children don’t learn to live, they learn to survive. »
This struggle for survival in Gaza – and the all-too-frequent failure to achieve it – is at the heart of Abu Toha’s poetry.
In “Beneath the Rubble,” he describes the death of a young girl whose “bed became her grave” after her home was destroyed by an Israeli airstrike. With hundreds of thousands of homes razed in Gaza – often burying those who were there – such cases are common.
What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Airstrike lists the practical and impractical actions one must take when bombs fall, from turning off lights and staying away from windows to putting essentials in a backpack , put a little soil from the ground. balcony flower pot in your pocket. The land symbolizes the continued displacement of Palestinians and their desire to retain whatever land they can.
In After Allen Ginsberg, the narrator states, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent, searching for water and diapers. » An ironic observation about the lives and potential needlessly devastated by the ongoing violence. For Ginsberg, the best minds have been destroyed by the madness of modernity – a luxury in comparison.
Poetic politics and publications on Facebook
Abu Toha’s poetic output began ten years ago as Facebook posts to his English-speaking friends abroad describing scenes and sensations during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza.
“At the time, I wouldn’t call it poetry,” he says. “I didn’t live in a literary family, but I wrote about what I saw and what I felt.”
His English readers, however, continued to notice the poetic side of his messages – a response that was not necessarily shared by Arab audiences.
“In Arabic,” he explains, “there are three pillars for poetry. One is rhyme, one is meter, and one is meaning. So if one is missing, it’s not a poem. And while Abu Toha’s work certainly does not lack the final principle, it exhibits little of the formal structure necessary to address the first two. “In Arabic, there is a big battle around free verse. You could call it fiction. You could call it non-fiction. We could call it prose or poetic prose. But you can’t call it a poem.
He continued to write in English free verse without worrying about these criticisms, because, he explained, it better captured what he felt.
Then, in 2019, he founded the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza, which enjoyed support from a wide range of writers who began reading and championing his work. Three years later, with the publication of his first book Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, he received widespread acclaim and won the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award.
Since then, however, airstrikes have razed two of the library’s three branches – including the original location in her own home, which was bombed two weeks after her family’s evacuation – and the remaining branch in Beit Lahiya suffered heavy damage, although one of its librarians managed to save some books.
Although a minor disaster considering the difficulty of getting books into Gaza – Abu Toha says it took over a month and a half for each book to arrive from Europe or the States -United before the war – he notes that “The urgency is not for the books themselves, but for the people who will use these books.
I ask why the books are taking so long to arrive in Gaza.
“This is part of the siege of Gaza,” he explains. “All the books, toys, clothes, gifts, whatever – everything that comes to the land of Gaza goes first to Israel. » He is then detained until authorization from the Israeli authorities. “Once it took three or four months for the books to arrive in Gaza. And now they’re just under the rubble.
Handcuffed and blindfolded
He speaks in a matter-of-fact way that suggests an intimacy with such difficulties, and indeed, Abu Toha’s writings draw on a life of toil within the confines of Gaza.
“I was born in a refugee camp,” he says. “My father and mother were born in refugee camps. My grandfather was born in a refugee camp. I cannot ignore or forget my journey, that of someone who was born in a refugee camp and who was injured and who never left Gaza until the age of 27. And whose house was bombed. And who was kidnapped by the Israeli army.
He describes this frightening incident in a poem entitled On Your Knees, which appears in Forest of Noise. While trying to flee Gaza with his wife and children last November, Abu Toha was taken by Israeli soldiers who forced him to strip at gunpoint.
“On your knees, that’s the only thing I heard from the Israeli soldiers. » He remembers being kicked in the face and stomach and being forced to sit on his knees for hours until his legs cramped and he screamed in pain. “And then I was blindfolded and handcuffed before being taken – I didn’t know it at the time – to Israel for the first time in my life. Which was my homeland, my country, Palestine. But I arrived in our country handcuffed and blindfolded.
The ordeal lasted about 50 hours before he was taken back to the scene of his abduction where, to his great surprise, the bag containing his rosary, his watch and the notebook he had kept during his stay in a transformed school in refuge, remained.
“The next mission for me was to find my wife and children because I didn’t know if they were still alive. »
Suddenly, as we speak, a young red-haired boy appears on camera. Abu Toha introduces him as Mustafa, his youngest.
“He’s the only American in the family,” says Abu Toha. “He was born here. It is because of him that our names were included on the list to evacuate Gaza. The American administration cared about us not because we are human beings, nor because I am an award-winning poet or author, but because my son was born in America and has an American passport. »
Those living in Gaza without immediate family members holding foreign nationality have not been so lucky.
“They had no value,” says Abu Toha. “No one cared about them. They send bombs to kill those who have no connection with foreigners.”
A message from Gaza to the world
I ask Abu Toha what he wants the world to know about life in Gaza.
“I want every person living outside (Gaza) to imagine being born in Palestine,” he said. “Being born in a refugee camp and living your whole life under occupation and siege. Raising your children in a war zone, not for a year, two years, three years, no – for me, that was my whole life.”
While October 7 will mark the first anniversary of the latest outbreak of violence, which captured the world’s attention, many do not realize how much Palestinians have suffered over the past 75 years. In Forest of Noise, Abu Toha describes this generational plight in painful detail, recounting the grandparents’ displacement during the Nakba – the Arabic word for “catastrophe” which refers to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians driven from their homes and villages in 1948 – daily indignation and anxieties, incessant fear and constant threats of death while “the drone watches over everything”.
“One thing that really hurts me as a Palestinian – and the people of the world need to be aware of this pain,” Abu Toha told me, “is that as long as we are alive, we have to fight and fight for to prove to people outside that we are human beings, that we exist, but that when we are killed, we are not even recognized as having been killed.
He cites the Israeli claim that the staggering number of Palestinian deaths – at least 41,600 and rising every day – is a lie produced by Hamas.
“Come on,” he pleads. “The photos, the videos and the people under the rubble are there. I have personally lost at least 31 members of my extended family. I lost three cousins and their children. And you say, “No, that didn’t happen, that’s something Hamas said.” “So not only do they not want to recognize our existence as a people, as a community, as human beings, but even after we are killed, we are denied death. »
He tells me he wants to share a few lines from something he’s working on.
“It’s just a draft,” he said, then read:
People are bleeding out
People are freezing to death
And the people in Palestine live to death
Our discussion is over – he has to go pick up the other kids from school.
“They are traumatized,” he said. “I don’t want to go into details, but I am a traumatized father. I am a traumatized son. I am traumatized.