Poetry that is filled with the crushing weight of Gaza’s rubble

Poetry is not a luxury. For Palestinian writer and poet Mosab Abu Toha — the Pulitzer Prize winner for his essays on Gaza in The New Yorker — it is survival. Poetry is protest, it is resistance, and it is stubbornness, the refusal to be erased.

“Let it bring hope, let it tell a tale,” was his short acceptance after winning the Pulitzer recently for documenting the carnage in Gaza. It is the only time ‘Mobarak’ appeared on the X timeline, otherwise a grim daily record of the losses in Gaza — over 53,000, according to the Palestinian health ministry. Mosab refuses to allow them to remain numbers. The loss, for him, is personal. They have names, stories, they have lives, they are mourned. He has lost 31 members of his family.

“Every child in Gaza is me. Every mother and father is me. Every house is my heart. Every tree is my leg. Every plant is my arm. Every flower is my eye. Every hole in the earth is my wound,” he writes in ‘Forest of Noise’.

Written in the past year, if his essays bear witness to what he lost in Gaza, his poetry is filled with the crushing weight of the rubble. Hard-hitting, deeply felt, his poems are impossible to walk away from and should be essential reading. His neat sentences contain the bloodiness of the war and barely hold the crushing weight of grief.

“She slept on her bed, never woke up again,” he writes in ‘Under the Rubble’. “Her bed has become her grave, a tomb beneath the ceiling of her room, the ceiling a cenotaph. No name, no year or birth, no year of death, no epitaph.”

In one of his winning essays, ‘My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza’, he writes about hating the food in front of him. “Pretty much everyone is hungry,” he quotes Arif Husain, chief economist at the UN World Food Programme in the essay. This was February 2024. His family had taken to eating bread made from donkey and pigeon feed. “This is the wondrous thing we call ‘bread’ — a mixture of rabbit, donkey and pigeon feed,” his brother Hamza posted on social media. A year later, with the blockade, one in five people are starving. As he writes in ‘Under the Rubble’: “He left the house to buy some bread for his kids. News of his death made it home, but not the bread. No bread.”

The Pulitzer Prize for Mosab comes at a time when voices on Palestine in America are being clamped down. His voice then becomes that much more vital. The protests are falling silent, the outrage no longer as shrill, the death toll but rises, constantly.

A poem cannot stop a bullet, wrote Salman Rushdie in ‘Knife: Meditations After An Attempted Murder’. Palestinians know that better than most. Mosab wants you to picture where they land. ‘In Younger Than The War’, he writes: “Tanks roll through dust, through egg-plant fields…. No need for radio: we are the news…. At that time, I was seven: decades younger than the war, a few years older than the bombs.”

There is always death. “Before I sleep, Death is always/sitting on my windowsill/whether in Gaza or Cairo. Even when I lived in a tent, it never failed to create a window for itself,” he writes in ‘Before I Sleep’. But his poetry is about life and living, to keep the memory of what now doesn’t exist, tangible proof of what Gaza was before dust. In ‘Palestinian Village’, he writes: “You can lounge on a wicker chair near a pomegranate tree, where a canary never tires of singing.” Of his library — he was the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza — “My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year, but all the words have died.” Or of the cake in the oven in ‘Thanks (on the Eve of My Twenty-Second Birthday)’ just “seconds before shrapnel cut through the window glass”.

‘Forest of Noise’, his book of poetry, will keep you up at night — loss sits heavily on your chest. As it should. In ‘A Blank Postcard’, he writes a poem for his brother Hudayfah, 16 years old, who appears in his dream. The graveyard where he was buried has been razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. “How can I find you now? Will my bones find yours after I die?” Mosab forces you to bear witness to his loss. It is essential to do so — for him, and more importantly, for us. There is a lot at stake, especially hope.

— The writer is a literary critic

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