‘Living to death’: Poet Mosab Abu Toha on Gaza’s trauma, one year on

“If you live in Gaza, you die several times,” writes Mosab Abu Toha in his new collection Forest of Noise: Poems, which comes out on October 15 – eight days after the first anniversary of the beginning of the war.

I ask the poet – whose work has been lauded for its heart-rending, vivid descriptions of life under Israeli occupation – to elaborate.

“It has many layers,” he explains. “If you live in Gaza, you die several times because you could have died in an air strike, but only luck saved you. Also, having lost so many family members is a death for you. And losing your 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’. So you die several times, because you count yourself amongst the dead every night.”

He tells me this via Zoom from his new home in upstate New York, having been evacuated from Gaza late last year, escaping with his family first to Egypt before relocating to the United States. I ask him what he thinks of his new life there. He considers, then shakes his head, a grim expression on his face.

“I wouldn’t call it a new life,” he says, explaining that it feels like 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 wait in line for four hours – just like my other friends and family members are now – to get water for my children to drink. Here I can go to the shop and get them ice cream, which is something.”

Abu Toha tells me that the lives of his three children have been marked by violence.

“My youngest son – who is four years old – knows what war means,” he explains. “He knows what an aircraft means. Knows what a bomb means. An air strike. An explosion. What a drone means. What an F-16 means.”

He describes how during an air strike as his daughter desperately sought to hide from the incoming bombs, his six-year-old son attempted to shield her with a blanket – “the only thing he could do to protect his sister”. In Forest of Noise, Abu Toha portrayed the scene in the poem My Son Throws a Blanket Over His Sister, writing:

Our backs bang on the walls 
whenever the house shakes.
We stare at each other’s faces,
scared yet happy
that so far, our lives have been spared.

“Children are not learning how to paint, how to colour, how to ride their bikes,” he tells me. “Children are not learning to live – they are learning to survive.”

This struggle for survival in Gaza – and the all-too-frequent inability to do so – is at the core of Abu Toha’s poetry.

In “Under the Rubble” he describes the death of a young girl whose “bed has become her grave” after her home was destroyed by an Israeli air strike. With hundreds of thousands of homes razed in Gaza – often entombing those inside – such cases are common.

What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike lists the practical and impractical actions one must take as the bombs fall, from turning off the lights and staying away from windows, to packing essentials in a backpack, to putting a bit of soil from the balcony flower pot in your pocket. Soil is symbolic of the ongoing displacement of Palestinians, and their desire to hold onto whatever land they can.

In After Allen Ginsberg the narrator declares, “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed in a tent, looking for water and diapers.” A wry observation on the lives and potential needlessly devastated by the ongoing violence. For Ginsberg, the best minds were destroyed by the madness of modernity – a luxury by comparison.

Poetry politics and Facebook posts

Abu Toha’s poetic output began a decade ago in the form of Facebook posts directed at his English-speaking friends abroad describing scenes and sensations during the 2014 Israeli assault on Gaza.

“At the time I wouldn’t call this poetry,” he says. “I did not live in a literary family, but I was writing about what I was seeing and how I was feeling.”

His English readers, however, kept noting the poetics of his posts – a response that was not necessarily shared by Arabic audiences.

“In Arabic,” he explains, “there are three pillars for poetry. One is the rhyme, one is the metre, and one is the meaning. So if something lacks one of them, it’s not a poem.” And while Abu Toha’s work certainly has no dearth of the final tenet, it bears little of the formal structure necessary to meet the first two. “In Arabic, there is a big fight over free verse. You could call it fiction. You could call it nonfiction. You could call it prose or poetic prose. But you cannot call it a poem.”

He continued to write in English free verse heedless of these criticisms, because, he explains, it best captured how he felt.

Then in 2019, he founded the Edward Said Public Library in Gaza, which was offered support from an array of writers who began reading and championing his work. Three years later with the publication of his debut Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, he received widespread acclaim, garnering the Palestine Book Award and the American Book Award.

Since then, however, air strikes have levelled two of the library’s three branches – including the original location in his own home, which was bombed two weeks after his family evacuated – with the remaining branch in Beit Lahiya taking heavy damage, though one of its librarians managed to save some of the books.

While this is a minor disaster considering how difficult it is to obtain books in Gaza – Abu Toha says that it took more than a month and a half for each book to arrive from Europe or the United States prior to the war – he notes that “The urgency is not for the books themselves right now, but for the people who are going to use these books.”

I ask why books take so long to reach Gaza.

“This is part of the siege on Gaza,” he explains. “Any books, toys, clothes, gifts, whatever – anything that comes into Gaza lands in Israel first.” It is then held until cleared by Israeli authorities. “One time it took three or four months for the books to enter Gaza. And now they are just under the rubble.”

Handcuffed and blindfolded

He talks in a matter-of-fact way that suggests an intimacy with such hardships, and indeed, Abu Toha’s writing is informed by a lifetime 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 can’t ignore or unlive my background, the background of someone who was born in a refugee camp and who was wounded and who never left Gaza until he was 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 attempting 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 that I heard from the Israeli soldiers.” He recalls being kicked in the face and stomach and was forced to sit on his knees for hours until his legs cramped and he was screaming in pain. “And then I was blindfolded and handcuffed before I was taken – I didn’t know at the time – to Israel for the first time in my life. What used to be my homeland, my country, Palestine. But I reached our homeland handcuffed and blindfolded.”

The ordeal lasted for roughly 50 hours before he was returned to the spot of his abduction where, to his surprise, the bag containing his prayer beads, watch and the notebook he had kept during his time at a school that had been converted into a shelter, remained.

“The next mission for me was to find my wife and kids because I did not know whether they were still alive.”

Suddenly as we’re speaking, a young, redheaded boy runs into camera view. Abu Toha introduces him as Mustafa, his youngest.

“He is the only American in the family,” Abu Toha explains. “He was born here. He was the reason our names were listed to evacuate Gaza. The American administration cared about us not because we are human beings, not because I am a poet or an award-winning author, but because my son happened to be born in America and happened to have an American passport.”

Those in Gaza without immediate family members holding foreign citizenship were not as lucky.

“They were of no value,” says Abu Toha. “No one cared about them. They send bombs to kill those who have no relation to foreign nationals.”

‘I want every single person to imagine themselves being born in Palestine’ [Courtesy of Mosab Abu Toha]

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 single person who is living outside [Gaza] to imagine themselves being born in Palestine,” he says. “Being born in a refugee camp and living all their lives under occupation and under siege. To raise your children in a war zone not for one year, two years, three years, no – for me it’s been all my life.”

While October 7 will bring the first anniversary of the latest eruption of violence, which has drawn the attention of the world, many do not realise the degree to which Palestinians have suffered over the past 75 years. In Forest of Noise, Abu Toha describes this generational plight in painful detail, relating the displacement of grandparents during the Nakba – the Arabic word for “catastrophe” which refers to the ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians from their homes and villages in 1948 – the daily indignations and agonies, the relentless fear and constant threats of death as “the drone watches over all”.

“One thing that is really painful to me as a Palestinian – and the people of the world need to know about this pain,” Abu Toha tells me, “is that while we are alive, we have to fight and struggle to prove to the people outside that we are human beings, that we exist, but when we are killed we are not even recognised as having been killed.”

He cites the Israeli assertion that the staggering Palestinian death toll – at least 41,600 and climbing every day – is a lie produced by Hamas.

“Come on,” he pleads. “The photos and videos and people under the rubble – it’s there. I personally lost at least 31 members of my extended family. I lost three cousins and their children. And you say, ‘No, this did not happen, this is something Hamas said.’ So not only are they unwilling to recognise our existence as a people, as a community, as human beings, but even after we are killed, we are denied our deaths.”

He tells me he wants to share a few lines from something he’s been working on.

“It’s just a draft,” he says, then reads:

People bleed to death
People freeze to death
And people in Palestine live to death

Our talk is over – he has to pick up the other kids from school.

“They are traumatised,” he says. “I don’t want to go into the details, but I’m a traumatised father. I’m a traumatised son. I’m traumatised.”