Batool Abu Akleen: Poetry Is What Keeps Me Alive

Nineteen-year-old Palestinian poet Batool Abu Akleen was recently named Modern Poetry in Translation’s “poet in residence,” which entails not quite a residency, but a stipend to write and translate for the magazine. Her non-metaphorical residence is a tent in Deir al-Balah, after her home in northern Gaza was bombed and she and her family were first made homeless, then forced to move south.

Yet even under these circumstances, Batool — who has been committed to her craft since the age of 10, and won her first major poetry recognition at 15 — continues to write. She says: “It’s what protects me from going insane.”

This interview took place over WhatsApp, in a combination of text and voice notes.

You were already a serious poet at age 15, when you won a Barjeel poetry prize and Golan Haji said of your work, “Her senses are awake.” What drew you to poetry—family, a teacher? What woke your senses?

Batool Abu Akleen: When I was 10 years old, I wrote the first poem in my life, and there was an Al-Qattan Foundation cultural center close to our house and I went to it. There was a creative writing club led by Heba al-Agha, and after I wrote that poem, I went to her, and I showed her my poem, and she said she was really surprised with its creativity and sensitivity, and she said, You have to come a day per week to join us in the creative writing club so you can learn more techniques about how to write poetry, about how to feel poetry. And to be honest, I wasn’t that kind of a child who can come and go alone, and I was really young, just 10 years old, but she kept calling and texting my parents and telling them, ‘Your daughter has something different. She is not like other kids, and she will be a really famous wonderful poet.’ So I went to al-Qattan for years and years, till I finished high school I kept going, and until today I’m still in touch with Heba al-Agha. She was my first instructor, my first teacher who taught me how to see the world before teaching me techniques of writing poetry. And she just believed in me. She saw something different.

Also, my family has been a really huge support for me. My dad has shared my poems on his Facebook page, and my mother, I consider her my first reader and editor. So also my family has played a really huge role in the position I’ve reached today.

If it’s possible, this has increased my admiration for Heba al-Agha even more. (Editor’s note: You can read a few of Heba’s poems on ArabLit and more of her writing at LitHub.)

BAA: Heba is and will always be my favorite person. She is an incredible woman, instructor, and writer!

When I was a little kid, I used to ask her, “Why don’t you publish your own book?” She always answered, “I am raising writers who’ll publish and write wonderful books. You are my output.”

What poems did you first fall in love with? Which poems and poets were you reading as a young teen?

BAA: I was not that kind of teen who’s easily satisfied. I read all the well-known poets like Mahmoud Darwish and Nizar Qabbani. I loved their poems, but they’ve never been my favorites. Three of my favorite poets who I really admire are Asmaa al-Azaizeh, Riyad Al-Saleh Al-Hussein, and Taha Muhammad Ali, but my favorite of these is Taha Muhammad Ali. The first time I heard about him was in a play called “Taha,” written and acted by Amer al-Hlehel. It was a really wonderful play. Since then I’ve fallen in love with Taha and his Amira. There is a poem in which he said, ‘When our loved ones leave / Amira / as you left, / an endless migration in us begins  / and a certain sense takes hold in us / that all of what is finest / in and around us, / except for the sadness, / is going away—departing, not to return.’* I do really love this poem. It has been my favorite since I was sixteen.

Who is your poetry community? How and where do you share your poems?

BAA: I always wanted to share my poetry with others to read it, and just to have this company of friends who write poetry and literature, who are in love with literature and poetry. There are some communities, but they are small. As I mentioned before, I used to go to the Al-Qattan Foundation center. After that, I went to another, Tamer Institute for Community Education, and here I used to share my poems and we used to meet in a creative writing club, and I was one of the leaders of that team. After that, we can say that my poetry community is my friends who write poetry. We meet from time to time, we read poems to each other, and we discuss them. And there is actually also some online workshops, some online cultural evenings, sometimes I join them. But there is not a lot. I mean, Gaza is a small city, and a sieged one, so there is not that much for poets here.

On the MPT announcement, they say you also want to work as a literary translator. What interests you about literary translation? Which poets have you translated and what did you discover in the process? Are you also interested in translating prose?

BAA: From my own perspective, literary translation is not only translating from one language to another, but it’s also about translating my thoughts into literary texts, poems, prose, and all this. This is what made me interested in that field. Since I was a really young kid, I knew that I wanted to be a translator, and we can say that the first thing I translated in my life was myself. I translated my thoughts into poems. But if we’re going to talk about the usual notion of literary translation, I translated the first poem in my life when I was at university, maybe we can say a year ago, I translated a poem written by Nizar Qabbani, and this was the first one. Then I translated one of my poems, which is called, “This is how I cook my grief.” My professor actually advised me to visit professor Refaat al-Areer’s office and ask for his help in this translation, because he was a specialist in that field, may his soul rest in peace.

This poem actually has been translated by Yasmin Zaher, recently, and published by Triangle House magazine. After that, I translated with Cristina Viti almost five poems, which have been published as part of the last issue of MPT magazine.

What I discovered actually is that translating is not an easy thing at all. It’s really hard and you need to be patient. It’s almost—I consider it a re-writing of the poem, but in another language. Of course I’ll translate prose in the future. But meanwhile I’m going to translate just poetry. I would like to translate poems by those unknown, talented, hidden poets, so this is my ambition for the coming six or seven months. This is what I’m going to work on with my residency with MPT.

Do you want to translate in both directions? What skills (or talents, or gifts) do you think are most important in a translator of poetry?

BAA: Yes, I would like to translate in both directions, but now I think I’m just going to translate from Arabic to English. Well, the first thing is, I think, that the translator should be a critic before being a translator. You need to fully understand the poem, to understand the feelings it involves, because you’re not only translating words, you’re translating emotions and feelings. This is actually the hardest thing in poetry for me. And also I think that the translator needs to be selective, to know how to select the best words that convey the meaning and the emotions they felt and saw in the poem. These are the most important things, I feel, that any translator should have.

In a poem posted on the MPT website you write, “I read poems out loud / I gather them all from the throat of my heart.” What are some of the poems you most enjoy reading aloud? Do you perform poetry for an audience? Or read aloud for yourself?

BAA: I have a believe that poetry is audible, not readable, so this is why I read poems out loud. Other poets, I read them out loud because this helps me to feel the poems and understand them much better. And when it comes to my own poems, I read them out loud in the process of editing because it helps so much. When I hear the words, I can know what’s wrong, what is to be deleted, what I can add. I don’t know how it works, but it helps me so much in the process of editing, and this is why I read my poems out loud.

Can you tell us where you are right now, what your circumstances are, where you are writing and working?

BAA: Now, I’m living in a refugee camp, in a tent. This is why you hear a lot of noise in my recordings. My house has been bombed, so we can say that I’ve lost everything, I’m homeless now, and I’ve been evacuated from the north of Gaza to the south, and now I’m in Deir al-Balah. My office actually is the corridor between the tents, and in front of my tent’s door. I sit on the ground, where I try to write and translate and edit.

Sometimes, I’ve got my headphones on, and I listen to something so it might distract me from all this noise around me. It doesn’t always work, but I’m still trying. There is no regular internet connection. I have to go from one mobile phone place to another, searching for a good network so I can send messages and emails and be in contact with people, like you. So it’s not easy at all, sending messages or emails. But I’m still trying. And I’ll keep working, and I’ll keep writing, even if my office is just a corridor between the tents—we almost can say a street. You’re sitting and everyone around you is just sitting and watching what you’re doing. It doesn’t feel good at all, but I’m doing that, because poetry is what keeps me alive. It’s what protects me from going insane.

*Translation by Peter Cole, Yahya Hijazi, Gabriel Levin, from So What: New and Selected Poems, 1971-2005.