By Husam Maarouf
Why write poetry during war? The question, an essential one in Gaza in these last two years, drives both at poetry’s function and at how it connects to our selves, lives, and emotions. At the path we take to breathe.
In the end, the presence of poetry is the presence of humanity. This idea is palpable in the poetry collection 48 kg by Gazan poet Batoul Abu Akleen,. The collection was published in Arabic and English by Tenement Press, with translations by Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher.
The poems follow one another, each devouring the last, conveying the intensity of war from both personal and general perspectives. The collective effect is poetic curiosity at its most expansive, participating in the bodily rhythm and embodying their presence in every detail.
Abu Akleen’s poems are born of the moment and steeped in the emotions of events; here, the event is war.
This is the poet’s first collection, a beginning marked by a considerable challenge, since its central subject is war. Indeed, those who experience war through language find it difficult to ever part ways from it.
During the two years of war, Abu Akleen experienced displacement, loss, fear, severe hunger. Her poetry carries the intensity of that cruelty. Yet how can poetry bear the cruelty of war?
A Striking Geometric Form
The collection foregrounds its form: the poems stand atop a pyramid of forty-eight steps, each representing a loss of one kilogram of weight. With each step, the loss of weight, the narrowing of space, and the constriction of voice become more apparent.
Each step allows the reader to feel the severity of war’s impact on a fragile human body which has been subjected to its machinery. This approach seems to reflect the poet’s detachment, as if the distance to death were a single step, as if it were the very moment from which she writes her poetry.
The Body as a Repository of Memory
From the first poem, Abu Akleen redefines the body as a repository of memory and experience. Here, memory is threatened by excessive force and experience, engulfing both body and mind like a spreading stain.
She writes:
I want a grave
I don’t want my corpse to be
decomposing in the middle of the street.
This is less a desire for death than a desire for dignity. After death, the body’s value becomes sacred, as it is the final image in this world, the one that remains etched in the mind.
Through this plea, the poet presents an inverse image of the grim and horrific reality.The image evokes severed limbs, decomposed corpses, and piles of human flesh in blue bags—all nameless and without identity.
She writes:
The hand that has been severed
is still up in the sky,
…
she asks a lost eye to cry for her.
Here, the poet does not treat the body as lost forever but as a continuation of existence that seeks the final form of the body, the image that remains in the minds of those who said goodbye.
In 48 Kg, writing is less a description of events than it is a way to compensate for what has been lost, both psychologically and physically, during war. The poem substitutes for what is no longer present and struggles to survive.
In this case, poetry becomes a surgical thread that re-stitches the body’s fragments while attempting to persist despite the terrifying reality that war has produced.
In the poem “Housework,” cleaning the home becomes a way to confront external and internal chaos, a means to create order amidst destruction.
She writes:
she sweeps the tile floor
I sweep away the fear scattered over my soul’s tiles
she polishes the pictures hanging on our walls
I polish my soul’s windows, wipe away the fog that dwells there
Here, poetry provides a different voice amid war—one of survival and the ability to redefine things, taken from a reality that relentlessly gnaws at human identity.
Motherhood in the Face of Annihilation
The mother appears as a central figure in the collection, in its confrontation with disaster. She acts as a protective barrier, embodying safety and continuity of life. It is the mother’s everyday gestures that signal the persistence of life. They represent the pure form of survival to which humans turn when lost in the labyrinths of war.
The mother pays for this survival with her own body, becoming a guide and a map for her children to use when navigating toward safety.
In the poem “I didn’t steal the cloud,” written when Abu Akleen was just fifteen, a kiss becomes a symbol of affection and a sign of life amidst death. This fusion of opposites brings us a philosophical search for existential answers amid war—almost like a miracle. Lines often bring us both tenderness and violence, as when, in “I didn’t steal the cloud”:
I kiss my kids by the stinking gas lamp
A Single Cell
Throughout, the collection conveys the desire to diminish and disappear—a contraction and cooling of the body that returns it to its original state, before experience, struggle, and fear. The cell alone is safe, untroubled, and free of pain.
The poet casts this urge to escape the horrors of war and the heavy atmosphere of fear as a central element of its poetics, representing the voices of those trapped in war and condemned to fire and iron.
In “Illusion,” she writes:
I want to go back to being a little chick
not knowing how to fly
or jump
or walk—
how any of that is done.
It ends:
I will return past days to the calendar
so as to grow smaller by the day
until I become a chick
then an egg
then
nothing.
The language itself carries a trembling rhythm; the voice quavers inside the words as if emerging from water on a winter morning. All the senses are engaged, until the writing is transformed into a new entity that speaks through Abu Akleen’s voice and asserts a poetic argument about war to the world.
At the peak of fragmentation and disappearance, Abu Akleen depicts the shocking spectacle of war, focusing on human decomposition and extreme violence to paint the true picture of events. But can poetry convey the sound of a missile hitting a populated home?
At the end, in “1 kg,” Abu Akleen uses the image of a criminal soldier at the edge of a strike attempting to enter the scene of death and place his bloodied hand directly on a victim, a telescopic perspective that only literature can capture. This creates a new image that exposes humanity as an illusion and renews the human picture.
In the end, a paramedic roams the site:
Confused,
he tries to guess which of these bags
contain my flesh.
The collection divides the human body as land is divided in Palestine, violating existence through cold, heavy metal that extinguishes the notion of humanity.
The diminishing weight echoes the dwindling flow of life, much like the receding rivers worldwide. In Gaza, signs of life are disappearing under criminal hands, trapping people between walls of fire.
The language in the collection tugs at words of war, placing them in a distilled literary context. Sentences intertwine like the hands of displaced people moving from north to south under threat of evacuation or bombardment.
In a collection that spans more than 170 pages, Abu Akleen uses the words, fears, voices, and emotions of Gazans to craft poems that are, perhaps, a collective portrait of the sorrow experienced by those who have lived through war. She deliberately embeds a weeping that will not cease, no matter how calm the world might one day become.
-Husam Maarouf
Husam Maarouf is a poet and journalist from Gaza. He has published two poetry collections, Death Smells Like Glass and The Barber Loyal To His Dead Clients, and the novel Ram’s Chisel. He is also co-founder of a new publishing house, Gaza Publications.
Read recent essays by Husam:
‘Gaza, the Game the Elephant Swallows Every Time’
I Want a Room, God. Do You Hear Me?
How Do I Leave the Prison of Gaza?
What Do Gazans Read During War?
How War Transformed My Literary Taste
Laughter Without Joy: Between Gaza’s Reality and Beckett’s Stage
Learn more about Husam’s publishing house:
Husam Maarouf on Launching New ‘Gaza Publications’
You can contribute to Husam here.