Nathalie Handal: Where does passion live here?
Mosab Abu Toha: Near the border, where we create new designs in the sky above our grandparents’ houses, which Israel demolished in 1948. At the beach, where we sail with our eyes to places we are deprived of seeing. On top of the small hills, where we imagine ourselves touching the clouds.
- Interview from Words Without Borders
I can’t talk about Mosab Abu Toha’s work without addressing the present. This was the last tweet I saw before Gaza went under another technological blackout. I’m praying constantly for him and his family’s safety. I hope he is getting the help he needs, how small that might be. These hopes and prayers I know aren’t enough. We need to do what we can like calling for a ceasefire from our representatives, and demanding no more funding of weapons to Israel. I’m still figuring out all the roles I can use to end this genocide in Gaza. I hope you are doing what you can too.
Picture: First poem from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Picture: The poetry collection’s cover is a picture of a shrapnel hole in the shape of an ear revealing Gaza’s landscape.
I first want to say the majority of the books I read are recommendations I get from others on social media. I hope you pass these recommendations on to others as I am doing here.
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I recently finished Mosab Abu Toha’s full length collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. You can download and read the collection for free at City Lights Books.
The collection recently won the Derek Walcott Prize, and the prize judge, Canisia Lubrin wrote:
Here is a book which revels at an impossible pitch, the potent will to live heart-first in confrontation with life under brutal siege. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a supertonic glossary of sorrows so extreme it bends the brace of language into fortifying, never-naïve, elegy.
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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet born and living in Gaza. The home he and his family lived in for years is in Beit Lahia of North Gaza and was completely destroyed by Israeli airstrikes.
In an interview with Philip Metres he shares,
My family originally comes from Yaffa, a beautiful Palestinian city on the seashore of the Mediterranean Sea. We call it “The Bride of the Sea.”
After the Nakba, Mosab’s family was forced to flee to Al-Shati refugee camp west of Gaza City where Mosab was born. After almost a decade, they moved to Beit Lahia.
Mosab Abu Toha is a librarian, scholar, and founder of the Edward Said Library in North Gaza. Gaza’s first English language library. You can read more about the library in Light in Gaza, where he talks about literature and arts in Gaza as well.
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Mosab Abu Toha’s collection shows life in the Gaza Strip under Israeli occupation.
The poems contain the speaker’s house, the walls and objects within rooms, how they are draped in colonial violence—
When I hear the explosion, I can smell the sand, sand that blows
through the still air
to gather on my windowsill
-from NOTEBOOKS
Loss is part of their grammar—
the I, the he and the she. No pronouns left. Not even
for the kids when they learn parts of speech
next year.
-from SHRAPNEL LOOKING FOR LAUGHTER
Grief is shown on intricate levels.
Continuing with this poem in the interview from Words Without Borders, Mosab Abu Toha says:
I wrote this poem during the horrendous eleven-day Israeli bombardment of Gaza in 2021…We could hear them being dropped from the planes. Everyone looked into the eyes of those around them as if to say “goodbye, take care”.
It was the same day the Al-Tanani family was massacred.
Here is part of the poem:
The house has been bombed. Everyone dead:
The kids, the parents, the toys, the actors on TV,
characters in novels, personas in poetry collections,
the I, the he and the she. No pronouns left. Not even
for the kids when they learn parts of speech
next year. Shrapnel flies in the dark,
looks for the family’s peals of
laughter hiding behind piles of disfigured
walls and bleeding picture frames.
In the poem above, remembering can become sounds, the spaces between each sound, and spaces between wreckage.
The insistence of shrapnel breaking through the joy and memory of being alive.
Pictures are one of most common reminders of who is/was living in the house. Naming picture frames and not the picture reminds the reader of loss surrounded by grief.
What happens to the memories between family members when everyone is killed? Who is left to pass these memories down from one generation to the next?
This question will sit with me for a long time.
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Poetry can also be a way of seeing. In an interview with Ammiel Alcalay from Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Abu Toha says:
But when we talk about literature in general, you are not only talking about fantastic worlds or imagined realities. No, you are talking about works that document the lives of the authors and the places they lived. When I’m reading Wordsworth or Marlowe I’m not reading the beautiful words and sentences—no, they are telling me what they see. It’s not only about the work of literature, but what is carried in it. And when I talk about Wordsworth and Coleridge and Shelly and Keats, I’m not talking about things they liked or wanted to bring to us. When I read them, I want to be there with them because I’m deprived of that nature and those things that exist in their world.
Poetry can be read in many ways such as reading what the speaker sees and taking it in. Connecting with the words and recognizing ones deprivation is a reality of occupation. I see this as another pathway of engaging with poetry.
Writing down what is happening is an act of remembering. What the speaker sees.
What is carried in it.
The parts of speech. The picture frames.
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The speaker also sees the continuation of life even amidst bombings and drones. A claim to land regardless of colonial powers of destruction.
Abu Toha uses building as an instrument of steadfastness, believing in futures where children are safe, they can sleep and play without worry.
Love is a form of steadfastness.
Buildings are often a symbol of destruction in war footage. We’re seeing it now on social media, and I find the use of building here as a resistance to this crumbling of walls and concrete. Some may only see destruction, but others believe in worlds where they remain forever, generation after generation.
The tree is a form of rootedness, a planting of care and freedom. Watching over their descendants. Trees are many ways of being, they are uprooted, they are planted, they grow, and they remain. They are all of these at once.
The children in the last line swing through time with no rupture between who they are now and who they were. The childhood they exist in is one where they play, laugh, and dream. The homes, buildings, or trees are the location of this future.
In the interview from the collection Abu Toha says:
…there are many Mosabs in the world—the Mosab who was born in Gaza in al-Shati camp; the Mosab I could have been if my grandparents were not expelled from Jaffa. Maybe I wouldn’t have had to write poetry, maybe I could have been a chemist like Primo Levi or a linguist like Noam Chomsky. I could have been a scientist or a historian or a researcher of marine life. But now I’m living in Gaza. And I don’t feel that I was a child, I think I was running from something. Maybe from my childhood. maybe my childhood was left behind forever, because I never felt that I was a child.
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So I never exercised my childhood. I think it’s there waiting for me—till when? Maybe until I go back to Jaffa and become a child again.
I think of all the childhoods, that do and don’t become. The childhoods that couldn’t be childhoods. The childhoods that are still waiting to be.
Swinging through all possible childhoods without interruption and land on the one that brings those dreams to life is incredible. Gathering this together on a single line.
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In Conor Bracken’s review of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, he considers what the poem’s role is, particularly as a mode of salvation:
Am I being asked, by the poets or their placement within a specific reading public, to read them in order to save myself?
I don’t see the poems as a mode of salvation for the reader, especially as a reader in the United States. I refuse to see Abu Toha’s work as excavation of knowledge, or empathy, these are colonial enterprises.
Reading poetry can be a form of relation, experiencing the poems as themselves. When reading poetry I think about how much a line, image, and word carries multiple meanings at once.
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In the interview with Philip Metres, Abu Toha shares his experience living through many Israeli bombardments in Gaza:
In 2018, a big explosion very close to our house shook the whole area. Some of my books on the shelf fell off and a small vase broke next to me while I was writing. This incident inspired me to write a poem. This is an excerpt:
Edward Said is out of place
again:
His books on my shelf
fall off on the broken glass.
[Palestine is also out of place:
Its map
falls off my wall.]
The books’ exile bleeds
of wars,
of continued estrangement.
The sound of an object breaking is disruption. A physical rupture, where pieces are scattered. They are unable to return to what was again. The image moves from an object to breakage, moving away from the center. Away from the wholeness of the self or object.
Repeating the phrase out of place gestures towards exile. Again slips off the edge of the first line and is on its own. I land on again with a pause before the next line, reminding me of the heaviness of exile, displacement, and disruption. The two syllables land on my tongue like one is walking while exhausted. The syllables punctuate like books falling onto the floor.
Listing the multiple disruptions, the shaking of walls, books falling, glass shattered, the map, all show the meaning of estrangement.
Mosab Abu Toha adds:
But we, their descendants, were also robbed of our right to dream and think about those places—no, instead, we are forced to live in the nightmares of our current life. And they are creating more misery for us, wounding us again and again, so that we forget those earlier wounds in the face of the fresher wounds. The more Israel attacks us, the more they are trying to erase the older memories. So it also because a matter of exhaustion.
The word again holds power. Remembering the new wounds along with the earlier wounds. Again also acknowledges the exhaustion of the repeated violences of Israeli bombardments.
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One of the photographs in the collection is of a broken mirror with the frame still intact, the caption reads:
Where is the rest of me? Shattered in pieces.
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In the review, Conor Bracken continues,
For Darwish, as well as Elias and Abu Toha and many other extraordinary Palestinian and Palestinian-American poets, what is being saved is not the reader, but the experience of a self, which can stand in for or helpfully represent, though not totalizingly so, the experience of a people.
What role does poetry play when the poem moves out of the self and onto the page? When they are released from the present experience of making and into the world?
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The poems name many violences and the selves experiencing those violences. This can be a type of agency. Creating some form of control and mapping of movement. I don’t necessarily mean a typical progression, but events, moods, images, and grammar moving and connecting in ways that only poetry can show. Are the lines short or long? How many lines in a stanza? What are the images? How do they relate to each other?
Perhaps the image is a way of entering, repeatedly like the tide. The image changes, but we are still on the same shore, the same source of water. Clouds are rolling in. The wind is picking up. Or maybe the source does change, maybe we are at the bank of a river and you’re trying to cross using large rocks, they’re slippery, but they provide a path. Suddenly the rocks change into boats and except there’s no land anymore, except more coursing images.
All the images in Abu Toha’s work remind me of the heaviness of the waves against one’s legs, the difficulty of walking the deeper one enters the water.
One enters the poem. At the poem’s end one stands, the waves continue, still heavy, rhythmic. I mention heaviness because it is with care the reader should hold these poems, should enter the water. To not run through them quickly.
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I write and read because of the not knowing. What will come? How does it enter? By wave? By wind? By a vase crashing on the floor?
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Maybe the mapping of one’s experience through poetry is a way to save the self. Save as in naming, acknowledging, beckoning, listening to the many selves that make up a person. Maybe a self in the past, the self that never was because of violence, and the self now trying to comprehend it all in the present.
Maybe this is a form of resistance to occupation and colonialism, which try to fracture identity, land, selfhood, and history. Maybe by taking into account the many selves one is, they name that fracturing by gathering them together and creating a different way of being, and relating with others who are also under occupation.
Who will honor these many selves when they are gone? Why not write them down? To relate with those around us?
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Creating new designs in the sky, sailing with their eyes to places they can’t always see, places where they can touch the clouds.
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Bracken finishes by saying,
If this book were interested in saving you, in satisfying some benign desire of witness, it would modulate more, reach occasionally for the transcendent or sublime, the indomitable tenacity of the human spirit, but it doesn’t… That they exist, as a record of what has and is happening in Gaza, is enough.
Other articles written by Mosab Abu Toha:
“In 2021, when I returned from a fellowship in the United States, my parents generously refreshed my apartment, buying new plates, glasses, rugs, and a desk. They had shelves installed for all the books I brought back. They also had the ceiling painted with a pattern that I love. In the center is a big brown-and-yellow star, and around it are little triangles, circles, and a rainbow. The shapes and colors seem to embrace and coexist with one another, like strangers who share the same floor of a building. The moment I saw it, I knew how much love my parents had for me.”
I think about of the love, work and care that went into this painting and I hold this with me. To know all of this was destroyed is another form of devastation.
In Gaza, no one can believe their eyes
“In this prison that is Gaza, when we hear a bomb falling, we ask ourselves: “Is it my turn this time?”
He also has a column with ARROWSMITH Press.
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Recent Posts:
What I’m currently reading:
I just finished Like We Still Speak by Danielle Badra
In the Presence of Absence by Mahmoud Darwish.
Just finished Light in Gaza Edited by Jehad Abusalim, Jennifer Bing, and Michael Merryman-Lotze. An anthology of Gazan writers and experts in various fields. I will talk about this anthology more in the future. The ebook is free at Haymarket Books.
For research: Ghostly Matters by Avery F. Gordon
The Blue Light by Hussein Barghouthi, Translated by Fady Joudah
I will end with a picture of my dear Luna.
Thank you again for reading.