Poetry After Gaza

Notes made while reading Mosab Abu Toha

In 2022, a year before the outbreak of the most recent war in Gaza, in reality a long unending war from earlier still, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha published a book of poems titled Things You May Find In Your Ear. The above photograph-poem is from that book. It conveys quickly, directly, the devastation of war, and the brutal, touching irony of the survivor. This mood is present everywhere else in the collection. Here’s an example: “A country that exists only in my mind. Its flag has no room to fly freely, but there is space on the coffins of my countrymen.”

Or take this poem:

“My city’s streets are nameless. / If a Palestinian gets killed by a sniper or a drone, / we name the street after them. // Children learn their numbers best / when they can count how many homes or schools / were destroyed, how many mothers and fathers / were wounded or thrown into jail. // Grownups in Palestine only use their IDs / so as not to forget / who they are.”

It has happened before and it is still happening—and yet, after Israel began its blanket bombing after the Hamas attack of Oct 7 last year, these early poems of Abu Toha’s appeared very nearly prescient if not prophetic. For instance, this one about the aftermath of a bombing: “I never knew my neighbors still had that small TV, / that the old painting still hung on their walls / that their cat had kittens.”

Another notable aspect of the collection is the homage it pays to names like Edward Said, Noam Chomsky, and even Adorno. This is in part a young writer’s search for affiliation but it also reflects the generous impulse of a writer who had set up the first English language library in Gaza. When you read about the founding of a library by an idealistic poet, you feel uplifted by the communitarian spirit. But such a report is like light traveling to you from a distant star: the light you saw was seemingly from a million years ago because a merciless assault has taken place in the time in between: the star from which the light came is dead, has been dead for some time.

Here is an update from The Guardian on Mosab Abu Toha’s home and the library. (Spoiler: “The library he founded is also gone.” This update includes an interview with the poet. Please read it.)

I came to know of Abu Toha’s writing only in the days of the current—what to call it, “upheaval” sounds so euphemistic, maybe the only word is “devastation”—devastation, when I first came across a report of the exodus from Gaza. Then, there were other pieces of poetry, including this one titled “OBIT,” all of which bore not just the stamp of urgent witness but also provided a way of seeing, a way of preserving humanity, that seemed destined to be completely and violently erased, buried, under the rubble. “OBIT” is a part of the collection that was published last month under the title Forest of Noise.

To write a poem after Auschwitz is barbaric, wrote Adorno. He was commenting on the dialectic of culture and barbarism. Abu Toha’s stance is that to be silent is to be condemned to a second death. In an interview included in his debut collection, he had said that when a theater in Gaza was destroyed in an attack in 2018, musicians had gathered to play music among the ruins. He went on: “When the Italian tower complex was hit by the Israelis in 2014, a young artist painted many different faces on the destroyed wall—gloomy faces, hopeful faces—looking toward the sky. It’s very difficult that we have to do these things, but we cannot tell the world that we are giving up.”

In that same interview published in the 2022 book, Abu Toha had said that given how their memories were being lost, the grandchildren of the people in his generation would not be asked about Jaffa and Acre and Haifa. Instead, the children would ask questions about the 2014 war: “What happened to you? What did you eat, which of your friends was wounded, did you leave your home, where did you go?” Forest of Noise anticipates the questions that will be asked in the wake of all that has happened in Gaza since October 7.

These poems can be seen as a part of a memory project: they are often elegiac, and understandably, sometime sentimental. Others are reportorial communiques. Several poems are in conversation with poems by earlier American poets: Walt Whitman, Allen Ginsberg, Yusef Komunyakaa. So many of them are brief like shards, patched together fragments of a blown-apart whole: “A group of mute people / were talking sign. / When a bomb fell, / they fell silent.” Mostly, as a reader of Forest of Noise, I saw these poems as dispatches from a terrible interregnum, a kind of exile, a prayer or a call made from in between unresolved events. Abu Toha is currently in the U.S. with his wife and kids on a visiting appointment at Syracuse University; the rest of his family, those who are still living, are in Gaza. These poems are reports or memorials or testimonies, yes, but they rise as a cry, above all the sounds in this forest of noise, a cry for peace, peace, peace.

P.S.

I understand fully a line in one of Abu Toha’s poems: “(Don’t think of us as numbers.)” His poems are an antidote to any thinking about people reduced to mere numbers. But I appreciate that there is someone on Vassar campus keeping count. I pass this window on my way back to my classes. The first picture is from Oct 31 and the second from Nov 12.