A Famed Palestinian Poet On What He Left in Gaza

Credit – Knopf

The acclaimed Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha left his native Gaza 10 months ago, but he is still very much there—mentally and emotionally, that is. Since fleeing to Cairo, and then on to upstate New York where he currently resides with his family, Abu Toha dedicates much of his time to amplifying what is happening in Gaza, particularly in the north where many members of his family still reside amid mass displacement and death.

“I’m immensely worried,” he says, referring to his sisters in the north, one of whom is heavily pregnant and unable to heed the latest Israeli evacuation orders – issued on Oct. 5, in advance of a new offensive. His third sister has been incommunicado in Gaza’s south. “I cannot rest,” says Abu Toha, 31.

The poems in Forest of Noise, his new book, were written both before and since Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack on Israel and Israel’s punishing response. While some of the early poems may not have withstood events–he notes that the shelter-in-place premise of his 2021 poem “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike” did not anticipate Israel’s use of 2,000-pound bombs–each offers moving glimpses of Palestinian life in relative peace and amid the tatters of war.

Read More: How Poetry Became a Tool of Resistance for Palestinians

TIME caught up with Abu Toha on the anniversary of Oct. 7 to talk about his new poetry collection, which hits bookshelves on Oct. 15, as well as how he pays tribute to those who did not make it and the burden of keeping their stories alive.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

TIME: We are talking on Oct. 7.  How are you navigating this anniversary—how are you feeling?

Mosab Abu Toha: I’m trying to mourn the many friends, the many members of my extended family. Thirty of them were killed in one airstrike in Gaza City. I mean, whole families were killed in one airstrike in October. So I’m trying to mourn these people, but I don’t have the space. I don’t have the time to even sit with myself and remember the time I had with each one of them because the moment I sit, there is another piece of breaking news: my family has to leave their house, my family has to leave their school, my family doesn’t have food, my teacher was killed. My student just two days ago was killed while he was looking for firewood to help his family not to live, but to survive. So I’ve been trying for one year to just relax and sit and remember the people who I lost….I couldn’t.

How has this past year made you feel about your life before Oct. 7?

Sometimes people say, “Oh we had a good life before Oct. 7.” Even though we were under Israeli occupation and under siege.We had a good life: We had trees, we had cars, we had the sea.

But this is not the life we are aspiring to live. Because we are comparing it with the aftermath of Oct. 7, we have never thought about [how] we should be living compared to other people outside of Palestine or the way we should have been living if there was no occupation. The desperation of people is really relative. So people who lived in their houses, they say, “It was a beautiful house,” but that’s because they are now living in a tent. And even if they left this tent today, if they were ordered to evacuate it and move to another area with no tents and with no water, they would say, “Oh, it was a beautiful tent, why did we leave it!”

Read more: Gaza-Based Poet Mosab Abu Toha Was Afraid of Becoming a News Statistic. Then He Was Abducted by Israeli Forces: What to Know

How has your poetry helped you overcome this past year?

I think one of the purposes of writing a poem is trying to understand something better, to understand your feelings. And it’s difficult to portray the true feelings that one has after going through a traumatic experience like getting kidnapped, losing family members. It’s very difficult even to describe it in a conversation.

So the best way, for me, has been to write poetry about this—something beyond the trauma, the images that are haunting me that I cannot articulate in a normal situation. I think the best tribute to the people who I have lost or who I miss so much is through art, it’s through poetry. And again, just to emphasize how important it is for me to write poetry: It helps me make sense of what I feel.

I noticed that one of the poems from your latest collection is dedicated to your friend, the late Palestinian poet and academic Refaat Alareer. Was that a tribute to him?

I wrote it before he was killed.

Oh, really. When was that?

Refaat posted his poem [“If I Must Die”] in November, two or three days before I was kidnapped. [In late November 2023, while his family was trying to flee Gaza to the safety of neighboring Egypt, Abu Toha was detained by Israeli soldiers, during which time he says they blindfolded and beat him. In a statement to TIME earlier this year, an Israeli military spokesperson said that “detainees are treated in line with international standards.” Abu Toha wrote a poem about the experience, called “On Your Knees.”] That poem kept knocking at the door of my imagination, and I found myself writing my own version of Refaat’s poem. He said, “If I must die,” and in my poem, I wrote, “If I am going to die.” It’s really a nightmare that happened to people, and it could have happened to me if I was in our house with my wife and kids and siblings and parents because our house, which was bombed on Oct. 28, had about 22 people in it a few days before. What could have happened if I and my family decided to return to the house? So that poem talks about this.

If I am going to die, I don’t wish to be dismembered, to have the glasses and plates I used to eat from hurt my body. I want it to be a clean death, just like how other people die, without any pieces of shrapnel in my body, without any missing limbs. That kind of nightmare was this poem. It’s totally different from Refaat’s, because Refaat’s poem was about hope and his death that could bring hope, that could be the last death after which follows peace and security for the Palestinian people and everyone in the world.

It was titled “If I am going to die,” but after he was killed, I changed it to “A Request: After Refaat Alareer.”

Did Refaat ever read the poem?

No. I didn’t have the peace of mind to send him my poem. It was not the time to send him a poem. Refaat was totally busy, caring for his wife and children, his elderly parents, and also his extended family.

Read more: Waiting for Iron Man in Gaza

I was struck by so many lines in this collection. In “Younger than War,” you wrote: “No need for radio: / We are the news.” In “We Are Looking for Palestine,” you say: “Sir, we are not welcome anywhere. / Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies.” Were these poems written during the current war?

No, it’s from before. And it’s good you ask about that last poem, because if I wrote the poem today, it wouldn’t have that stanza the way it is right now. Because I said only cemeteries welcome us. It’s no longer the case. At least 16 cemeteries have been damaged by the Israeli bulldozers and tanks. So even cemeteries don’t welcome our bodies because we are kicked out of the cemeteries, kicked out of our graves.

Half of the poems were written after Oct. 7. The other half were written before. And the poems that were written before Oct. 7, such as “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike,” if this poem was to be written today, it wouldn’t have the sentence: “sit in the inner hallway of the house / away from the windows.” I mean, come on. Entire neighborhoods have been wiped out! Why would you sit in the inner hallway away from the windows? Because in the past, if there was an airstrike in the street or in a neighboring house, it was safer to stay away from the windows because they could break. But now, what a Gazan should do during an Israeli strike—I don’t know. Maybe send for a ladder and hide somewhere above the F-16s and the F-35s. A lot of poems could be rewritten based on the way Israel is wiping out not only houses, but neighborhoods and streets and cemeteries and cities. They are not killing people. They are killing cities.

In a way, your poetry documents the intensification of every bombardment of Gaza over the years. You’ve lived through how many, four?

I was wounded in 2008. I lived through the 2014 attacks, which lasted for 51 days. I lived through the May 2021 attacks. And August 2022. And 2006, by the way, but it wasn’t a major operation. But I could see the tanks rolling in the street. That’s where the poem “Younger than War” comes from.

Of your recent poems, such as “For a Moment,” were any based on a particular individual or story from the past year?

Any personal experience in Gaza is a collective one. Whatever happened to me, it happened to hundreds of people. The sole survivor of an airstrike is just one of the so many others who were the sole survivors from amongst their family in an airstrike. So that poem, “For a Moment,” was written after I watched a video of a young man carrying the unmoving body of a girl and running to the hospital. She was dead. I thought, why are you running? Are you trying to rescue her from death? So I was trying to understand, I was trying to make sense of my feelings. Because this is really mysterious to me. Why is a young man, why would I, run with someone who is dead? Why am I in a hurry? Am I going to an emergency room with the body of a girl who is dead?

I thought that this guy was trying to give life to this girl when he was running, because when someone who is alive runs with the body of someone who is not, they are trying to give them some life, that they are moving. They are not on the floor, they are not in a cot, they are not in the morgue. So that’s one way I tried to face my trauma, face my pain.

Can you tell me about the story behind your poem “Right or Left!”?

This is not about a particular person, although I have close friends whose bodies are still under the rubble since November 2023. For example, my friend Ismail, who taught Arabic in a nearby school. He evacuated his house in North Gaza with his wife and two children, along with his parents and four sisters. He moved to Nuseirat, which is South Gaza, according to the Israelis, which should be a humanitarian area. And in one airstrike, Ismail, his two children, his parents, and two of his sisters were killed. They were able to retrieve the bodies of everyone except for Ismail and his father.

There are so many other people whose bodies are still under the rubble. And this poem is about some of the people who were buried under the rubble of their houses and who were found as one bone—only one bone of their body survived. This poem is about a girl who is found. I mean, it is a bone. We have nothing except a bone. Maybe the rest of her body turned into tiny, tiny pieces and only one bone from a shoulder, from an arm, survived. And whether this bone is from her left or right arm, it doesn’t matter, because we cannot see her skin. We cannot see the henna on her skin, or the ink from a school pen from a class the previous day. This is about the people who were left under the rubble for months.

How do you feel talking about these poems now?

It’s very devastating for me to experience everything in Gaza. It’s very traumatizing to write about these things. And now, as I read things to you and as I read things for people in festivals or in reading, it’s even more devastating and traumatizing for me to read these things. As a poet, I’m living the experience three times: the first time when I see it or live it, the second time when I write about it, and the third time when I read it. This is what it means to be a Palestinian poet from Gaza.

Earlier this year, you told me that you want the people who read your poetry to be able to feel your pain. Is that what you hope people get out of your latest collection?

I want people to feel my pain in the hope that I will not live this pain again—that it will not happen again to me or anyone else. That’s my hope. I’m telling them stories about things that happened in the hope that they would feel what it means to live like this for years, not for months or weeks. For years.

As someone who made it out of Gaza, what responsibility do you feel to those such as Refaat who didn’t make it?

I think whoever survives, whether he is a writer or a father or a neighbor, they have the duty to share the stories of people who never made it. So as a poet, I have this duty, this burden, of sharing the stories that I see every day on Instagram, on Telegram, the stories I hear from my parents, the stories that I hear from my siblings in Gaza, the children, the photos they send me, the way they struggle everyday. As a survivor, I have to make the story survive with me. I mean, it’s true that I survived. But I also have to help the stories that I have survive with me. There are two kinds of survivors: A person and a story, and they have the responsibility to share this story and to let it survive, not during his lifetime, but forever.

Write to Yasmeen Serhan at yasmeen.serhan@time.com.