Mosab Abu Toha held his hands six inches apart to demonstrate the flattening of his home in Gaza on Oct. 28, 2023.
“I have a video of my mother with my brother, digging through the rubble in the hope of finding some food,” he said. “The only thing they could find were books.”
Two branches of the Edward Said Public Library, which Abu Toha founded, were also destroyed in airstrikes, he said. The collection consisted of around 6,000 titles in English. Each box took eight weeks to arrive, having traveled through Israel for processing.
“People used to come borrow books,” said Abu Toha, who fled Gaza in 2023 after Hamas’s attack on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 sparked an ongoing retaliatory blitz. “I used to give lessons in the library. There was a book club.”
Now in Syracuse, N.Y., Abu Toha follows the war from afar. “I personally lost about 31 members of my extended family,” he said. He continued, “The rubble of my house, the rubble of the school where I used to teach, is on my shoulder.”
When that weight becomes too heavy, Abu Toha pours it into a poem.
Several of those poems have become “Forest of Noise,” his most recent collection, published last month. Along with “No One Will Know You Tomorrow,” by another Palestinian poet, Najwan Darwish, which comes out on Nov. 26, it provides readers with an unvarnished view of war and its repercussions: fear, dread, devastation and exile.
In “Thanks (on the Eve of My Twenty-Second Birthday),” Abu Toha describes a family fleeing their home during an airstrike: “Mother forgot the cake in the oven, the bomb smoke mixed with the burnt chocolate and strawberry.”
In “The Last Kiss,” he shows a soldier leaving for battle — the sandwich in his backpack, the smudge of his wife’s lipstick on his ear, the list of baby names they brainstormed together.
“For me, the story of the loss is important,” Abu Toha said. “But equally important is what was happening before everything was lost.”
The signposts of normal life are there, obscured by ash.
Since its publication, the book has sold 32,500 copies — a significant number, especially for a poetry collection. Abu Toha believes his poems paint a clearer picture than a news story because they include feelings — and, he said, “because I am not a camera.”
His work has visceral immediacy. He’ll jot down a poem, post it to Instagram or X and transmit the horror of an airstrike to tens of thousands of followers almost in real time. “I can publish it sooner than I can publish a novel or a short story,” Abu Toha said. “It doesn’t wait. The urgency of the moment is written.”
Abu Toha and Darwish join a long tradition of poetry about war. Since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Ukrainian poets have fueled a literary revival. A new documentary, “After: Poetry Destroys Silence,” shows writers’ responses to the Holocaust and argues for the importance of the form in addressing trauma.
One proponent of this approach is Edward Hirsch, author of (among others) “100 Poems to Break Your Heart” and “Gabriel,” a 78-page elegy to his son, who died at 22.
“Poetry gives you information that you can’t find elsewhere,” he said. “It speaks to our emotional lives. It dramatizes the experience from the inside.”
Two Palestinian-American writers, Fady Joudah and Lena Khalaf Tuffaha, were finalists for the National Book Award for poetry; on Nov. 20, Tuffaha won the award.
In her acceptance speech, she described how her father, who was born in Jerusalem in 1938, sat her down when she was 5 years old and told her “the story of the homeland he couldn’t live in anymore.” She said, “That story has carried me through my entire life — has driven me, has motivated me.”
In Tuffaha’s and Joudah’s work, and in collections by Abu Toha and Darwish, Hirsch said, “there’s an element of witness. There’s an element of resistance. There’s a passionate longing. And there’s a fury.”
He continued: “Tremendous grief, in my experience, renders you mute. By trying to find your way from muteness to language, you bring yourself back into the human community.”
Darwish, like Abu Toha, writes every day, even when it takes a toll. “Sometimes I’m exhausted. I have nothing. I write one line and that’s it,” he said.
Abu Toha used to write in Arabic. Since the Oct. 7 attacks, he said, “I haven’t written a single word in Arabic.” His thinks of his audience as “the outside world.”
Darwish, 45, lives in Jerusalem and writes in Arabic; the poems in “No One Will Know You Tomorrow,” which will be published by Yale University Press, are translated into English by Kareem James Abu-Zeid. They cover a decade of Darwish’s work — from 2014 to 2024 — and, like Abu Toha’s, they grapple with a sense of erasure.
“I have no country to return to and no country to be banished from,” Darwish writes in “We Never Stop.”
In “Hardly Breathe,” he writes, “Didn’t I have a history?” And, “How did you take my share of loss and leave abandonment in its stead, a planet without a ribcage?”
In the introduction to “No One Will Know You Tomorrow,” Darwish’s third collection in English, Abu-Zeid describes the book as “a relentless bearing witness.”
Darwish also has a day job as culture editor at The New Arab newspaper — a role he appreciates, he said, because the word for “editor” also means “liberator” in Arabic.
“When I was a kid my dream was to liberate Palestine,” Darwish said. Now, he said, he’s liberating the words of fellow authors: “The irony of how dreams can become smaller with time.”
Poetry is a “spiritual practice” for Darwish, one he turns to in order to make sense of his own life. He carries a notebook wherever he goes, and keeps it within arm’s reach as he sleeps. Recently he started taking pictures of his notebooks in case something happens to one of them.
“What kind of creatures would we become without poetry?” Darwish said. “It’s the oldest art we practice.”
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