Of all the emotions, obvious or hidden in the words of authors far removed from their war-torn homelands, the most readable is helplessness. The ache of not being able to do much for their countries-in-crises is all too palpable in the literature: poems and whole memoirs pouring out of them without masking the vulnerability. Reading the poems by Mosab Abu Toha, the Pulitzer winning poet from Palestine, can bring to mind the works of Hisham Matar, a writer shuttling between London and New York, and worrying about the home he left behind in Libya.
Mosab, in the two years of war in Palestine, spent every day of his life away from Gaza, updating the world about what was happening there, with photos and pleas and reminders that can shake anyone with a conscience. His essays are first person narratives, told with the honesty of a man too deep in the trenches, simple, sharp and intense. His tweets, bringing everyday stories of Palestinians, are filled with anger, pain and guilt-tripping questions. Mosab’s poems do their part.
His second book of poems, Forest of Noise, that came out earlier this year, is mostly prose-like: short and direct lines that manage to shock and stir and tug at your heartstrings.
I leave the door to my room open, so the words in my books,
the titles, and names of authors and publishers,
could flee when they hear the bombs.
– ‘Under the rubble’, Forest of Noise
Mosab, who had been studying in the US for four years, was back home in Gaza when the October 7 attack by Hamas took place in 2023. The Israeli retaliation that followed soon morphed into a genocide, that in two years, took the lives of more than 68000 Palestinians.
In November 2023, Mosab was barely 30 and a father of three. His youngest child Mostafa was a US citizen and had an American passport, which the family hoped would help in their journey out of Gaza. They did not want to leave the rest of their family there, parents and uncles and aunts and cousins. But they had to think of the children. Little did Mosab think that he – a writer, teacher and the founder of the first English library in Gaza – would be taken for a Hamas member, blindfolded and dragged away from his family and tortured.
For days before that, they were sheltered in a school of the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), sleeping separately in rooms for men and women, among dozens of others. Refugee camps were not new to Mosab, he was born and raised in one till he was nine. His father was born in one. Even his grandparents had spent their time there.
I dream still about my grandfather,
how much I want to pick oranges with him in Yaffa.
But my grandfather died, Yaffa is occupied,
and oranges no longer grow in his weeping groves.
– ‘My Dreams as a Child’, Forest of Noise
They decided to leave, Maram and he – lovers since teenagers, married young – so their children will have the childhood that they were deprived of. But at an Israeli checkpoint on the way to the Rafah border crossing, Mosab was taken away. He describes the uncertainty of the hours he spent away from his family in his New Yorker essay A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza, that would come out a month later in Christmas 2023. The essay would bring him his Pulitzer in 2025.
But Mosab's pain never dwindles, not when he is finally released by someone who recognises him, not when they escape to Cairo and find an abode at a friend's, not even when they land in New York and Mosab gets a job to teach at the Syracuse University that he graduated from. There would be days he could not get hold of his mother or when Mara couldn't reach her people and their children would be upset not knowing what happened to their friends.
When he left his home to go to the refugee camp, he had taken only one book, a copy of his poetry collection Things you may find hidden in my ear: Poems from Gaza. In that book is a poem called ‘One Art’, in which he says he lost three friends to war, a city to darkness, and a language to fear. “If I were to write this poem today, I would say I lost more than 300 friends to war. I did not only lose people. I lost the tangible evidence of my memory,” Mosab says in an NPR interview taken last year.
In that first book of poetry that he took a copy of, Mosab wrote a poem called The Wounds, that might give a gist of what every Palestinian suffering for the Hamas attack would like to tell the world:
The houses were not Hamas. The kids were not Hamas. Their clothes and toys were not Hamas. The neighborhood was not Hamas. The air was not Hamas. Our ears were not Hamas. Our eyes were not Hamas. The one who ordered the killing, the one who pressed the button, thought only of Hamas.