[City Lights Books; 2022]
When I first began writing this review, it had been 290 days since the onslaught in Gaza began after Hamas attacked Israel on October 7th. Israel has operated as an apartheid state for almost a century now, but in the past 290 days we had seen more bloodshed and violence by Israeli forces towards Palestinians civilians than ever in our lifetimes. The violence is not new, but the depth is unprecedented. Only earlier that week I heard about Muhammed Bhar, a Palestinian martyr with Down’s syndrome, who was viciously attacked by a dog and was overheard by his parents saying to the dog, “Enough, my dear, enough.” Those were his last words.
It has now been 351 days since October 7th. 351 days of genocide, 351 days of praying, protesting, mourning, 351 days of mass death and starvation. It becomes incomprehensible to the mind, a luxury to those overseas.
After 351 days, fatigue accumulates for even those abroad. There is the fatigue of the onslaught of news cycles sharing new horrific proclamations, and the repetition of famine on the rise, death tolls, and the spread of polio. There is also compassion fatigue: After feeling empathy for long periods in tumultuous moments or crises, a person can begin to burn out. Those holding grief for almost an entire year can begin to feel shut down and distant from the trauma as life carries on. Now more than ever, solidarity and empathy are needed. There are further methodologies that can assist creating connection to a reality that feels out of grasp. Palestinian art and literature are methods to build this connection to a tangible, lived experience of the creator. Writing becomes a tool of survival.
In his debut poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, Mosab Abu Toha explores life in Gaza, from the mundanity of the everyday in the face of moments of connection or devastation of war. Toha demonstrates that even the most ordinary parts of life in Gaza are shadowed by the occupation. Toha’s other published writing includes the essay “Exporting Oranges and Short Stories: Cultural Struggle in the Gaza Strip,” published in the anthology Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, and a new collection of poetry, Forest of Noise: Poems, published last month. Toha also started the only English-language library in Gaza, called the Edward Said Library after the Palestinian-American scholar and philosopher, and even opened a second branch in 2019. This public library provided reading and English clubs, art and computer sessions, and English language lessons, among other programming.
After October 7th, 2023 and after the genocide began in Gaza, Toha wrote “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza” for The New Yorker. In it, Toha chronicled his harrowing journey trying to escape Gaza with his family, which unjustifiably begot his arrest. Toha recalls his time imprisoned in an Israeli detention center, where he was interrogated and beaten. Toha’s wife, Maram, reached out to friends who created international calls for Toha’s release, and he was shortly released. Toha and his family were then able to escape from Gaza to Cairo, Egypt. He arrived with one book: his copy of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear.
This collection echoes the despair, resilience, and righteous anger felt in Palestine. Toha writes with simple syntax and diction, weaving in metaphors and unsaid emotions that cry out loud and clearly. Plain language houses complex and nuanced ideas about catastrophic mass grief, felt from almost a century of ethnic cleansing, and the mundane and extraordinary survival of ordinary people. The book speaks of birds and drones filling the sky, and flowers and homes, destroyed universities and community grief. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear was written in 2022, and provides a poignant and haunting foreshadowing of the mass murder to occur after October 7th. Yet, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is not a graveyard in verse. “In Gaza,” writes Toha, “you can find a man planting a rose in the hollow space of an unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.”
“Notebooks” is a long sequence poem segmented by asterisks; each small poem acts as a short vignette, a passing image or expression that at times only comprises two lines. The long sequence poem is thematically tied together by absence—this absence may be direct, such as when Toha speaks of the angel of death coldly decimating his body and separating his spirit, or indirect, such as dreaming of Palestine in black and white. Some of the vignettes in “Notebooks” are composed of explicit or implicit metaphors, while others appear as candid statements, devoid of written emotions or metaphors.
There are images that are conveyed in implicit metaphor through syntax. When Toha writes, “The grave was brimming with sand / and prayers and stories that fell from visitors passing by,” the prayers and stories that fell suggest flowers falling on a grave from mourners’ hands. Stories that fell on the grave also evoke grief, as if these stories falling into the grave are the messages we wish to convey to our loved ones through the beyond. The poet also uses explicit metaphors: “During the night airstrikes, all of us turned / into stones.” In both of these metaphors, there is a sense of absence, absence of a loved one or the comparison of oneself to an inanimate object, powerless to move or be heard.
Toha’s body of poetry is characterized throughout by candid statements devoid of affect or metaphor—these are some of his most devastating and horrific lines. In “Notebooks,” this can be seen in more subtle vignettes: “Raindrops slip into the frying pan / through a hole in a tin roof.” Or the vignette: “It’s been noisy for a long time / and I’ve been looking for a recording / of silence to play on my old headphones.” These direct statements, though said with flat affect, evoke emotion and command attention through the implicit cause behind the statements, and the unspoken meaning behind such simplistic reports. The reader knows from other parts of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear that there are raindrops because of shrapnel that has torn from the roof—an image often conjured in the book—caused by Israeli Occupation Forces. Similarly, from earlier parts of the book, even in other vignettes within “Notebooks,” the reader knows that the airstrikes and drones cause the unbearable noise. The absence of this cause, and the absence of the emotion felt by the effect, makes these short statements so powerful.
This discrepancy in Toha’s poetry and his inclination towards candid testimony recurs in his interview with Ammiel Alcalay at the end of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. Here Toha speaks about the transformation his poetry undergoes abroad through the luxury of safety:
[In the US] I was with the audience, and Gaza was on the screen. I could see the film. Mainly it helped me to see myself, and my people, more clearly. Now when I’m in Gaza, I write almost like a reporter.
In the two vignettes about noise and the raindrops, absence is felt, albeit through literary style as opposed to metaphorical messaging. Through absence of emotive description, and the flat hardness of these lines in “Notebooks,” silence is felt—another theme in Toha’s poetry, as seen in “The Wall and the Clock.” In this poem, Toha builds one long metaphor. In it, the narrator is irritated with the clock’s noise, and takes it to a “doctor” or clockmaker to get “treatment,” which entails a mutilation of the clock so it becomes silent. Afterwards, the narrator takes it home, and it ticks silently. However, it inevitably breaks, the number four falling off its face. Toha ends the poem abruptly with, “Four days later, / my brother Hudayfah / passes away.” The story about the clock could be seen as a metaphor for Palestinians being silenced and killed; the clock is anthropomorphized through language such as “teeth” for its numbers, the removal of the clock’s “vocal chords,” and the patching of “its mouth shut.” In this way, the metaphor of the humanized inanimate object exemplifies its meaning—that the clock symbolizes Palestinian voices.
The violence in the words chosen for the clockmaker’s handling of the clock sounds like a gruesome dismemberment. It is hard not to think about the Palestinians in Israeli prisons who are tortured, the beheaded martyrs of the genocide, and Palestinians forced to be human shields by Israeli forces. The clock could be seen as symbolic of the Palestinian voice that is being stifled and killed by the American-backed Israeli Occupation Forces. “The Wall and the Clock” recalls Toha’s piece for The New Yorker, “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza,” in which he recalls prisoners being beaten into submission and silence. Through material, individual acts of violence, the attack on journalists in Gaza, and the lack of means for education or health, Palestinians are being silenced. Their deaths cannot even be correctly counted anymore for lack of resources: The reported death toll has not risen significantly since the winter of 2023, while the expected death toll is thought to be over 100,000 more.
The narrator, which is most likely Toha, is seen as mistreating and abusing the clock, which gives Toha a surface level appearance of power in this domestic sphere of his household. However, that power is only relational, as made apparent by the twice mentioned shrapnel holes in the wall. The conclusion of the poem, likewise, snaps this facade of power—though Toha attempts to exert dominance over the clock, in the end he is helpless to prevent his brother’s death. Hudayfah’s death abruptly ends the metaphor and the fever dream of the poem, abruptly taking the reader back to reality.
While Toha’s experience is Palestinian, his message of working through trauma resounds with anyone who has experienced acute trauma or PTSD. When asked by Alcalay, “What do you think happens to people who cannot find a way to process and express what has happened to them?” Toha responds with the significance of poetry as a mode of healing:
If [people] can’t write, or deal with their nightmares by reading, by putting them on paper, or somehow sharing their feelings with other people, this deepens the wounds. These nightmares will continue to come up, in their dreams and their reality—it’s very hard. . . . I often think of writing about all these hideous ideas and these hideous events and just setting them on fire, so that I can burn these nightmares.
The symbol of fire as a cleansing ritual to rid all the horror Toha has gone through will resonate with many people. Poetry can exonerate our demons. Toha speaks candidly about this pain: “Though we all have very different stories, as Palestinians our stories are the same in many ways. I think it’s like we are living in a grave: we are not dead, we are going about our daily business, but in a grave. We are living in place of a dead person. I know that’s contradictory.”
Mahmoud Darwish, perhaps the most famous Palestinian poet, wrote two years before he died in In the Presence of Absence, “He who was born in a country that does not exist . . . does not exist either.” Eleven years after the book was published, Toha would go on to write: “A book that doesn’t mention my language or my country, and has maps of every place except for my birthplace, as if I were an illegitimate child on Mother Earth. // Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets.” This genocide appeared to begin in 2023, but a silent, unseen genocide has been occurring for almost a century. Jewish people, myself included, often heard growing up never again, but never again for whom? There is a reckoning brewing in the US between leftists and liberals: Who will you choose to see wholly, and who will compel you to avert your gaze, lest you see the true methods and effects of your politics and taxes? Compassion should not be a regulated commodity for the few. For a long time, I wondered: What cost is too great? What body count will satiate the powers that be? The answer is—none. It is a war machine, and machines don’t read the names of the dead.
Reading Toha’s 2023 New Yorker article “A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza” after reading his book of poetry, written only a year before the article, crushed me. This man whose life and thoughts I felt I almost knew personally, who had already faced so much devastation, was faced with unthinkable atrocities. I thought of his family, the ones still in Palestine, as I read their names. I closed my eyes. For Toha, his family, and all Palestinians, survivors and martyrs alike. The genocide is like a fever-driven nightmare that has continued for a year. This must end. It must.
Maxwell Van Cooper is an emerging creative nonfiction writer and Library Trainee at the Free Library of Philadelphia. They are working to receive a Master of Science in Library Science (MSLS) with a concentration in Archival Studies. Max is a Philadelphia Trans Oral History Project Fellow, and was also the co-founder of an online publication, tk.collective. Two of their lyric essays were finalists for the Tucson Festival of Books 2024 Literary Award. Learn more about their work at www.maxwellvancooper.com or follow them on Instagram @mx__max__.
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