Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s first poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (City Lights Books: San Francisco, California, 2022), published a year before the overwhelming violence begun in early October 2023, touches upon a range of Toha’s and fellow Palestinian’s memories and daily life experiences in Gaza before the COVID pandemic. This award-winning collection is poignant and unreserved without being melodramatic. Toha shows that despite how violence perniciously and relentlessly invades every aspect of life in Gaza, he and other Gazans somehow survive and live on—even those who’ve died and now live on through a shared history. His worthwhile poetry subsists within the tension between violent destruction and the will to survive. In “Searching for a New Exit,” he conflates these external and internal forces pressing upon him:
There is no light
to help me see
the boundaries of my state:
my nonexistent state.
The destructive political force blurs into the individual, and both are erased. Toha’s poetry resists erasure through its interruptions and echoes of life in Gaza, through its observations of both external and internal spaces, through his bare-boned lines and language, and ultimately through Toha’s emphasis on voice.
A ten-page poem of colored pictures, “Interlude” interrupts poetry as strictly text and separates the collection’s first half from the second. In general, the twenty-two poems in the first half, beginning with “Palestine A–Z,” convey more what it means to live in Gaza, the observations and consequences of violence—its intrusion in addition to its mental and physical toll. The twenty-eight poems in the second half, beginning with “We Love What We Have,” add to the first part and convey more what it means to live on and Toha’s unpacking of what it means for him to have a voice in Gaza.
An interlude normally breaks from the intensity of something presented—in this case, written poetry. This poem “Interlude” though, echoes poetry in its captions, as in the incisive one for busted a concrete wall where there appears to be the round shape of a sink embedded in it, “When a shower of stones isn’t enough, a sky of stones must be.” In essence, “Interlude” invades and inhabits poetic space. It destabilizes the conventional way of seeing poetry. There’s a kind of resistance, perhaps echoing Toha’s poetic voice destabilizing the way Gaza is usually spoken about. While there’s no escape from the land Gazans find themselves on, the photos also interrupt and resist the normative violence portrayed in them with the last picture: an unexpected closeup of hearty strawberries. Even amid all this destruction, there’s resistance in growth and life.
Toha’s poetry is one of continual interruptions from one violent act or effect to another so that the associated lines seem more like hovering drifts of violence and threats, such as in “Palestinian Streets.” The three stanzas reveal how streets are named after some of the dead, how children learn numbers by counting how many places are destroyed and parents wounded, and how adults use their physical IDs “so as not to forget / who they are.” This poetics of drift work well here and elsewhere, as a drift cannot be captured. At once, this poem in its movement evades violence by absorbing it, as Palestinians internalize it. This costly act enacts the experience in Gaza. Violence becomes inextricably linked to existence itself—a seemingly haphazard drift carried by the winds of destruction and survival one way that can be easily carried another way. You cannot, though, no matter how hard you try, turn away.
At the start of the first poem, “Palestine A–Z,” everything is upside down in Gaza and defined by violence: “An apple that fell from the table on a dark evening when man-made lightening flashed through the kitchen, the streets, and the sky, rattling the cupboards and breaking the dishes.” While there’s an observational immediacy to this scene, its tone remains at a distance; notice the “the” instead of any “our.” The language and content come across as natural as an apple falling off a tree. As the sentence progresses, though, this scene is not natural to an English-speaking person who’s never been to Gaza. This falling apple is violence transformed—from nature’s tree to the intimate space of a kitchen table. Nature’s disrupted, and this disruption’s due to destructive man-made forces.
The political motivations, which underlie any action in Gaza, are in the background. Toha forgoes any political dogma. In the documentary-poetic sweep of this poem, he presents facts and figures, such as “About 47% of people in Gaza have no work.” Its movement goes back and forth between a distant, journalistic space and an intimate one. Near the end, violence becomes so transformed that it becomes the very container for life, “In Gaza, you can find a man planting a rose in the hollow space of an unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.”
Working against the long, winding sentence with the falling apple, Toha generally employs heavy enjambments in his poetry. Lines are units held together, as if needing to pronounce them slowly, as if weary of moving too sharply, as in “Cold Sweat”:
I hear a noise.
I look around.
There’s no one else in the room.
I cannot feel my body.
I look in the mirror.
It was the chatter of my teeth.
In these overwhelming moments closing in on fear or numbing despair, Toha chops time to a standstill, only releasing one chunk of image or thought at a time—as if telling himself, Ok, calm down. Just breathe.
In general, Toha’s language is direct and stripped-down. At times, punctuation is limited. This bare-bones approach perhaps reflects the landscape—both physical and mental—after continual bombings and implies Palestinians as having their humanity stripped away. At the same time, though, this approach exposes the very core of humanity through the vulnerable human being under extraordinarily destructive circumstances. Toha doesn’t so much as paint this kind of scene. Rather, he observes it, letting readers feel this space of internal and external landscape. In this collection, he’s a masterful writer of space—both its destruction and its intimacy.
The poem “silence of water” captures the poignant intimacy and sudden destructiveness of living in Gaza. It does so using the framework of sound, which is an element of emphasis throughout this collection. At one end, there’s overwhelming noise of violence. At the other, there’s silence, or the fleeting and fleeing sound in Toha’s poetry. In this poem, sound resides within the Gazan home and community, starting with “father typing on a keyboard / mother reading the morning paper aloud to / cover the sound of a neighbor’s radio.”
Toha’s heavy enjambment (“to / cover”) adds depth to this tension between violence and intimacy through the tug in unexpected split infinitives that rub against intimacy, even if colliding modes of sound exist amidst the neighborhood. Toha sublimely shows violence absorbed within the community, though there’s life even in the quietest of sounds:
hanging lamp swinging in the breeze from a cracked window
flies
losing balance
sometimes
b/w pictures on walls, searching for colors.
Without more punctuation, the scene is temporarily disorienting, which perhaps echoes displacement pervasive in Gaza. At first the flies are losing balance, then the pictures are. What causes them to lose balance—the wind, just time, or something else?
Suddenly, “one big drop hammers the roof.” The excess from a bomb
stuff[s] the nostril of other houses
water
on
stove
no longer boils
shrapnel has cut its throat.
The single-word lines in “water / on / stove” echo the “kettle / on / stove” earlier in the poem. Literal image is displaced in this violence. On one hand, there’s no vitality or sound, and by implication any poetic voice with its truths is cut off. On the other hand, Toha’s lively metaphor here resists—by the very existence and power of its truth—the destruction he writes about.
In “my grandfather and home,” Toha concludes, “for this home i shall not draw boundaries / no punctuation marks[.]” The poem itself becomes home. In this literary space, the are no boundaries and, by implication, none of the imposed restrictions and violence.
In the second half of collection, the emphasis on voice is more central to resisting erasure. Near the start, in “A Litany for ‘One Land’,” Toha’s poignant insight presents part of the challenge regarding the Palestinian voice: “We have been speaking but you / never cared to listen.” When Toha does speak up in “US and THEM,” Toha’s language is screaming (in title) and literally breaking apart:
I will tell them about houses being shelled,
about bodies
shred
into
tiny
pieces,
about a noisy sky and
ShAkInG ground.And they,
they tell me about their concerns over the little flowers
they haven’t watered for hours,
Such a powerful contrast, Toha adds a sublime touch with “And they.” It’s as if this very brief line will continue and connect with the brief lines in the previous stanza, as if the “they” will connect and have empathy with the victims in the previous stanza, as if Toha has some brief glimpse of hope that “they” will engage the speaker. His hopes, though, are thwarted with the next line’s content—and so much so, too, since the next line is the poem’s longest and the flowers–hours rhyme tidies this response as if into an isolated self-contained unit. Toha brings out how far apart the experiences of the Israelis are from Palestinians.
The other challenge of this Palestinian voice is more internal. In “A Voice from Beneath,” it’s the voice that comingles in all the destruction and death around him, which overwhelms him, “That voice takes away my voice. / . . . / Screams fill the cracks in the walls / and the potholes in the nameless roads.” How can he compose anything in this overwhelming moment? The collective voice of violence and history wears him down, takes away his voice by continually pressing on him.
Toha branches out to figures whom he associates with Palestinian literary and intellectual tradition. These figures include such persons as Ibrahim Abu Lughod, a renowned Palestinian academic; Ghassan Kanafani, who published Men in the Sun, a seminal novel about Palestinian refugees; Mahmoud Darwish, probably the most well-known Palestinian poet in the English-speaking world; and Edward Said, a well-known Palestinian American literary critic and activist who wrote Orientalism, the seminal book on cultural representation and appropriation. These poems briefly pull readers away from the immediacy of his visceral poetry and layer over it an intellectual and historical force that perhaps align Toha with this tradition of being a Palestinian writer and activist poet. These poems are followed by one of the stronger, more poignant poems in this collection, “The Wounds,” which tells about Toha being wounded by a bomb. At this place in the collection, it seems to stamp Toha more firmly within the Gazan experience.
In “Notebooks,” Toha writes, “People say silence is a sign of consent. / What if I’m not allowed to speak. . . .” He continues on the next line that he cannot speak—it’s not just a choice— because “my tongue [is] severed, / my mouth sewn shut?” For Toha, this suppression is physical and brutal. Palestinians cannot speak—are not allowed to speak—and they are reduced to silence.
He tries to extricate this voice in “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear”—if only “so my mind may dance, / with yours.” Even here in this escapist moment, Toha hints that he cannot escape and be merged in this other safer world of “you,” his doctor. This unnecessary comma splice and line break separate him from his doctor. Even the pause at the end of the line is not enough to indicate a slight separation. The boundary of his desire—even if grammatically incorrect—must be sustained. There is no cure for his desire to be free from the imposing violence.
By the end of the book, though, Toha asserts that despite the violence imposing upon him an unstable identity, home, and community, he has created space for his voice and ultimately a Palestinian voice in Gaza. In the penultimate poem, “Forever Homeless,”
Before my long travel, I pack
my suitcases, stuff them with
some sand from our land,
some scent from my mother’s kitchen and
sounds of birds in the morning.
Without these intimate possessions, Toha would be “weightless / and forever homeless.” Home becomes transformed from the one associated with violence—and made unstable through it—to the moving one within him. Toha enlarges the implications of this voice, concluding his last poem with the “rose [that will] shoulder up / among the ruins of the house: / This is how we survived.” Here, the will to survive outlasts destruction. Here, Palestinians in Gaza coalesce with the land and its resilient growth and beauty. Here, the personal Palestinian voice in this worthwhile collection becomes the collective: we Palestinians are here, we in Gaza have a voice.
