Yasmine Seale
In Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha’s second collection of poetry, a split sensibility of whimsy and agony, wonder and torment.
Forest of Noise, by Mosab Abu Toha,
Knopf, 75 pages, $22
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On the cover of Forest of Noise, the Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha’s second poetry collection, is a painting of a hand that looks like it’s been made by dipping the hand itself in red and laying it across a sheet; around the fingers, splayed stiff, are dabs of green, as if the flesh were coming into leaf. The image (designed by Arsh Raziuddin) of one life-form merging sympathetically with another might be read as an illustration of the book’s first poem, which appears before the table of contents and is set in the center of the page like a creed.
Every child in Gaza is me.
Every mother and father are me.
Every house is my heart.
Every tree is my leg.
Every plant is my arm.
Every flower is my eye.
Every hole in the earth
is my wound.
Whatever symbolic resonance the image may have held when it was made, reality soon caught up. A day before Forest of Noise was published, in the small hours of October 14, footage began to surface of a man burning alive outside one of Gaza’s last remaining hospitals. An Israeli air strike had hit some cooking gas canisters in the courtyard where he was sheltering with his family; their plastic tents were set ablaze. His father carried his younger son and two daughters out of the inferno, but was too late to save him, Shaaban, who died still attached to an IV drip, having been injured in a previous air strike on a mosque where he was sleeping. He was nineteen. In the video, we see the crimson silhouette of his left hand lift, then go rigid as the flames engulf him. The horrifying likeness was not lost on Abu Toha. “How can I look at my book?” he wrote on social media. “How can I read my poems?”
Abu Toha was born, like his father, in Al-Shati refugee camp, named after the coastline where it stands—the shore that has been Gaza’s wealth since antiquity and is now the fourth, liquid border of a prison. When he was fifteen, severe restrictions on the movement of people and goods hardened into a punishing blockade. By thirty, he had lived through four wars so asymmetrical and indiscriminate they seemed closer to collective punishment than to conflict; one left him wounded. All the while, he read and wrote poetry, learned English well enough to teach it, and when his home library was bombed in 2014, he rebuilt it for public use and named it after Edward Said (it has since been destroyed in the latest onslaught). At twenty-six, he was invited to be a Visiting Fellow in Harvard’s Scholars at Risk program and boarded a plane for the first time. Abroad, he has said, he was able to see life in Gaza more clearly.
The result was his first collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022), a chronicle in verse of trying to live—not just survive—under siege. From rubble, from memory, the poems salvage shards. They curve lovingly around “what we have.” They carve not into silence, the marble of peacetime, but into a storm of noise: aerial bombing, shattering glass, surveillance drones intruding on every thought. What Abu Toha makes of this hard material is disarming. His voice tends to gentleness and wonder, nosing out beauty in all its small places; even corpses appear “embroidered with bullets and shrapnel.” Like kites or clouds or birds, recurring images, his verses cast on a scorched earth “split-seconds / of shade.” The painful question arising from this work is how to be a lyric poet when life is a violent epic, how to sing when even “breathing is a task.”
Forest of Noise, partly written over the last year, is filled with many of the same things, for the ongoing assault has much in common with 2008 and 2012 and 2014 and 2021 while also marking a turning point—from the curtailment of Gazan life to its annihilation. What can a poet do when “what we have” dwindles to language itself? In the early days of the Israeli offensive, Abu Toha became the diarist of a collective nightmare, typing pieces into his phone for the New Yorker. His house, like virtually every house, was destroyed; his family, like almost every family, was displaced and displaced. While trying to cross into Egypt with his wife and children, he was kidnapped by the IDF, taken to a detention center in the desert, beaten for three days. He was released only after an international campaign. “I think about the hundreds or thousands of Palestinians, many of them likely more talented than me, who were taken from the checkpoint,” he later wrote. “Their friends could not help them.”
The poems Abu Toha fashioned from his ordeal were written in relative safety, in another kind of agony; he is now based in the US, obliged to witness from afar his people “skidding off the map” while living in the country that is funding it. Images of doubling—the world and the screen, a watch that tells two kinds of time—evince a consciousness split between here and there. Split, too, between the pull of a playful, even whimsical sensibility and the brute facts demanding to be recorded. Sometimes these voices intersect in startling ways. “History Class” imagines the past, present, and future as students in a schoolroom, but the fable is derailed when these characters—the very stuff of narrative—begin to torment each other. The future deserts the poem “while the past is handcuffing the present, / slicing its hamstrings, / and dyeing its clothes gray.”
It is a measure of the past year’s enormity—the sense, week to week, that a new threshold of catastrophe has been exceeded—that even recent poems feel like relics of a more innocent time. “In Gaza, you leave via either Erez or Rafah, / a hard escape to make . . .” Now there is no leaving at all. “I’ve personally lost three friends to war . . .” writes Abu Toha, taking up Elizabeth Bishop’s instruction to practice the art of losing. A vertiginous line to read, knowing that hundreds of his friends, relatives, and students have now been killed. He addresses his brother Hudayfah, who perished in 2016 and was buried in a cemetery that has since been razed. “How can I find you now? // Will my bones find yours after I die?” The living and the dead call to each other across a ghost world where nothing can be relied on to stand firm, not even words. “In the house, the house is missing.” “What are you thinking? / What thinking? / What you?” As I type out that quote, jagged blue waves appear under the last two lines, demanding I flesh them out into complete sentences. Syntax is warped and wrecked by the pace of destruction.
When his university was bombed in 2014, the first book Abu Toha was able to extract from the rubble was The Norton Anthology of American Literature. He has spoken of his love for the English Romantic poets; reading Wordsworth gave him another world to live in as well as a reminder of the world they share: “when he’s talking about the sun, it’s the same sun.” There is a harder edge in the new volume; responses to the poets who shaped him feel like rebukes to apathy or willful innocence. “I saw the best brains of my generation / protruding from their slashed heads” he writes in “After Allen Ginsberg,” those defiant italics writing both into and against his chosen tradition. I finished writing this piece on the Day of the Dead, in another library named after Said—a reading room at Columbia University that houses the late scholar’s own books. Outside, students were holding a vigil for those killed in Gaza, projecting the numberless names on a screen, reduced, in Etel Adnan’s phrase, to “contemplatives of an ongoing apocalypse.”
Yasmine Seale’s latest translation from Arabic is Something Evergreen Called Life (Action Books, 2023), a book of poems by the Sudanese writer Rania Mamoun. She is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University.