On November 19th, 2023, the Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was detained by IDF forces while attempting to evacuate Gaza with his wife and children. 200 others were also taken. Two days later, after extensive news coverage and outcry in the international literary community, Abu Toha was released and immediately hospitalized for injuries received while in custody.
Who knows what happened to the other 200 who were captured?
It’s with this in mind that I picked up the poet’s award-winning debut collection. I’ll tell you straight out–this isn’t something I’d have read otherwise. It’s a hard, relentless read. It’s a litany of fear and sorrow and rage, displacement and injustice, and the strength of will and desperation that it takes to refuse to be forgotten. A lot of terrible events are preserved in these verses. Even moments of beauty are salted with the constant tension of imminent violence. The sensory details are spare, blunt, and often harsh. This is poetry of experience, meant to draw you into the emotional and physical privations of current Palestinian reality.
It’s scary to think that despite this work having won an American Book Award, despite Abu Toha having received his Ph.D. in the US and having a child who is a US Citizen, despite having founded the Edward Said Library in Palestine, despite his stints at Harvard and Syracuse, despite despite despite…
…despite the hard and urgent calls for justice and demands for beauty in his poetry, the current genocide came dangerously close to robbing us of this voice.
Who knows what other voices, what beauty, what justices it’s already robbed us of?
This isn’t so much a review as it is a small and hopeless requiem from a far away and powerless place, recognizing that something precious–many somethings–are being taken from the world through this violence and those who could stop this may not even care until they are nearly all gone and there is only old poetry left to radicalize whoever is left behind into repeating it all again.
Freedom, safety, and healing to Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear.
(Fellow readers–hi. There are innumerable resources offering education about and ways to support for those suffering in Palestine and Israel, and I encourage you to go and find a few and get stuck in. You don’t have to save the world, but you do need to be present in it to the greatest extent that you can, even if the impact is small. Raindrops make storms, right?
It feels a bit weird to put this here after this post, but for legal reasons I do have to tell you that there are affiliate links in this blog leading to the Equal Opportunity Bookshop and if you purchase anything there I’ll earn a commission from it. As always, go and read something good. Peace!)
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