No doubt you have been hearing, seeing and reading the news from Gaza. You may have a clear understanding of what’s happening there. That’s all fine and good. But if you’d like to read a unique perspective on Gaza you might turn to Mosab Abu Toha’s book of poems, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, which was published by City Lights in 2022. Get it through your library, or buy it from City Lights for $11.17, plus shipping. It’s worth the price of admission. Toha’s book has won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and others. If there’s one book of poetry you read this year, read Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear. You may feel like you’ve been to Gaza and back.
It’s not hard to understand why it’s a favorite with reviewers and readers. For starters, it offers news of what life has been like for Palestinians in Gaza, a war zone for years with bombings a routine part of life there. Toha’s book does not offer the very latest news from Gaza, though the latest news is more of what has been happening for years, only with greater intensity.
Toha is an excellent person to tell the story. While he recently fled Gaza and went to Egypt, he was born and raised in Gaza and spent much of his life there. Toha is currently “stateless,” as he calls it: a man without a country. He lived briefly in the US and taught at Harvard and elsewhere, and has written for The Nation, and Literary Hub. He has one eye on Gaza and another on US readers and knows what to deliver to us.
His poems can be depressing, but they can also be illuminating. You learn what it has been like to live in a place under near total bombardment and where something that passes for ordinary life goes on, though there’s nothing ordinary about life in Gaza, at least not by US standards. In the first poem in the book, “Palestine A-Z,” the humor is welcome. Under the Letter “G,” Toha writes, “When I was asked to fill out a form for my U.S. J-I visa application, my country, Palestine, was not on the list. But lucky for me, my gender was.” Hahahah.
Toha’s poems are insightful because he’s on the ground and sees all around him and up above him. “If a helicopter stops in the sky above Gaza, we know it’s going to shoot a rocket. It doesn’t see if a target is close to children playing marbles or soccer in the street.” Toha has learned about war by living through war. By observing helicopters and F-16s in the sky and Palestinians in their homes baking, drinking mint tea and waking to the sounds of bombs falling nearby.
He wears his heart on his sleeve so you know what and how he’s feeling. Under the letter “R” he writes, “I was born in November.” He adds, “I love the rain and the sea, the last two things I heard before I came into this horrible world.” Hearing things before he’s born? That poetic license.
Toha also has facts and figures about Gaza at his fingertips and rolls them in some of his poems: “In 2014, about 2,139 people were killed, 579 of them were children, around 11,100 were wounded, around 13,000 buildings were destroyed. I lost 3 friends.” He adds, “But it’s not about the numbers.”
In “My Grandfather Was a Terrorist” he offers a portrait of his grandfather and simultaneously a portrait of a terrorist. He humanizes the terrorist and at the same time lifts his grandfather out of the ordinary. In the longest poem in the book, “The Wounds,” subtitled “Israeli aggression against Gaza (November 27, 2008-January 15, 2009,” Toha describes his own wounds inflicted by Israeli aircraft firing a “nail bomb”— a bomb with nails. His view of nails changes. Once, he thought they were for construction. He learns that they can also be for destruction.
In “Things You May Hear in My Ear,” written for a medical doctor who treated his wounds, he asks her to touch his ear gently and adds “You may encounter songs in Arabic/poems in English/or a song to chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.” By the end of the book, the reader has heard many of the same sounds that Toha has heard in a war that’s an assault on the eyes, the noses, the ears and the bodies of the Palestinians.
He balances hopelessness and hope, destruction and survival, and insists that the Palestinians aren’t going to go away. In a “Litany for ‘One Land,’” Toha writes , “when we die,/our bones will continue to grow” and “we have been here forever.” Though Toha is now in Egypt with his family, he is probably still in Gaza in his poetry and in his head.” He’s in exile and he’s at home in his native land. You can join him in Gaza by reading his book and surrendering to the auditory imagination.
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