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Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet, short story writer, and essayist from Gaza. Abu Toha is the author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022, City Lights), which won the 2022 Palestine Book Award. Abu Toha is the founder of the Edward Said Library, and from 2019 to 2020, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University. He’s a contributor to the Light in Gaza book. Mosab is now completing his MFA in Creative Writing in Syracuse, NY.
Said Arikat (moderator) is a member of the Palestine Center Committee, and the Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, a daily for which he is a writer, columnist, and analyst. He previously served as spokesman and director of public information for the United Nations Assistance Mission for Iraq, and currently teaches as an adjunct professor at American University in Washington, DC.
Discussion Transcript
Said: I was warned that I need God’s help in conducting a conversation with you. And I said I agree. Because I think you have presented us with a very profoundly compelling chronicle, really, of what’s going on in Gaza. It is so intricate, and it is so detailed. I mean, it really does tell the story, so I don’t know how to thank you, because we see this so plainly and we see this image so plainly.
I want to ask you about all the people that you’ve talked about. I want to see what happened to them. How is Yafa and how is Yazan? How is your sister, Saja? It is all just really a step-by-step walk through the tragedy, the agony, of what Palestinians go through, but also their perseverance. Their ability to go on, their ability just to look for the next day and go on hopefully, and so on, you know, from the ambulance driver that doesn’t say anything, to one assuming that their son, their father, their husband is dead because he hasn’t shown up or they did not hear from him. All this, this is part of a daily life for you. And Gaza endures.
You talked about the eight kids [that were killed on the beach]. Eight kids, eight bombs for eight kids. Imagine this, eight bombs for eight kids. Let this sink in, so each kid was allocated a bomb by the Israelis. People allocate gifts for kids. The Israelis allocated a bomb for each. And these kinds of images do not leave you untouched. I’m a bit shaken, though I have been through some of these events that have penetrated our lives as Palestinians in the West Bank or Gaza or Beirut, or any other places, to which I witnessed and so on.
I don’t know where to begin, honestly. Some of the images are loving and fantastic. And you talked about coming home, wondering whether your father would be making the salad, for instance. And I can assure you all that all Palestinian fathers are wonderful salad makers. We make the best salads in the world. So many different types of salads, you know? All these images that you shared with us, make us, in a way, at least for the presentation’s time, live that life.
So, my question to you is a simple one. When did you begin to write poetry? What compelled you to write poetry in English, no less?
Mosab: Thank you all for your words. I’m really glad to be in conversation with you and to have such a beautiful audience.
It’s a harder question to answer when it’s just the same question you ask a child. Were you aware of yourself when you started to crawl, and then to lean on things to walk, and then start walking on your own, and then starting to run? So, one finds himself writing poetry, or whatever creative form, without realizing that they are producing something that others would see as poetry or something. I was posting something about the Israeli attacks in 2014 on Facebook, and I never thought of writing poems in the “real” way, but people were just commenting on my posts about the “poetic-ness” of what I’m writing.
So I thought, if what I was writing was seen as poetry by them, then I would like to continue doing this. I was just writing what I was seeing in front of me what I was hearing other people saying. And I’ve been always a “photo-taking” person. I think my love for taking photographs is one reason why I like to write poetry, the details, the things that I can see in my eye and put them onto the page.
Said: Your poetry really paints the picture and paints a photograph and with all the details and so on. Now, let me ask you another basic question. Do you write poetry in Arabic?
Mosab: Yeah. So, I’m a bilingual poet, and it’s very strange to many people, because my first collection is for my poetry that’s written in English, not in Arabic, mother tongue. I was more successful when I started writing in English than in the Arabic language, and I think maybe one reason is because we don’t have publishers in our world as much as we have publishers in the English language world. And I think people nowadays, in the West especially, are very supportive of creative people. In the Arab world, on the other hand, people are just very concerned with their everyday lives. People don’t spend much time reading poetry, like in the past. And that’s because of the occupation, and the political situations in the Arab world. But generally, I do write poetry in Arabic, and I have some poems published in Al-Araby Al-Jadeed, and also Al-Jadeed, and also Al-Ayyam, which is a major Arabic language newspaper in Palestine. And I’m working on publishing my first visual collection in Arabic.
Said: When you write in Arabic and in English, do you ever try to translate your poetry from one language to another, or do you chart a new poem altogether that is not related to the other?
Mosab: I only had one experiment, not in translation. I’ve never translated any poem of mine into English or into Arabic. What I write in English, I just write it in English from the start. I am part of the MFA program at Syracuse University. So, I write my poetry in English. And some of the poems that I read earlier, I wrote them during a class last semester, so generally when I write in English, I have maybe a specific audience in my mind. I’m telling stories that I want other people in the West, especially in America, to know about.
For example, I first wrote a poem about a mirror in Arabic, and in it, I talked about the mirror yearning to return to its original form, which is sand. A mirror feeling jealous of us. When we look at ourselves in the mirror, she sees us in the room. It looks at us, it watches us when we are changing our clothes. When she watches us weeping, she wants to extend a tissue to wipe our tears, when we remember our dead brother or sister, and also hears the sound of other people in the street.
I wrote that poem in Arabic, and then I wanted to write a poem about the same thing, a mirror, in English. I tried that, and it was a different poem. The idioms for mirror in Arabic are different from the association of mirror in English.
When I wrote the “Mirror” in English, I ended the poem with how, when I heard my name pronounced incorrectly in English when the health insurance agent called me, the mirror collapsed, and it broke. The mirror was just watching me, how vain I am just dressing myself in nice clothes. It could see me when I am naked, it could see how ugly I am without clothes. It could see me, it could see who I am and how I want to be looked at.
So, this is the only thing that I tried my pen with writing about the same thing in different languages.
Said: I want to ask you, one would assume that you’ve shared some of your poetry at Harvard or Syracuse. How were you received? How was your poetry received? Did your audience or listeners react to your words, to the content or to the imagery that you painted?
Mosab: I think many of the people who read my poetry, they were learning about what I was writing about. I mean, Palestine and Gaza, where I come from, my heritage as an Arab, but also the images that I’m using.
One mentor said you use a lot of personification in your poetry. And I think he thought that I was using that on purpose just to personify everything. The book is “looking,” just like the mirror was “looking” at me and it wanted to give me a t-shirt to wear. That’s something he noticed, and he thought I was doing that on purpose, but I told him “No, everything I sent to you, I don’t rework it before.” I don’t stop, finish the first draft and then try to make new images to make them seem attractive or figurative in language. No, this is how I write. I don’t do something to impress other people, but this is how I write. And she, [Emma, my colleague in the audience] can tell us, she can say something about my poetry because she read a lot of my poems.
Said: I’m going to turn to [the audience] and turn to you, Emma, to make a couple of comments.
Emma: The first poem that Mosab submitted to our workshop was “Things You May Find in My Ear,” and we were all blown away. It was better than anyone else’s. I think very well received where it’s been an honor to read Mosab’s work for the last three years.
Said: Thank you Emma. And thank you for being here. Would anyone else would like to speak?
Audience Member: Are there either any literary groups or humanitarian agencies you’re aware of that would be receptive to reading, presenting your work, making it available to people there [in Israel]?
Mosab: I’m sure some people in Israel read my poetry and they find it very important for them to read. So, you can find some people there, maybe, reading. And some of them wanted to translate some of my poems into Hebrew. Which I don’t have a big problem with. I’m just very concerned with delivering my message. And I want people there, I mean, anywhere, not only in Israel, but here, to know what they are doing to us.
In my poem, these people on the other side, they are not looking at us. They are pretending that they can see us. And I think it’s very important for people, no matter where they live, to read our work and to learn from us and to see the reality on the ground. I’m sure there are, but I don’t have any contacts with anyone.
Said: Well, that actually answered my question. I wanted to ask you whether you are in contact with anyone, because for instance, you could publish in Ha’aretz in English for instance, or something like that. I wonder if you attempted to do that.
Mosab: Yeah. I was approached by an American friend who lives in Israel. And there are some good people who know what’s going on in Palestine is wrong, and they want to change things on minor levels. I mean, at least individually. So, one friend of mine who lives in Vermont, she went to visit Yaffa last summer and she sent me some photos. She said, “oh, I went to Yaffa, and I took some pictures for you.” She respects me and she’s also a fellow writer and she’s a great supporter.
She went to visit Palestine, or Palestine-Israel, now, she took some photos, and she sent them to me, and I told her maybe next time you go and look for any person who has the same surname as me, maybe there are some relatives of mine who live there that I’m not aware of. I don’t know if there are other people who have the same surname who are from my family, who still live there, and I want to know, I’m not allowed to leave Gaza and visit. I want to visit, and see my grandparents’ house, where it was, et cetera. Because there were, in the past, thousands of workers who used to go to Israel to work after 1967. And there are still workers who go to work in Israel as workers, as farmers, with whatever work permits they have. But I don’t think I’m allowed to go there either as a, a worker or as a visitor. I don’t know if I should do this. I mean, this is a huge issue.
Audience Member: How do you process your trauma through writing your poetry?
Mosab: I think a lot of the poems I wrote, I wrote them after, let’s say, months of the incidents and experiences that I wrote them about. So, for example, the poem “The Wounds,” I wrote just two years ago, which means 11 years after the incident. This means that my wounds are still fresh. I could remember every detail during the wound, the Israeli attack, when I was wounded. And also, what happened to my neighbors.
There is one guy whose name is Ghassan who was killed during one of the attacks. He was born in Qatar, and they returned to live in Gaza, and he was killed in Gaza. So, at the same ambulance attack [I discussed earlier], new neighbor was murdered, barely 20. Now I’m older than he was. Ghassan went out to buy bread for his mother. He didn’t return home. The family got worried, turned on the radio to check if his name was announced. This is how we learned about our dead. A hospital secretary who knew the family called that night, he told them about an unidentifiable young man lying in the morgue and wondered if it was Ghassan. And news about Ghassan’s death arrived, not him. I think writing about these things helps me recover from some of the traumatic experiences.
And I do think that writing is a healing process because many of us have nightmares and we don’t know the source, or sources, of these traumas until we write about them. Because through writing it’s like you are pulling something from your subconscious, and you can kill these memories. Sometimes you can bury them in the drawer or maybe somewhere else.
Audience Member: It’s interesting because for me, I’m also from Gaza and had the same journey, but I failed in writing. That’s why I ended up making movies. So, I’m jealous.
Mosab: I think there are different ways of being a creative. For example, Mahmoud Darwish, he said in one interview that he wanted to be a painter when he was a child, but his father couldn’t afford to buy him colors. So, he became a poet and you have the luxury, or maybe the honor, of being a film director. So, every one of us can be a drawer of things through pictures, through painting, through words, through films, and through also talking to other people who want their voices to be heard, just like you.
Said: I’m reminded of one Palestinian intellectual, I can’t remember if it was Edward Said, who said that all Palestinians have one profession: they’re Palestinian, and everything else that they do is no more than a sideshow. You could be a doctor, or you could be a designer, you could be an engineer, but actually your profession is, you are a Palestinian. You live this because you breathe it, day in and day out.
Audience Member: As you know, poets in Palestinian culture and in the community have a very special place. More than essayists, more than novelists, more than playwrights, to an extent. Poetry for Arabs in general, but also in Palestine in particular, means something very special. Why do you think that is, Mosab?
And also, as a follow up to that, if you want to address it. In writing here in the US versus writing back home, was there a change in tone, or what would come to mind, or what would leap to your heart that you’d want to express when you’re in the United States or in the West versus back home?
Mosab: Your first question is about poetry?
Audience Member: Poetry for Palestinians and for Arabs in general. What it means to be a poet and the power that poetry has specifically for our people.
Mosab: Poetry in the Arabic tradition is a holy thing. Arabs in the past used to celebrate when a poet is born cause a poet is a spokesperson for his tribe. And for us in Palestine specifically, not to say in the Arab world, but in Palestine, we need to speak up about the catastrophes that have befallen us. Any poet is a spokesperson for himself, but not only himself, but for his nation. Mahmoud Darwish was the “national poet” of Palestine… although he hated to be called that, after the Oslo Accords, he was asked to be asked to be the Minister of Culture, but he refused that, he wanted to be a poet.
Arabic poetry is unlike any other poetry. And why is Arabic poetry really sacred? Because when God wanted to challenge the Arabs 14 centuries ago, when Prophet Muhammad was sent to his people, God sent with him the Qur’an. Why? Because the thing that the Arab people were very proud of was poetry. So, God came with this text, which is the Holy Qur’an, to challenge them if they can come up with a more perfect text. If poetry was something little, why would God send a text that would challenge it? So, poetry is a holy thing.
But now, it’s not only poetry, it’s Palestinian poetry. We are not talking about love or just about nature or just about personal traumas. But you are talking about a national trauma, collective trauma. So that’s why poetry in Palestine is very important.
So, your other question is about my poetry. I think my journey to the US and my spending time here away from Gaza helped me see Gaza differently. And I would liken this to looking at oneself in the mirror very closely. If you just put the mirror just very close to you, you won’t see your whole body, you won’t see your whole face. You have to just go back a little bit in order to see the whole picture. And then, I think my traveling to the US has helped me see Gaza from abroad, from a very far distance, and I was lucky to be here, to have new experiences, because you cannot know what kind of a prison you were in until you leave it.
It’s very funny because I think if you ask any Gazan who has never left Gaza, “how big do you think planet Earth is?” they would say “maybe it’s 100 times bigger than Gaza.” Because the world to them is Gaza. “Maybe a thousand times.” But when I left Gaza, the first time I went on the plane was in 2019 on my trip from Cairo to Amman. And I felt very scared when the plane went up. I was 27. I mean, here in the US people travel when they are infants with their families. But for me, I was very scared on the plane. And then I could see the planet, Egypt coming closer and closer and closer. And then in my second trip in the US, by car, it was with Emma, we traveled from Syracuse to New York City and it took us five hours in the car. Five hours from Syracuse to New York City. That’s within the US itself. That’s within the state of the New York itself. Five hours in the car! You can cross Gaza from its south to its north, within just 40 minutes. If we are just traveling within the same state, it took us five hours or maybe six. So, this planet is bigger than 100 times compared to Gaza.
I think this is one of the things that I learned about. I started to see things differently. The universe is now different. Nature is different to me.
Said: I think you just made a great case for opening immigration in this country. This country’s huge, by the way, we should all support an open immigration. Go ahead.
Audience: In several of your poems, you mentioned the F-16, and I happen to know that’s an American-built plane. The fact is that it’s the American government that has always supported Israel’s genocidal policies. And I think about that when it’s time to pay my taxes, how can I support these policies? It’s almost as if the US is a client state of Israel. If you look at how many billions of dollars we give to Israel on a yearly basis, you would say that that forms backbone of our foreign policy. Not loaning, but giving. I’ll stop there, but there’s a complicity here, and maybe there’s a blindfold, or maybe we’re afraid to do anything because people will claim that we’re being anti-Semitic if we say anything about equality. I was just wondering if you had a comment on that.
Mosab: In Palestine and just like in any other part in the world, we study literature. We study American literature, and we appreciate it, we write about it, and we learn from it. In 2014, my university’s administration building was targeted by the Israeli army, and of course the weapons were from the US. And one of the books that I was able to rescue from under the rubble of my English department was the Norton Anthology of American Literature. So many writers were buried under the rubble of the English department where I studied. And the bombs that were used on my university where we study English and American and world literature were paid for by America.
I think for you as an American, maybe you can counter your involuntary donation and taxpaying by helping and supporting Palestinians, not as individuals, but as communities, as cultural centers, for them to benefit from. Maybe this is one way of trying to evade the sense of guilt that you have. Maybe supporting other initiatives. We have Gaza Ambassador. I have the Edward Said Public Library that I founded in Gaza in 2016, and now it has two branches, and a third one joined us from East Jerusalem. I think this is one good way of trying to fix things.
Said: I want to thank you all for coming and of course I want to thank our guest who has done a fabulous job. But I want to respond to your question on America. Let’s not kid ourselves, in this partnership between the US and Israel, the bigger partner is the US. Israel is no more than a client state. It’s not the other way around. This country still sees it in its interest to continue to support the Israeli genocide as you said it, whatever political term is used to describe what’s going on.
But let’s not forget, this country is the premier imperialist country. It was founded as an empire early on. I think the country was 11 years old when they sent in the Marines or their ships to the shores of North Africa until today. The marine hymn that we sing, “from the shores of Montezuma to the sand of Tripoli” or “from the sand of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli,” it really tells you.
It’s only when Americans begin to see the injustice, much like my generation turned against the war in Vietnam, turned against apartheid in South Africa. And only when Americans to begin to see this, I think we will see that turn.
Thank you all for coming and we hope to see you soon.
