Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha on new collection Forest of Noise
We speak with Gaza poet Mosab Abu Toha, whose extraordinary new collection spans poems written before and during the genocide
In November 2023, Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha was evacuating Gaza with his family through the Rafah border crossing when he was kidnapped by Israeli forces. He describes this experience in On Your Knees, a poem whose stanzas inhabit the harrowing silence between the echo of one heartbeat and the next, between the anticipation of a blow and the stunning pain of its arrival. ‘On your knees! / Yes, I’m a teacher, I say [...] On your knees! / We are on our knees [...] Minutes later, someone kicks me in the stomach / I fly with pain.’
In this recounting of the exchange between Abu Toha and the Israeli soldier lies the monstrosity of language in a time of genocide: that the words ‘I’m a teacher’ and what they signify could have ever come to mean so devastatingly little; that a violent settler colonial entity funded by the most powerful military and economic forces on Earth can simply remake reality around what they reiterate is the truth, bludgeoning the whole world into kneeling acquiescence. Terrorists are hiding in this hospital, in this UNRWA school, in this refugee camp full of starving, injured people in tents; Israel has the right to defend itself.
Abu Toha’s second poetry collection, Forest of Noise, collates new poems from Gaza written both before and during this year and a month of genocide: they reject the collective amnesia that justifies Israel’s decimation of Gaza as mere response to 7 October, and not, as is the horrific truth, the latest chapter in a decades-long project of ethnic cleansing. The poem My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter is insistently subtitled with the date May 2021; unable to shake the image of his children comforting each other in the moments before escaping death by air strike, Abu Toha wrote it in the months following this wave of 2021 attacks, during which the Gaza Strip was pummelled by Israeli bombs in response to Palestinian protests against the eviction of six Palestinian families from Sheikh Jarrah.
These earlier poems instigate a stomach-turning recognition in anyone who has borne witness to Palestine this past year, extending already incomprehensible continuities of violence backwards into history. “This in itself is a testimony to the never-ending suffering of the Palestinian people,” Abu Toha tells me over Zoom. “[The poem] is re-acted as if it’s a play: a play that happened five years ago, and now the same actors are perpetrating the same crimes against the audiences who watched [it happen] next to them.”
The collection’s title evokes the sensory assault of living in an open air prison-warzone, summoning into our empty skies the nauseating hum of drones, deafening bombardment, and human terror. “As a Palestinian who has been living in Gaza almost all my life, every hole in the earth, every hole in a wall, is a forest of noise,” Abu Toha explains. “Every tiny hole in the earth compresses within it the screaming of children and mothers, the sound of the explosions, the screaming of the earth pounded by F-16 bombs, the shouting of the people who are demanding a ceasefire. Every hole is a forest of noise that compresses all the pain and the tragedy of every Palestinian individual.” This resolute, tormented connection between body, land, and people – such that every single site of suffering reverberates into a dizzying cacophony – is foregrounded with the collection’s striking opening words: ‘Every house is my heart. Every tree is my leg. Every plant is my arm. [...]. Every hole in the earth is my wound.’
Abu Toha’s poems task the written word with approximating the horror of an air strike; the tragedy of losing a portrait of his grandfather under rubble; the longing for orange trees, birthday cakes, or to stop running long enough that entire lifetimes of grief might begin to catch up. Amidst images of life being torn from human flesh, some of the most devastating poems in Forest of Noise revolve around another locus of grief: the histories and loss of mundane, unimaginably precious artefacts of home. In Gaza Notebook (2021-2022), which scatters across the page like shrapnel, ‘frying pans miss the smell of olive oil’ and stones begin to ‘forget they were in a wall in a bedroom or a kitchen.’
“The Israeli attacks are not only targeting the people and their houses, but everything that ties Palestinians to their land: their flowers, the trees they named after their lost loved ones,” Abu Toha says. In Palestinian Village, when he writes that one 'can chock the wheels of your vegetable cart with a stone your grandfather once used to crush thyme' – the poem’s insistent present tense is a refusal to let these practices, the very stones and building blocks that comprise generations of Palestinian existence, be damned into extinction.
Forest of Noise is an archive of survival: a grief-ridden, painstaking commitment to witness both the incredible violence of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Gaza and Palestine, and that violence’s 76-year-long failure, nevertheless, to eradicate a nation and its people. The exhausted sense of duty with which Abu Toha’s poems describe life under genocide is precipitated by the Audre Lorde quote, ‘Poetry is not a luxury’, that serves as the collection’s epigraph. “People usually look at poets as very talented people,” Abu Toha says. “But for the poet, it’s not a sign of any talent – it’s a sign of very deep pain. The process of finding these images is like giving birth to twins after twins after twins without any break. Poetry is not a luxury. Writing it is not a luxury. It’s traumatic.”
He likens his work as a poet to that of a reporter, but in opposition to the brutal flattening of numbers and statistics. “I’m trying to present a human image of the girl who was killed waiting in line to refill her water bucket,” he says. Israel is not only denying Gaza food, water, electricity, and medicine, but shrouding it in darkness by cutting off the internet. Poetry resists the terrifying erasure of reality – and the individuality of every life taken – under such darkness.
“You know, it’s not easy to write when you are under bombardment,” he continues. “But I found myself writing back, trying to resist the silence that was engulfing the whole world about the atrocities that have been committed in Gaza even before 7 October. I’m putting this piece of ‘breaking news’ into a poem, charged with how I feel about this loss of a girl. Because the loss of a girl is the loss of a garden.”
In perhaps the most heart-shattering poem in Forest of Noise, Request Letter, a man writes a letter to the ‘angel of death’, asking if: ‘when you collect the souls of those killed in an air strike, do you mind leaving a sign for us, so we know who is who? Because last time my old kindergarten teacher couldn’t recognise her daughter’s face, which ear or arm or bloody finger on the dusty streets was hers …’ He writes in both English and Arabic, because ‘who could know what language the angel of death uses’? It is gutting when Abu Toha shares that this poem was written before 7 October, 2023.
After a year and a month of ongoing genocide, language seems to either be a death-obsessed weapon or an ineffectual tool: reality warps to accommodate nauseating atrocity; words of protest, witness, and their ensuing actions have not halted the killing machine. “Everything that brought destruction and annihilation for my homeland Palestine has been in the English language,” Abu Toha says. The Balfour Declaration, which created the settler colony of Israel in 1917, was wrought in this colonial language; so too is the genocidal refrain of our Western governments, who, he says, “never stopped saying, in English, ‘Israel has the right to defend itself’. Against whom? Against a population, half of whom are children? A population that has been under siege since 2007, under occupation since 1948? So this is the English language.”
How do we grapple with the English language – indeed, language and poetry itself – in this monstrous time? “Poetry does not change people who do not believe in the humanity of others,” Abu Toha reminds me. “As they are closing their eyes, stuffing their ears with the rubble of our buildings, they are not going to hear the poem.” To confront the terrifying ambivalence and responsibility of language in this moment, then, is perhaps as simple as understanding this. It is not poetry that has revolutionary duty: we do.
Forest of Noise is out with Fourth Estate on 7 Nov