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4.72 AVERAGE
4.72 AVERAGE
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
tense
fast-paced
"What's your name? Mosab. Where are you from? Palestine. What's your mother tongue? Arabic, but she's sick. What's the color of your skin? There is not enough light to help me see."
"In Gaza, breathing is a task, smiling is performing plastic surgery on one's own face, and rising in the morning, trying to survive another day, is coming back from the dead."
"Their ears hurt when they hear sirens, but we are made deaf by explosions."
"I am neither in nor out. I am in between. I am not part of anything. I am a shadow of something. At best, I am a thing that does not really exist. I am weightless, a speck of time in Gaza. But I will remain where I am."
"But there are some beautiful things around me: there is the sea, there are the clouds, there are flowers and trees and lemons on the trees, and these are things to enjoy, even if it is a momentary thing."
This is a beautiful (and sad) book about the pain, trauma, persistence and perseverance of Palestine and its people, who will always survive, endure and live on.
"In Gaza, breathing is a task, smiling is performing plastic surgery on one's own face, and rising in the morning, trying to survive another day, is coming back from the dead."
"Their ears hurt when they hear sirens, but we are made deaf by explosions."
"I am neither in nor out. I am in between. I am not part of anything. I am a shadow of something. At best, I am a thing that does not really exist. I am weightless, a speck of time in Gaza. But I will remain where I am."
"But there are some beautiful things around me: there is the sea, there are the clouds, there are flowers and trees and lemons on the trees, and these are things to enjoy, even if it is a momentary thing."
This is a beautiful (and sad) book about the pain, trauma, persistence and perseverance of Palestine and its people, who will always survive, endure and live on.
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
emotional
medium-paced
emotional
medium-paced
challenging
emotional
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
medium-paced
emotional
reflective
sad
Across a lifetime of bombings and violence, yet through a prose of beauty and grace, Mosab Abu Toha examines life in Palestine in his debut collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza. These poems chronicle the destruction of his country, the mass murdering of innocents, and hones in on the omnipresent fears of bombings and soldier-fire amidst a landscape that still arrives in striking beauty in contrast to smoldering wreckage around it. Abu Toha also provides an extraordinary interview after the poems which is worth picking the book up even if just for that, where he discusses his life, art and hopes. There is a resiliency that keeps this harrowing collection afloat, and for all the ways it continuously makes us confront the devastation and violence, it also champions the spirit of survival in the Palestinian people. ‘Don’t ever be surprised / to see a rose shoulder up / among the ruins of the house: / This is how we survived,’ he writes, and that is precisely how this collection feels: a brilliant rose rising up amongst the violence, reminding us to listen, to not turn away and to cherish human life.
We Love What We Have
We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t
we will no longer exist, since there will be nothing here for us.
What’s here is something that we are still
building. It’s something we cannot yet see,
because we are part
of it.
Someday soon, this building will stand on its own, while we,
we will be the trees that protect it from the fierce
wind, the trees that will give shade
to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.
Following in the footsteps of [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg], the “national poet” of Palestine and a major influence on Abu Toha, this collection makes Palestine a land of poetry above all things. He writes in a direct and accessible style bursting forth with arresting imagery and playful language, using his pen to transform indelible tragedies into monuments of prose for all of us to witness and learn from them. His poetry primarily is written in a collective consciousness, using we or us instead of I in many of the poems, creating a landscape of stories. ‘Though we all have very different stories, as Palestineans our stories are the same in many ways,’ he says in the interview at the end of the collection:
Contradictions are a playful aspect of his poetry, and this statement is reminiscent of the conclusion of his poem My City After What Happened Some Time Ago where a people who are already ‘living in a grave’ have a will to survive that cannot be killed and the sound of bombs can wake the dead:
In Gaze, some of us cannot completely die.
every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
We are awakened from our temporary death.
Yet still ‘the fear of dying before living / haunts us while we are still / in our mother’s wombs.’ Abu Toha never lets us go long without reminding us how often it is the children who are killed in the blasts, children that don’t know there is any other life other than living between bombardments. ‘I never realized I was born in a refugee camp because that was just my world,’ he tells us, ‘A fish doesn’t ask its mother why a shark is running after them.’ We are reminded that in war it is the innocent who do the most of the suffering. In The Wound, he recalls seeing the limbless body of a child pulled from a home and writes ‘The houses were not Hamas / The kids were not Hamas / Their clothes and toys were not Hamas / the neighborhood was not Hamas,’ and yet ‘the one who ordered the killing / the one who pressed the button thought / only of Hamas.’
He tells us these stories because those who do not tell of the horrors they witness find them returning forver as nightmares. ‘One function of poetry is to heal the wounds,’ he says, and he does so in a way that will certainly stick with you always. Remembering is important, especially when not only are people are being erased by genocide, but also their memory is being erased politically. Even their own country is denied existing by others, such as when he mentions his application for his US Visa claims his homeland doesn’t exist. ‘Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets,’ he writes. In this way his poems often hold space for what is absent, be it places or people: ‘a child who was shot by an Israeli sniper / or killed during an air raid en route to school. / Her picture stares at the blackboard / while the air sits in her chair.’ As [a:William Hazlitt|52629|William Hazlitt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1679640477p2/52629.jpg] said ‘Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life,’ and Abu Toha keeps that memory alive.
We Deserve a Better Death
We deserve a better death.
Our bodies are disfigured and twisted,
embroidered with bullets and shrapnel.
Our names are pronounced incorrectly
on the radio and TV
Our photos, plastered onto the walls of our buildings,
fade and grow pale.
The inscriptions on our gravestones disappear,
covered in the feces of birds and reptiles.
No one waters the trees that give shade
to our graves.
The blazing sun has overwhelmed
our rotting bodies.
There is still a playfulness to these poems despite all the sadness. ‘Come on, it’s my first time being wounded,’ he quips in The Wound, less bravado and more a jab at the absurdity of bravado and war. He writes of F-16s massacring an innocent neighborhood writing ‘They descended from the inferno. Dante hadn’t mentioned them,’ and in another poem talks about pilots adding rubble after a bombing ‘to increase the pilot’s salary’ because ‘on the scale, stones and rebars are heavier / than souls.’ Not that he makes a laughing matter of anything, but what else can one do but laugh in the face of absurdity in death when the alternative is to hear ‘silent walls / and people sobbing / without sound.’
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a collection that will certainly haunt you, but you will be better for it. Abu Toha writes many poems to or in the vein of his predecessors, such as [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg], [a:Edward Said|16770310|Edward W. Said|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1518095868p2/16770310.jpg], and even [a:Audre Lorde|18486|Audre Lorde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1613651890p2/18486.jpg], and chronicles the horrors wrought on Gaza to ensure they are remembered and as a method of processing. This is a wonderful little collection, complete with photographs from the author and an interview, and while it will break your heart it will still cast a beautiful glow all the same.
5/5
‘The words fly out.
The poem is free.’
We Love What We Have
We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don’t, everything will be gone. If we don’t
we will no longer exist, since there will be nothing here for us.
What’s here is something that we are still
building. It’s something we cannot yet see,
because we are part
of it.
Someday soon, this building will stand on its own, while we,
we will be the trees that protect it from the fierce
wind, the trees that will give shade
to children sleeping inside or playing on swings.
Following in the footsteps of [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg], the “national poet” of Palestine and a major influence on Abu Toha, this collection makes Palestine a land of poetry above all things. He writes in a direct and accessible style bursting forth with arresting imagery and playful language, using his pen to transform indelible tragedies into monuments of prose for all of us to witness and learn from them. His poetry primarily is written in a collective consciousness, using we or us instead of I in many of the poems, creating a landscape of stories. ‘Though we all have very different stories, as Palestineans our stories are the same in many ways,’ he says in the interview at the end of the collection:
’I think it’s like we are living in a grave: we are not dead, we are going about our daily business, but in a grave. We are living in place of a dead person. I know that’s contradictory.’
Contradictions are a playful aspect of his poetry, and this statement is reminiscent of the conclusion of his poem My City After What Happened Some Time Ago where a people who are already ‘living in a grave’ have a will to survive that cannot be killed and the sound of bombs can wake the dead:
In Gaze, some of us cannot completely die.
every time a bomb falls, every time shrapnel hits our graves,
every time the rubble piles up on our heads,
We are awakened from our temporary death.
Yet still ‘the fear of dying before living / haunts us while we are still / in our mother’s wombs.’ Abu Toha never lets us go long without reminding us how often it is the children who are killed in the blasts, children that don’t know there is any other life other than living between bombardments. ‘I never realized I was born in a refugee camp because that was just my world,’ he tells us, ‘A fish doesn’t ask its mother why a shark is running after them.’ We are reminded that in war it is the innocent who do the most of the suffering. In The Wound, he recalls seeing the limbless body of a child pulled from a home and writes ‘The houses were not Hamas / The kids were not Hamas / Their clothes and toys were not Hamas / the neighborhood was not Hamas,’ and yet ‘the one who ordered the killing / the one who pressed the button thought / only of Hamas.’
He tells us these stories because those who do not tell of the horrors they witness find them returning forver as nightmares. ‘One function of poetry is to heal the wounds,’ he says, and he does so in a way that will certainly stick with you always. Remembering is important, especially when not only are people are being erased by genocide, but also their memory is being erased politically. Even their own country is denied existing by others, such as when he mentions his application for his US Visa claims his homeland doesn’t exist. ‘Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn into the ground by bullets,’ he writes. In this way his poems often hold space for what is absent, be it places or people: ‘a child who was shot by an Israeli sniper / or killed during an air raid en route to school. / Her picture stares at the blackboard / while the air sits in her chair.’ As [a:William Hazlitt|52629|William Hazlitt|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1679640477p2/52629.jpg] said ‘Poetry is all that is worth remembering in life,’ and Abu Toha keeps that memory alive.
We Deserve a Better Death
We deserve a better death.
Our bodies are disfigured and twisted,
embroidered with bullets and shrapnel.
Our names are pronounced incorrectly
on the radio and TV
Our photos, plastered onto the walls of our buildings,
fade and grow pale.
The inscriptions on our gravestones disappear,
covered in the feces of birds and reptiles.
No one waters the trees that give shade
to our graves.
The blazing sun has overwhelmed
our rotting bodies.
There is still a playfulness to these poems despite all the sadness. ‘Come on, it’s my first time being wounded,’ he quips in The Wound, less bravado and more a jab at the absurdity of bravado and war. He writes of F-16s massacring an innocent neighborhood writing ‘They descended from the inferno. Dante hadn’t mentioned them,’ and in another poem talks about pilots adding rubble after a bombing ‘to increase the pilot’s salary’ because ‘on the scale, stones and rebars are heavier / than souls.’ Not that he makes a laughing matter of anything, but what else can one do but laugh in the face of absurdity in death when the alternative is to hear ‘silent walls / and people sobbing / without sound.’
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a collection that will certainly haunt you, but you will be better for it. Abu Toha writes many poems to or in the vein of his predecessors, such as [a:Mahmoud Darwish|75055|Mahmoud Darwish|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1414535868p2/75055.jpg], [a:Edward Said|16770310|Edward W. Said|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1518095868p2/16770310.jpg], and even [a:Audre Lorde|18486|Audre Lorde|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1613651890p2/18486.jpg], and chronicles the horrors wrought on Gaza to ensure they are remembered and as a method of processing. This is a wonderful little collection, complete with photographs from the author and an interview, and while it will break your heart it will still cast a beautiful glow all the same.
5/5
‘The words fly out.
The poem is free.’
emotional
hopeful
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
For a Free Palestine and total decolonization. Liberation for all the subjugated people. Our tears are nothing compared to the blood creeks. Our exhaustion from hearing the sad news is nothing compared to the forcedly deafen ears -- since they listen to haunting bombs every day. In this very brief breaths we take, the only thing we can do is to condemn the imperialists, the colonizers, the exploitative corporates that support the genocide. Long Live Palestinian Liberation; Long Live Palestine.