'Every child is me. Every mother and father is me': A glimpse of Gaza, occupation and genocide in Mosab Abu Toha’s new poetry collection, Forest of Noise

You might begin reading Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s second collection, Forest of Noise, by judging his book by its cover. On a matte, off-white background, a bark-brown, finger-painted hand and spindly arm stretch diagonally; green thumbprint leaves sprout from the fingers. It’s a tree limb. A child’s raised hand. An arm stretched in terror.

With its multiplicity of meanings, Arsh Raziuddin’s arresting cover art captures the spirit of Mosab Abu Toha’s candid poetry about living in and through war and genocide in Gaza.

It teases a litany of quandaries central not only to this collection but also to Mosab’s online presence as an unceasing chronicler of Israel’s destruction of Gaza: How does life go on amid death and devastation? How do despair and hope feed each other? When will it end? How can we make art amid the rubble? How can we not?

"Throughout the book, Mosab grapples with poetry’s ability to convey the horror of life in Gaza under Israeli assault"

In a recent post, Mosab responded to the widely shared photo of 19-year-old Sha’ban al-Dalou, arms raised against flames as he burned alive. Witnessing this horrific image reminiscent of his cover, he writes, “How can I look at my book? How can I read my poems?”

Throughout the book, Mosab grapples with poetry’s ability to convey the horror of life in Gaza under Israeli assault — and makes clear to readers the price the poet pays when writing and revisiting what he has lived through.

He also vividly portrays his deep connection to everything in Gaza, where he lived most of his life before fleeing last December to Egypt, then the United States, with his wife and children.

In a dedication, he writes:

“Every child in Gaza is me.

Every mother and father is me.

Every house is my heart.

Every tree is my leg.

Every plant is my arm.”

Born in 1992, Mosab Abu Toha has endured multiple Israeli assaults, as well as the siege of Gaza that began in 2007.

His collection’s opening poem, Younger Than War, recalls tanks rolling “through dust, through eggplant fields,” book-burning soldiers, and warplanes overhead at the start of the Al-Aqsa Intifada in September 2000.

“No need for radio,” he writes, “We are the news,” and “At the time, /I was seven: decades younger than war, /a few years older than bombs.”

Last fall, Mosab himself became news when Israeli forces kidnapped him and other Gazan men and transported them to an Israeli prison. Under pressure from PEN International, the New Yorker, and others, Israel released him, calling his detention “a mistake.”

In On Your Knees, it feels as though he is sitting across from us, recounting the harrowing story aloud:

"On your knees!

A new soldier calls me by my full name.

He even says my grandfather’s name.

I love the name of my grandfather.

I hate the soldier,

I hate his name,

which I do not know.

Your ID number, say it aloud!

Remove your clothes,

Even your boxer shorts.

Turn around.

*

In my ears, I’m hiding

my mother’s stories,

my father’s recitation,

of the Holy Quran when I am sick."

These lines offer both a blow-by-blow account of Mosab’s abuse and humiliation and his interior response: wanting to protect and keep for himself the things that matter most to him (memories, stories).

As for many Palestinians, a lineage of loss and persistence looms large for Mosab Abu Toha, a third-generation Gazan refugee whose grandparents fled Yaffa during the Nakba.

In My Grandfather’s Well, his deceased paternal grandfather stands vigil in Yaffa. “Where have you been? Grandfather asks me,” Mosab writes. As though the living have abandoned the dead.

Later, in No Art — which echoes and responds to Elizabeth Bishop’s One Art (“The art of losing isn’t hard to master/so many things seem filled with the intent/to be lost that their loss is no disaster”) — Mosab writes:

"I’ve personally lost three friends to war,

a city to darkness, and a language to fear.

This was not easy to survive,

but survival proved necessary to master.

But of all things,

losing the only photo of my grandfather

under the rubble of my house

was a real disaster."

Writing after and in response to other English-language poets like Bishop, Whitman, Ginsberg, Bob Kaufman, and Mosab Abu Toha’s beloved late friend and mentor Refaat Alareer, the poet pushes against any notion that poetry must uplift and beautify — or that any poem can stand alone.

Of course, poets know their work is inspired by and in dialogue with other works. But today, individual poems have become standalone memes that many of us share on social media because we feel otherwise impotent to stop Israel’s violence against Palestinians.

Mosab’s unwillingness to hold any particular poem holy reminds us that poets’ conversations with each other, across time and space, among the living and the dead, hold more power than a single poem.

Take his response to Refaat Alareer’s well-loved poem of hope, If I Must Die (which echoes Claude McKay’s defiant 1919 resistance poem If We Must Die).

Refaat wrote of his own foretold passing, “You must live/to tell my story… let it bring hope/let it be a tale.”

Mosab brings another perspective by writing about the nightmare of always knowing you’re this close to dying: “If I am going to die,/let it be a clean death./No rubble over my corpse.”

He wants a funeral, something too many Palestinians have been denied, and clean, ironed clothes for his corpse. He wants the dignity of a nonviolent death.

He continues this logic in Rescue Plane, where he wishes for two planes: One to drop wheat, tea, and vegetables in Gaza and remove rubble. Another is to drop flowers for children to plant on graves. And then he strips away the flights of imagination and reveals his true, and truly simple, wish: “No planes at all.../No war/I wish we never had to wish.”

Though he’s no longer in Gaza, Mosab frequently shares photos, videos, and breaking news on Instagram and X.

Forest of Noise includes several ekphrastic poems that describe some of the indelible images we’ve witnessed in the past year-plus of genocide: A murdered father and daughter eyed by a hungry cat in The Moon.

A man rushing for help though the child in his arms cannot be saved in For a Moment, which ends with the narrator saying:

"I know she is dead,

but everyone who sees us

runs after us.

You are alive

for a moment,

when living people

run after you."

Are those of us who have been reading Palestinian poetry in this moment of genocide, in a way, tricking ourselves into thinking we can save already dead children? Mosab won’t let us get away with the illusion. His collection’s final poem, This Is Not a Poem, asserts that what’s real is Gaza’s rubble and death.

"This is not a poem.

This is a grave, not

beneath the soil of Homeland,

but above a flat, light white

rag of paper."

When you reach these last words, close the book. Turn it over. Imagine the hand on the cover is the poet’s and clasp it.

Reread the poems. Call, once more, for an end to genocide and the ongoing Nakba.

Eman Quotah is the author of the novel Bride of the Sea and winner of the Arab American Book Award for Fiction

Follow her on X: @EQuotah