Missing Poet From Gaza

There has been no news of Batool Abu Akleen since October 23, the last time she posted anything on any social media platform. A two-month absence brings the worst question to the fore: is she alive?

“Two days ago, I was preparing myself to go to university, and now I am preparing myself for an expected death,” she wrote in a social media post on October 9. The ‘war’ was only in its second day.

Akleen, who already started making a mark as a poet, turned an adult this year. She has been a member of the literature circle at the Qattan Foundation in Gaza and led a literature group called Yaraat at the Tamer Institute for Community Education. Her Facebook profile describes her as ‘The daughter of the sea and the city, coffeeholic, a poet, an artist, and a dreamer’.

In 2020, she won the Barjeel Art Foundation’s poetry contest in the youth category for Arabic language. Contestants were to write a poem reflecting on an artwork. She chose Egyptian painter and activist Inji Efflatoun’s 1961 work, Dreams of the Detainee. She titled her poem ‘I Did Not Steal the Cloud’. She said she was inspired by the artwork as she too writes from behind the bars of another prison: Gaza. 

In May, she was one of the five participants in the Poetry Marathon as part of the Palestine Festival of Literature. She read poetry at many other events.

“I write poetry to write myself, in search of the nature of this incomprehensible world,” she wrote in an Instagram post as the caption to a photo of one of her poetry recitals in August. “Poetry is a release of the energy of madness that inhabits me. If it were not for poetry, I would be crazy, swimming in the universe, unable to curb my madness.” 

It is quite understandable that when she realised death could be coming at any moment, she clung to poetry all the more. Could even poetry help her comprehend what was happening?

“I always wanted to become a translator, a poet, a journalist, and a professor of poetry to teach the Gazans the meaning of life, which we lack. I don’t know if I’ll stay alive to post those words. I am a person with a lot of dreams and I deserve to live and achieve them all. I don’t care if I die, but I don’t want to lose my family, my home, my friends, and my left hand. I don’t want to live in a city where I won’t even know its features,” she wrote in her October 9 post. 

From the day the war began, she started wearing a necklace with a blue stone that she got as a gift from her friend Rola, who is from Jerusalem. Rola had bought it from Ramallah, in the West Bank, the other part of Palestine. The necklace made her feel like carrying the whole country around her neck - it connected Gaza with Ramallah and Jerusalem. She wanted to die wearing it.

She lived in the Al Remal neighbourhood in central Gaza. More than 150 died in an Israeli bombing in central Gaza, with Al Remal being the worst affected, during October 22-23. Outlook asked some of her well-wishers about how she was but no one was certain. One of them said, “We haven’t heard of her death. So, hope remains.”

At the 2020 contest mentioned above, Syrian-Kurdish writer Golan Haji, who was the judge, wrote, “Batool, using the eyes of her body and spirit, without exaggeration of wit or tears, draws the details of prisoners’ weakness and humiliation. The world narrows like a prison cell, and her poetry lights it up with pain and with mercy.” She continued to do so.

Below is the last message she posted on social media: a poem that she read out in a video, wearing that same necklace with the blue stone.

My name is not important

My friends’ names are not important

Our stories are not important

Because we are just numbers.

This is how the world sees us.

a foreign person asked: how do you feel?

Well, thanks for your question.

We don’t feel.

We don't cry.

We don’t have the time for

Bemoaning our beloveds because others are being killed.

We don’t have the time to feel

We just have time to smell the death coming closer and closer

We just have the time to sit in one room,

hugging each other,

asking god to take our souls together.

We are eager to sleep a whole night without being terrified by the sound of falling bombs.

We are eager to have a shower,

to be tired at the end of a normal day,

to talk about anything except death, martyrs, and blood,

and to hear a laugh from a child

Are we asking much, world?

(This appeared in the print as 'Where Is She?')