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'Door on the Road,' a Poem From Gaza

May 13, 2022
in Democracy In Exile, Palestine
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  • Mosab Abu Toha

    Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet and librarian who was born in Gaza and has spent his life there. His debut book of poems, Thing You May Find Hidden in My Ear, was recently published by City Lights Books.

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Born in Gaza's al-Shati Refugee Camp in 1992, Mosab Abu Toha wrote his first poems in 2014, during Israel's punishing war on Gaza. "Having a circle of friends outside, with whom I could connect and exchange emails and messages, encouraged me to write about my life and that of the people around me," he told PEN America recently. "Everything around me is a stone under which lies a poem or a story to write about." Even after his family moved out of Beach Camp, as it is known, to a small Gaza town surrounded by farms and fields, "the sense of being and living on the corners of things never left me," he said. "The Israeli warplanes and drones never abandon our ears or eyes."

Like so many Palestinians in Gaza, Abu Toha's family came from Yaffa. His grandfather, great-grandfather and great uncles were driven out of their city in 1948 and had to flee to Gaza on foot.

He became a librarian as well as a poet during the 2014 Gaza war. With so many of the territory's libraries destroyed by Israeli airstrikes, he set about collecting donations for what soon became Gaza's only English-language library, which he named after Palestinian scholar and public intellectual Edward Said. After teaching English at UNRWA schools in Gaza, Abu Toha came to the United States in 2019 as a Scholar-at-Risk Fellow in Harvard University's Department of Comparative Literature. He returned to Gaza in 2021.

"A writer must speak on behalf of the unheard, those who cannot articulate well what they feel or see, and most importantly to me, those who lost their lives under the rubble of vicious wars."

- Mosab Abu Toha

He writes many of his poems in English, rather than his native Arabic. "When I write in English, I feel like being free from the confinements of my existence in Gaza, even if briefly," he said in an interview in 2020.

He considers his poetry a form of resistance, a record of Palestinian resilience. "A writer must speak on behalf of the unheard, those who cannot articulate well what they feel or see, and most importantly to me, those who lost their lives under the rubble of vicious wars," he told PEN. "That's part of resistance—keeping memories of oneself and others, eternalizing shared feelings in human life."

His first book of poetry, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, was just published by City Lights. The New York Times praised it as an "accomplished debut [that] contrasts scenes of political violence with natural beauty."

His new poem "Door on the Road" is published here in Democracy in Exile for the first time. You can also listen to Abu Toha read the poem himself.

—Frederick Deknatel, Executive Editor

 

Door on the Road

 

In the Refugee Camp,

after the explosion, a door flies into a far street,

rests near a heap of rubble.

Clouds of dust settle on the coughing,

neighboring houses—

their noses swollen by the heat

of the scorched air.

A girl passes by, sees the bleeding door, opens it. A corpse

lies beneath it.

The earth weeps. Though some fingers got cut,

the dead young man still clutches in his hand

a very old key—the only thing he's inherited

from his father. The key to their house

in Yaffa. He was sure it's been destroyed, but a key

can be his passport to Yaffa when they return.

Now, neither he nor their knocked-down house in the Refugee

Camp can stand.

The girl closes the door. Windows of tears

open in her heart.

Palestinians return to the rubble of their destroyed homes in Beit Hanoun, Gaza, after a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, May 24, 2021. (Photo by Fatima Shbair/Getty Images)

Source: Getty IMages

Tags: GazaIsrael-PalestineOccupied Palestinian Territories (OPT)PalestinePalestinians
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GAZA CITY, GAZA - MAY 24: A Palestinian girl stands amid the rubble of her destroyed house in Beit Hanun town northern Gaza Strip,on May 24, 2021 in Gaza City, Gaza. Gaza residents continue clean up operations as they return to damaged and destroyed homes as the ceasefire between Israel and Hamas appeared to be holding into a fourth day. The ceasefire brings to an end eleven days of fighting which killed more than 250 Palestinians, many of them women and children, and 13 Israelis. The conflict began on May 10th after rising tensions in East Jerusalem and clashes at the Al Aqsa Mosque compound. (Photo by Fatima Shbair/Getty Images)

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