When the Palestinian poet and Gaza native Mosab Abu Toha is asked about his dreams for the future of his land and his people, he says, “I want my people to be able to see their refugee camp from the window of an airplane, to see Gaza as far as possible from the shore, and then to be able to return to their home whenever they want. That’s a right that everyone has to have as a human being: to travel as far as they want, and also to be able to return to their home.”
He tells me he has never been to the West Bank, Jerusalem, Haifa, Yaffa, or any of the other 1948 cities. That has been the reality for Gazans under siege—their freedom of movement is so restricted that they cannot even visit other parts of Palestine. This fact feels especially cruel when one reflects on the countless subsidized trips non-Palestinians are able to make every year to those same cities. Traveling even farther is out of the question without going through Egypt or Jordan first; Gaza only briefly had an airport, from 1998 to 2001, when it was destroyed by the Israeli military during the Second Intifada. Today, Abu Toha speaks with me from his current residence in Syracuse, New York, where he arrived after a harrowing journey out of Gaza. Following Israel’s bombardments and the repeated forced displacements of Gazans to increasingly labyrinthine and ever-changing demarcations of “safe zones,” Abu Toha decided to evacuate his family to Egypt. In November, while fleeing south, he was kidnapped by the Israeli military. Following immense international pressure, Israel released him, and he was able to make it to Egypt. He says, “When I first left Gaza, it was for Egypt. That was a bit easier than being here in the U.S., not because of what’s happening here, but because I’m 8,000 miles away from my birthplace, my family, my wife’s family.”
Far from home, Abu Toha stays informed about the horrors unfolding in Gaza and the circumstances of the loved ones left behind—whether hearing from his mother about his niece, hospitalized for three weeks following a surgery and not eating well, or from a friend about his and hundreds of other families living on the beach with no tents after evacuation orders drove them out of their camp.
“My role has been to document, to put into words what cameras cannot capture.” He views it as his duty as an artist to share the stories of those back home. Abu Toha shares stories on his social media from the citizen reporters who are still documenting what’s happening on the ground. He translates breaking news, reporting the names of those who have been killed, documenting their ages and the names of their family members.
But his work extends beyond recording the devastating facts of this genocide. He tells me that as a poet, it is his job to imagine and give voice to the stories of the countless people and families who have been wiped from the civil registry. He asks the writer to imagine: what were the victims of this genocide doing before they were killed? Abu Toha recounts the story of Dr. Jumaan Arfa, a mother who gave birth to twins Aser and Aysel and died with them in an air strike while their father, Mohammed Abu Al-Qusman was out getting their birth certificates. He tells me the role of the artist is to imagine what these newborn twins were wearing as well as what hopes and plans the mother may have had for her children—that is, to put the artist in the position of the deceased who never got to tell their story.
After months of being inundated with images of Palestinian death and suffering, Abu Toha emphasizes the importance of imagining the lives unlived, and the emotions of those who have suffered and perished. That is the role of the artist. “We are not machines, we are not only seeing and hearing, we also have feelings, and that’s what makes every one of us human.”
Abu Toha’s imagination has served him not just in his work as a poet, but in his community as well. Growing up in refugee camps, he was not surrounded by much cultural activity. When he moved to the city of Beit Lehia, he started working on building the city’s very first library, which he would name for the beloved Palestinian academic Edward Said. “I was trying to build something that was not available for me as a child,” he says. Over time he amassed an impressive collection of Arabic as well as English language titles, which he requested from abroad via airmail, and which would sometimes get held up in Israeli security checks for months at a time.
He reflects fondly on the role the library played in his community, saying, “It’s not only about borrowing books, it’s about the library as a meeting place.… A place for children to practice their lives by drawing and playing and watching movies, and getting gifts as a reward and encouragement for reading.” Abu Toha’s library was so successful that he built a second one in 2019 in Gaza City. Since October 7, both libraries have been destroyed by the Israeli military.
Today, in Syracuse, he has a fraught relationship with the accumulation of new books. He laments that these beloved books belong in his home in Gaza where their fate is fragile. “Many of the things I collected over the past six or seven years are now under the rubble of my house in Beit Lahia,” he says. “Even the plaques I have, the awards, I look at them here, and I say they should be hanging on my walls in Gaza, not here. They would be more beautiful on my walls in Gaza—not here.”
In October, Abu Toha will be releasing a new collection of poetry, entitled Forest of Noise. The collection includes poems written before October 7 as well as those that followed the beginning of the genocide. He wants them to be read continuously as one “because it is one story, one aggressor, one victim.”
Abu Toha leaves me with an image: a story from home, a piece of reportage that will be seared in my memory. In one of his correspondences from back home, he learned that his father managed to find a small mango on a tree in a landscape that is otherwise completely barren of fruits and vegetables due to the siege. His father gave the mango to Abu Toha’s brother, who then shared it with twelve other people. This is the power of Abu Toha’s storytelling—a simple anecdote captures both the grotesque famine and the indomitable spirit of his people.
