This is a continuation of posts about Palestinian Poets. I began this series because I found these poets have unflinchingly written about the horrors of living and dying in Gaza. Have given life (and death) to the absent or sanitized reporting of the atrocities that continues in the mainstream media.
The genocide, the bombardment of children in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon continues to be ignored. There is urgent need for an immediate ceasefire and an arms embargo on Israel.
Mosab Abu Toha
Mosab Abu Toha is a Palestinian poet. His recent book is Forest of Noise. He was friends with the Palestinian poet I wrote about yesterday, Refaat Alareer, who was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
Barely thirty years old, Mosab Abu Toha was already a well-known poet when the current siege of Gaza began. After the Israeli army bombed and destroyed his house, pulverizing a library he had painstakingly built for community use, he and his family fled for their safety. Not for the first time in their lives.
Somehow, amid the chaos, Abu Toha kept writing poems. These are those poems. Uncannily clear, direct, and beautifully tuned, they form one of the most astonishing works of art wrested from wartime. Here are directives for what to do in an air raid; here are lyrics about the poet’s wife, singing to his children to distract them. Huddled in the dark, Abu Toha remembers his grandfather’s oranges, his daughter’s joy in eating them.
Moving between glimpses of life in relative peacetime and absurdist poems about surviving in a barely livable occupation, Forest of Noise invites a wide audience into an experience that defies the imagination—even as it is watched live. Abu Toha’s poems introduce readers to his extended family, some of them no longer with us. This is an urgent, extraordinary, and arrestingly whimsical book. Searing and beautiful, it brings us indelible art in a time of terrible suffering.
All In with Chris Hayes
Democracy Now
unflinching 