I have been reading and writing poetry ever since I was a boy growing up in Huntington, Long Island, not far from where Walt Whitman was born and raised, and where he founded the newspaper, The Long Islander, which published my column on high school sports. At the age of 82, I still turn to poetry more often than to newspapers for news of the world, local, national and international. Recently, I read and reread the timely and (perhaps) timeless poems about Gaza in Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, published by City Lights.
That book appeared in print at about the same time that the author and members of his family, including his wife and children—and thousands of other Gazans—were detained by Israeli soldiers. Fortunately, Toha’s wife and children were released and allowed to travel to Egypt where the poet joined them, and then wrote and published an eye-opening account of his own harrowing arrest, incarceration, and interrogation. That narrative was published in January 2024 in The New Yorker. In a short time, it has alerted readers around the world to Toha’s poetry and to his own newsworthy story.
As Toha knows, poetry travels well; it crosses borders, ignores checkpoints and soldiers with guns and arrives in the hearts and minds of readers. When he reads the English romantic poets—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley and Keats—he lives their experiences, he says, and through their words he has traveled outside Gaza.
“I live on the same earth that Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and others have inhabited,” he says. He was also saddened by the Israeli bombing of the administration building at his school, and the destruction of the English department at the Islamic University of Gaza.
Toha knows his American audience. From 2019 to 2021 he taught and delivered lectures in the United States at Harvard and elsewhere. He gave talks at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Arizona.
The only book that Toha brought with him from Gaza, his homeland, to Egypt, his temporary resting place and sanctuary, was his own book which boasts 51 poems set in Gaza, and that are about the people of Gaza, the history of Gaza and the on-going war between Gaza and Israel.
They offer a deeply felt perspective on a small place, geographically speaking, that has been in the news big time again and again and especially since October 7, 2023.
“Hope is a difficult word for Palestinians,” Toha says in his piece for The New Yorker. “We have to help hope grow.” At the back of his book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, there’s a lengthy in-depth interview with him by Ammiel Alcalay, an American poet and a scholar born in Boston to Sephardi Jews from Serbia.
“Though we all have very different stories, as Palestinians our stories are the same in many ways,” Toha says. “I think it’s like we are not dead, we are going about our business, but in a grave.”
Indeed, they are among the living dead, the walking and talking dead in a surreal and macabre landscape of the dead and the dying. Most Gazans are now no longer going about their business, not in the wake of the invasion and the bombardment of Gaza by the Israeli military. Tens of thousands of Gazans, both children and adults, have died. Most of them were civilians, with no ties to Hamas, the organization that organized and led the October 7 attack on Israel and the wanton slaughter of civilians.
For Americans, the most accessible poem in Toha’s book might be the one titled, “Edward Said, Noam Chomsky and Theodore Adorno in Gaza,” in which he imagines the work of those three intellectuals against the backdrop of bombs and explosions.
“Edward Said is out of place,/again,” Toha writes, “Chomsky, innately, repairs/ the wounded words,” while Adorno “tries to study the music.” In “Displaced”, which was written “In Memory of Edward Said,” the poet says that he is a thing/that does not really/ exist/…a spec of time in Gaza. But I will remain/where I am.”
That ending sounds hopeful, though one wonders if Toha would want to rewrite the last two lines since he is on longer living in Gaza, but in exile, like thousands of other Gazans and like Edward Said who was born in Jerusalem, grew up in Egypt, attended Harvard and who is the author of half-a-dozen potent books, including, Orientalism, and Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World.
Since Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear offers many of the same or similar kinds of images of Gaza—bombed out buildings, rockets and drones—that one can see on TV and on the Internet, one might ask why read Toha’s book, which was published two years ago and before the start of the current abysmal state of affairs? One answer might be that Things offers poetry, not journalism; Toha’s poems express universal human experiences and feelings often omitted or neglected by the mass media. Yes, some feelings and experiences are universal.
There is a world of difference between the poems in Things and Toha’s first person nonfiction account of his journey out of Gaza and into Egypt published in The New Yorker. Think of his first-person essay, as a springboard to his poetry. Under the letter “B” in the poem titled “Palestine A-Z,” Toha defines borders as “those invented lines drawn with ash on maps sewn into the ground by bullets.” Under the letter “G” he writes that “Gaza is a city where tourists gather to take photos next to destroyed buildings or graveyards.”
Tourists aren’t going there anymore. No one who is reading this now will travel to Gaza.
Toha’s poems are often as romantic as Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,” and Coleridge’s “This Lime-Tree Bower My Prison.” In “Tears,” an olive tree “bends when it sees the bombs fall.” In “A Litany for ‘One Land’” Toha offers what is perhaps his most hopeful poem: “One day, we will be born again/when you’re not there/ because this land knows us. She is our mother.” To those Zionists who insist that Israel has always been the homeland of the Jews and always will be, Toha responds with the lines, “We have been here forever./We have been speaking but you/never cared to listen.”
The sounds that Toha hears are the sounds of F-16s in the sky above Gaza, the sounds of bombs smashing houses, the sounds of explosions that make Gazans deaf and “the silence of absence.” Toha’s poetic language is not heard on Fox, CNN, NPB and MSNBC.
His words are the words of a Gazan poet trying to remain hopeful when hope seems to have taken a leave of absence and when words are often drowned out by the radio, “that old, dirty box/that usually vomit/ blood and body parts into our ears.”
Toha ends his book with an image meant to instill hope. In “A Rose Shoulders Up” he writes, “Don’t ever be surprised, to see a rose shoulder up/among the ruins of a house: This is how we survived.”
Whose side is Toha on? Definitely not on the side of the Israeli military and not on the side of the Hamas invaders, either. “The houses were not Hamas,” he writes in “The Wounds.” “The kids were not Hamas/…Our ears were not Hamas.”
Toha is on the side of the roses, the side of poetry and poets, libraries and librarians, and the Gazans fleeing from bombs and soldiers.
When Professor Alcalay asked Toha for his impressions of the U.S. he said, “I was astonished at the size of the country. Open lands, with trees, and rivers.” He added, “In Gaza, you imagine the world as a small place and you never know what will hit you next, or from where.” It’s a very small place with F-16s “descended from the Inferno,” and that, as Toha writes in “The Wounds”—the longest poem in his book—“Dante hadn’t mentioned.” One hopes that the Inferno may one day turn into a paradise or at least a verdant garden.
I did not attempt to reach Toha; I thought that would be impossible. But I had an informative email exchange with Alcalay. When I asked him if Toha had a solution to the issues surrounding Palestine, Gaza and Israel he said “I don’t think there is an answer to this question at this time.” He added, Toha is “thinking about how to get food to his siblings and parents, and about his friends still buried under the rubble and all the rest of the horrors.”
Alcalay explained that when he and Toha worked on the interview, they wanted to show Toha’s humanity and “what someone’s life in Gaza might look like.” He added that the questions he asked Toha were “not a way of avoiding other questions, but of showing a person with an ability to be profoundly affected by works that, for all intents and purposes, might have already been ‘cancelled’ in the U.S. for some frivolous reason or other, or considered the work of ‘dead white males.’”
xxx
On Wednesday, February 7, 2024, at 7 p.m. City Lights hosts a reading of Mosab Abu Toha’s Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza. The more than two dozen readers include Priscilla Wathington, Neeli Cherkovski, Garrett Caples, mimi tempestt, Norma Cole, Kim Shuck, Carlos Quinteros III, and Agneta Falk Hirschman.
xxx
Jonah Raskin’s most recent book of poems from Regent Press is The Thief of Yellow Roses.