Mosab Abu Toha’s new poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, is an account of what is lost in war, and what is preserved, both tangible and intangible. Abu Toha writes of his life under attack and threat of attack in Gaza, chronicling both the devastation of being hunted in your own homeland and the small pockets of grace found amongst the ruins. It is these scraps of a different, possible life that become the inheritance of those from whom all else has been taken.
As he writes in the collection’s opening poem, “Palestine A-Z,” it is the victors who care about geopolitical boundaries; the victims fight to hold a territory of memory that has been erased from the physical world.
Borders are those invented lines drawn with ash on maps and sewn
into the ground by bullets.
The campaign of destruction and death Israel has waged against the Palestinian people has been excused under the guise of a war on terror to stamp out Hamas, a militant Islamic nationalist group in Palestine. In recounting an Israeli attack on a camp said to contain a Hamas leader that resulted in the death of over a dozen noncombatants, mostly children, Abu Toha seems to posit in “The Wounds” that the main difference between a soldier and a terrorist is sponsorship.
The houses were not Hamas.
The kids were not Hamas.
Their clothes and toys were not Hamas.
…
the one who pressed the button thought
only of Hamas.
In the wake of this theft of land and life, Abu Toha deals in the currency of words as the only wealth left to him, with the poem itself as the coin of the realm. Throughout the collection, he returns to the image and idea of the poem as residence, object, possession. In “My Grandfather and Home,” after describing the daily count his grandfather maintained of how long he had been exiled from his home until his death 36 years later, Abu Toha imagines the lift he would reconstruct for his family from language alone:
how big do you want our home to be
i can continue to write poems until you are satisfied
if you wish i can annex a neighboring planet or two
for this home i shall not draw boundaries
no punctuation marks
Just a few pages later in “Flying Poem,” he shares how words are remnants of the past dyed in the pigment of fear and either released or tucked away.
Like a woman
hanging her laundry on the clothesline,
I hang my words
on the lines of my page
Heavy, frightened words,
spread fear in my room.
The words are bound into a book and stuffed in a dresser, and later his niece smells their sweaty stench and opens the drawer: “The words fly out. / The poem is free.”
Elsewhere, poems fill his pockets to weigh him down and drown him in a river, and the word “home” is shown to contain the shade of trees, his grandparents’ wedding photo, his uncle’s prayer rug, the oven where his mother baked bread before their house was bombed. The poem concludes: “My child stops me: Can a four-letter word hold all of these?”
When possessions and land and mementos are lost, words and memories become the only inheritance carried forward. A rusted key to a bombed-out house is the sole physical reminder of a life once established.
The collection’s title hints at the role of language in this sense, and the title poem makes explicit the role of words as sacred icons and the ear as reliquary.
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
He lists the beauty contained in this receptacle of sound — songs in Arabic, poems in English — and requests, “When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my / ear.” Of the horrific — the buzz of drones and the scream of bombs — he asks that they be taken from his ear canal for good.
Throughout these heartrending depictions of bloodshed, destruction, and the grief that settles like thick dust in their wake, Abu Toha traces a thread of dark whimsy reminiscent of Juan Felipe Herrera’s use of absurdism. In “The Wall and the Clock,” he recounts the taunting of a clock’s ticking as a sort of slow torment, the anticipation of violence deferred doing its own work upon his nerves. He pleads with the clock to be silent, whispers to it that he will take it to the doctor, though he recognizes he is sick as well.
I take the clock to the clockmaker,
ask him to make it soundless.
He removes the clock’s vocal cords,
patches its mouth shut.
At a few points throughout the collection, he employs a grim and direct humor, highlighting the fundamental absurdity of violence and hate. In “The Wounds” — an 11-page poem about the Israeli aggression against Gaza in late 2008 and early 2009 — he recounts his own first close brush with death. He was walking to the grocery shop at the age of 16 when a bomb suddenly exploded. Everyone around him collapsed. Blood dripped into his eyes, and shrapnel had pierced his cheek, forehead, neck, and shoulder. “Like a madman, I begin to run around,” he recounts. In the midst of sharing this chaos, and just before describing being loaded into an ambulance next to a burnt corpse, he says, “Come on, it’s my first time being wounded.”
The feigned sheepishness here, as though his reaction had betrayed a rookie’s lack of poise, casts into stark relief the surreal and warped experience of living in a land under siege better than any straight telling could. Earlier in the same poem, he wryly comments on the novelty of supersonic death raining down on villages and families:
We didn’t hear the F-16s until they finished their strikes.
They descended from the inferno. Dante hadn’t mentioned them.
In the midst of poems containing images of limbless children, headless bodies, and abiding loss, Abu Toha shares moments of beauty and grace — seashells on a Gaza beach, kids playing on swings — and codifies the conscious choice to savor these pockets of joy as a preservation of identity in “We Love What We Have”:
We love what we have, no matter how little,
because if we don’t, everything will be gone.
This battle against mnemonic oblivion is an intentional choice, and one that defines these poems as a whole. One image that distills the heart of this collection perhaps best of all is returned to as a motif several times. In “Palestine A-Z,” he writes:
In Gaza, you can find a man planting a rose in the hollow space of
an unexploded tank shell, using it as a vase.
Healing, or at very least its prerequisite — survival — can never come from ignoring what wants to kill you. It comes from refusing to let what would kill your body claim your spirit as well. In the collection’s final poem, “A Rose Shoulders Up,” Abu Toha lays this bare:
Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is a startling collection rising up from the ruins of human hatred, reaching for the sun through drifting smoke.
[Published by City Lights Books on April 26, 2022, 144 pages, $15.95 paperback. You may acquire a copy by clicking here.]