BOOK TALKS

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza

11 Lives: Stories from Palestinian Exiles edited and translated by Muhammad Ali Khalidi, OR Books, 2022, paperback, 300 pp. MEB $22.95.

Written by refugees, this highly original anthology of Palestinians forced to live outside of their homeland brings together stories of what it means to be exiled. The contributors share insights into the events that led to their displacement and the raw experience of daily life in a refugee camp. The 11 lives given voice in this book are unique, each an expression of the myriad displacements that war and occupation have forced upon Palestinians since the Nakba of 1948. At the same time, they form a collective testament of a people driven from their homes and land by colonial occupation. Each story is singular, and yet each tells the story of all Palestinians. The product of a creative-writing workshop organized by the Institute for Palestine Studies in Lebanon, 11 Lives tells of children’s adventures in the alleyways of refugee camps, of teenage martyrs and of the love and labor that form the threads of a red keffiyeh

The Bird Tattoo: A Novel by Dunya Mikhail, Pegasus Books, 2022, hardcover, 304 pp. MEB $26.95.

By Mosab Abu Toha,

City

Lights

Publishers, 2022, paperback, 144 pp. MEB $15

Report by Delinda C. Hanley

Dunya Mikhail’s The Bird Tattoo chronicles a world of great upheaval, love and loss, beauty and horror. Helen is a young Yazidi woman living with her family in a mountain village in Sinjar, northern Iraq. One day she finds a local bird caught in a trap and frees it, just as the trapper, Elias, returns. At first angry, he soon sees the error of his ways and vows never to keep a bird captive again. Helen and Elias fall deeply in love, marry and start a family in Sinjar. The village has seemed to stand apart from time, protected by the mountains and too small to attract much political notice. But their happy existence is suddenly shattered when Elias, a journalist, goes missing. A brutal organization is sweeping over the land, infiltrating even the remotest corners, its members cloaking their violence in religious devotion. Helen’s search for her husband results in her own captivity and enslavement. She eventually escapes her captors and is reunited with some of her family. But her life is forever changed. Elias remains missing and her sons, now young recruits to the organization, are like strangers. Will she find harmony and happiness again?

The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics: Women Politicians Write from Prison edited by Gültan Kisanak, Pluto Press, 2022, paperback, 272 pp. MEB $22.95.

Award-winning poet, short story writer and essayist Mosab Abu Toha’s book reading on Jan. 12 was the first in-person event of the year hosted by the Jerusalem Fund in Washington, DC. Combined with a lunch donated by Falafel Inc (which serves the best falafels I’ve ever tasted), the book reading and lively Q&A session reminded attendees why in-person talks are ideal (but virtual viewing is still possible on YouTube, <https://youtu.be/mREsCciAHQw>).

Gültan Kisanak, a Kurdish journalist and former member of Turkey’s parliament, was elected co-mayor of Diyarbakır in 2014. Two years later, she was arrested and imprisoned. Her story is remarkable, but not unique. While behind bars, she wrote about her own experiences and collected similar accounts from other Kurdish women, all co-chairs, co-mayors and parliamentarians incarcerated on political grounds by the Turkish state. Written with a left-wing bent, The Purple Color of Kurdish Politics also features reflections on Turkey’s anticapitalist and socialist movements, as well as radical feminism. Demonstrating ceaseless political determination and a refusal to be silenced, the book hopes to inspire women living under even the most unjust conditions to engage in collective resistance.

Abu Toha read remarkable, unpublished new poetry and then turned to the compelling poems from his book, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, chronicling daily life under siege in Gaza. Moderator Said Arikat, Washington bureau chief for the Palestinian newspaper al-Quds, then asked, “When did you begin to write poetry?”

Abu Toha explained that he began posting about the 2014 Israeli assaults on Gaza on Facebook, and people commented that his posts were poetic. “I was just writing what I was seeing in front of me, what I was hearing other people saying. And I’ve always been a ‘photo-taking’ person. I think my love for taking photographs is one reason why I like to write poetry, the details, the things that I can see in my eye and put them onto the page.”

Some of Abu Toha’s photos are included in his book. For example, a photo of a recently bombed residential apartment building is captioned, “The scent of coffee still hangs in the air. But where’s the kitchen?”

He showed a video clip of his young daughter Yaffa, 4, frightened by Israeli air strikes in May 2021, and his son Yazzan, 6, offering a thin blanket to help her hide from the bombs. Abu Toha told the stricken audience, “I wish we did have a magic blanket that would hide all of us and keep us safe.”

His poem, “Shrapnel Looking for Laughter,” describes his neighbor’s house after it was bombed. “Everyone is dead: the kids, the parents, the toys, the actors on TV, characters in novels, personas in poetry collections....Even we, hearing the bomb as it fell, threw ourselves to the ground, each of us counting the others around them. We were safe, but our hearts still ache.”

A different poem describes how a mother in Gaza gathers all her children into her bed and sings a song or distracts them with a story to drown out terrifying explosions. Another mother leaves a cake burning in her oven as she evacuates her family from their home before it’s blown up.

When Arikat asked why, as a bilingual poet, he wrote in English instead of his mother tongue, Arabic, Abu Toha said one practical reason is that there are more publishers in the English language world. However, his poems have been published in AlAraby Al-Jadeed, and also Al-Ayyam, a major Arabic language newspaper in Palestine, “and I’m working on publishing my first poetry collection in Arabic.”

When asked if he ever tries to translate from one language to another, Abu Toha said that doesn’t work well. “When I write in English, I just write it in English from the start,” he explained. “Generally, when I write in English, I have a specific audience in my mind,” he said. “I’m telling stories that I want other people in the West, especially in America, to know about.”

One such poem speaks to the bleak reality in Gaza. When a father/son/husband is late returning home from work, Americans might just check the traffic reports. When a Gazan is late, relatives check the hospitals and the morgue.

“The Wounds” describes when the poet, aged 16, was felled by an Israeli attack during “Operation Cast Lead” on his way to the grocery shop. Dripping with blood, he shares an ambulance with a corpse. “The body burnt, maybe no head. I don’t look at it. The smell is so bad. I’m so sorry whoever you are.” Later at the hospital, “My brother tells me: Hearing the explosion and knowing you hadn’t returned home yet, we assumed you were dead. We began searching for you in the morgue. I look around me, relatives circle my bed. I watch them as they chat. I imagine them praying around my coffin.”

When asked how he copes with all the trauma he’s experienced, Abu Toha said sometimes he writes poetry months after the event. “The Wounds” was written 11 years after the incident, but “I could remember every detail....I think writing about these things helps me recover from some of the traumatic experiences. I do think that writing is a healing process because many of us have nightmares and we don’t know the source of these traumas until we write about them. Through writing you are pulling something from your subconscious, and you can kill these memories.”

The title poem of his book, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” is written to his doctor before surgery to repair lingering damage from that wound. When she opens Abu Toha’s ear, he asks her to “touch it gently. My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside...songs in Arabic, poems in English I write to myself, or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard...” He asks the surgeon to put those sounds back in his ear. “Put them in order, as you would do with the books on your shelf.” But as for “the drone’s buzzing sound, the roar of an F-16, the screams of bombs falling on houses, on fields, and on bodies, of rockets flying away—rid my tiny ear canal of them all...”

Readers of Abu Toha’s poetry will not want to forget the heartbreaking and also uplifting words penned by this Gazan poet. As fellow Palestinian poet Naomi Shihab Nye notes, “I feel like I have been waiting for his work all my life.” ■