As I write this, it has been a year and four months since the Israeli war in Gaza began. As the January’s ceasefire deal hangs in precarity, the devastation continues at an incomprehensible scale, the genocide only widening the interminable history of the Palestianian occupation by Israeli forces. Among the rich canvas of wartime Palestinian voices that have captured these horrors in their writing is the poet Mosab Abu Toha, whose writing and online presence has grasped a wide following of readers and spectators alike. As his contemporaries’, Abu Toha’s work writes back to this inherited history of political violence, his second poetry collection Forest of Noise (2024) voicing undoubtedly his condemnation of the Israeli occupation. While a harrowing testament to the interminable slaughter of Palestinians, Forest of Noise primarily serves as a reclamation of Palestinian life, especially as Abu Toha scavenges from the absolute havoc of more than a life-long war the impulse for Palestinian self-determination. 

Forest of Noise begins with Audre Lorde’s powerful dictum “poetry is not a luxury,” a choice which calls to mind how Abu Toha’s life, as much as his work, heeds urgently to this principle of a political poetry that Lorde has emphatically pronounced in her fierce and lyrical manifesto by the same title. Abu Toha was born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp. His first collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022), a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry and a winner of the Palestine Book Award and the Derek Walcott Prize in Poetry, chronicles his childhood and fatherhood under surveillance and siege. Abu Toha was writing Forest of Noise when Israel began its assault on Gaza in 2023. As his home was bombarded, he fled for safety with his family, and quite astonishingly, he continued to complete the collection. In addition to being a poet of many accolades, Mosab Abu Toha is also a librarian committed to nurturing literature and culture. In 2017, he founded the Edward Said Public Library, the first English language library that first opened in Beit Lahia and then expanded to another branch in North Gaza.

The poems in Forest of Noise spring from this spirit of empathy and humanism: Abu Toha’s prefacing note positions his voice as that of the Palestinian collective. “Every child in Gaza is me. / [...] Every hole in the earth / is my wound,” he writes, his intimacy with the ravaged homeland taking on a Whitmanesque plurality, as seen in his snapshots of a familial life, whether it is his extended or immediate relatives, deceased or living family members. Collective upheaval deprives not only the social fabric of family, social ties, and generations, but his ties with each aspect of Palestinian life: its flowers and frying pans, its trees and clotheslines, its roads and cemeteries, its walls, schools, language, sea, and so on. In the opening poem ‘Younger Than War,’ a seven year old Abu Toha witnesses perpetual warfare that mindlessly decimates everything around him. Tanks churn eggplant fields, hounding warplanes replace eagles, and the fusillade of machine guns batter ants’ ears. Man’s brutalization of nature is a common, though intentional motif in Abu Toha’s poems, as evident in ‘Gaza Notebook (2021-2023),’ ‘Mothers and Mulberry Tree,’ ‘Father’s Myth,’ and ‘Mouth Still Open,’ among other poems. This motif underscores Abu Toha’s approach towards writing a resistance poetry that grapples in detail with traumatic loss, as it depicts the senseless ravage among life’s most delicate forms, and the senseless plundering by Israel’s disproportionately powerful and covert systems of modern warfare.

In a review of Things You May Find Hidden, published in the National Book Critics Circle website, Jacob Appel praises Abu Toha’s “gift for the particular” and his tendency to “[avoid] panoramic generalizations.” One may argue that, in Forest, Abu Toha’s characteristic sensitivity to the particular and the textured detail serves as means to measure and grapple against the incalculable nature of his loss. In his luminous essay ‘Reflections on Exile,’ Edward Said says that “on the twentieth-century scale, exile is neither aesthetically nor humanistically comprehensible.” As Abu Toha’s use of detail surmounts to calculate loss, the poems in Forest both reflect and wrestle against this notion. In spite of the gravity of loss, Abu Toha is hardly sentimental. Direct and often wry, his style is imbued with a clarity that reminds me of the razor-sharp critique of war that is rife in the work of Polish poet Wisalawa Szymborska. “No need for radio:/We are the news,” Abu Toha also writes in ‘Younger Than War,’ attacking a media culture that churns death and suffering into dehumanizing material for mass consumption and public spectacle. How little is known–or what matters to the global eye–of Palestinian livelihood beyond its scores of the dead is a point that Abu Toha scathingly takes to task in the poem ‘True or False: A Test by a Gazan Child.’ Formally unique, this absurdist quiz-poem that is addressed “To the West” mocks its intended audience’s ignorance of the daily ground realities of life under siege in Gaza. “Hand the test to any Palestinian child and they’ll be able to answer it for you,” Abu Toha remarks.

The acerbic force of Abu Toha’s poems is not reactionary, however. It stems from an acute though fertile sense of estrangement: the lived knowledge of exile, even if within the homeland, as a state of constant rupture and contradiction, but also as a creative force. In ‘Reflections,’ Edward Said defines exile “as the unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its essential sadness can never be surmounted.” Nowhere in Forest is Said’s description of exile reflected more aptly than in the poem ‘My Grandfather’s Well.’ In the poem, Grandfather emerges in a dream, his “forehead [...] a glittering, wrinkled map of the past.” Grandfather, whom Abu Toha has “never met,” represents Abu Toha’s fissure from his past and native origin. Of his grandfather, Abu Toha writes:

My grandfather stands still close to the well.

He never abandoned it, even after the Nakba,

even after death.

His hands pour water

down into the well.

The well to which his grandfather holds on is emblematic of his own fight to preserve ties to Palestine in spite of the upheaval of the Nakba. “Where have you been?,” the grandfather asks Abu Toha, the query only disclosing the rift and the latent desire for reunion with the past and native origin. If the dream of his dead grandfather illustrates Abu Toha’s desire to return to the native land pre-Zionist control and thus to reconnect with his lost origins, family, and identity, the fact of displacement irremediably thwarts any attempt at healing. Language, both verbal and bodily, fails both, thus further complicating exile. Raising his question, the grandfather’s

voice get[s]

weary of

plowing the thick, muddy

soil of language,

and Abu Toha, who struggles to reciprocate with an answer, describes how his

arms are down, too tired to lift

even to say hi

The whole poem operates in a restless lag between search and loss, this drama of return and exile drawn out as Abu Toha continues to juxtapose the dichotomic metaphors of silence and language, past and present, age and youth, fruition and barrenness, despair and hope. The rupture colors Abu Toha’s poems with “chiaroscuro contrasts,” to borrow from Eva Hoffman's fine essay ‘The New Nomads’ in Letters of Transit in which Hoffman ruminates on her own early exile from Poland and the consequent creation of her “bipolar personal world.” Elsewhere in the poems ‘We Are Looking for Palestine’ and ‘OBIT,’ among others, Abu Toha harbors this psychic split as he longs for a Palestine interminably estranged. ‘My Grandfather’s Well’ ends with the following lines:

my harvest is yet to arrive,

my seeds only sprout on this page.

Such nomadism, while indicative of a doomed and riven world wherein all homecoming is provisional, ironically cultivates the self-determining impulse of Abu Toha’s poetry. With its wry and detailed critique of colonial forces, Mosab’s Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise paints a harrowing portrait of a collective life and loss under siege, out of which the poetry hones its desire for a free Palestine. If the notion of exile has been watered down within a global culture where disorientation, dislocation and fragmentation abides as a fashionable metaphor, Abu Toha’s collection arrests our attention towards its actual human cost, its terrible psychic implications, and the lessons that it teaches us.