The scale of the devastation that has been wracked upon Gaza since October 7, 2023, can be hard to fathom. It’s now 19 months on, and Israel's aggression is once again ramping up, much of the enclave in ruins, and the death toll continues to rise.
And in that time, just as they have for decades, Palestinian voices have been essential in processing this immeasurable pain on a human level, although it remains impossible to make sense of it all.
One of the most affecting commentaries has come from Gazan poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha, 32, whose essays for the New Yorker won the Pulitzer Prize on Monday.
Abu Toha’s pieces on the “physical and emotional carnage in Gaza” were praised for “combining deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year-and-a-half of war with Israel,” according to the Pulitzer committee.
But that doesn’t capture even the half of what makes his work so affecting. Abu Toha is a poet by trade, having published two award-winning collections in his burgeoning career: Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza (2022), and Forest of Noise (2024).
And his keen eye for catching small details amidst disaster, combined with his poetic skill, gives him the power to conjure images that linger in the mind’s eye of even the most desensitised reader.
In his essay A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza, published in December 2023, he paints a scene set on a dusty road leading to a school, in which a group of donkeys and horses stand amongst people fleeing for their lives.
Abu Toha writes: “One horse’s tail is nearly detached. When a young man tries to quench its thirst, the water dribbles out of a hole in its neck. He asks me whether I have a knife, to put it out of its misery.”
As an accomplished scholar and librarian (he founded the Edward Said library in Gaza, the only English-language library in the enclave), he draws from his influences and analyses his language with clarity and precision, helping the international community understand the nuances of the Palestinian perspective.
Abu Toha writes: “In A State of Siege, the Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish writes something that is difficult to translate. ‘We do what jobless people do, he says. 'We raise hope.’ The verb nurabi, meaning to raise or to rear, is what a parent does for a child, or what a farmer does for crops. Hope is a difficult word for Palestinians. It is not something that others give us but something that we must cultivate and care for on our own. We have to help hope grow.”
And while his work is invaluable from a political perspective, as he describes atrocities witnessed during his time in the detainment centre in Be’er Sheva, and his treatment when travelling to the United States, for example, he’s also an eminently relatable figure on the page, with his own tastes and foibles. He sees beauty in the mundane just as plainly as he sees evil and calamity. And clear-minded sense of justice never loses sight of his individuality.
And, by keeping his essays deeply personal, his writing, especially his poetry, captures the unmistakable sense of humour of the Gazan people.
Take this line in his poem Under the Rubble, published in November 2024: "I changed the order of my books on the shelves. Two days later, the war broke out. Beware of changing the order of your books!"
Many of Abu Toha's acclaimed peers have been killed in the war, such as the poet Refaat Alareer, making the poet’s work chronicling the ongoing calamity all more crucial.
