SCOTT SIMON, HOST:
We're going to ask Mosab Abu Toha to read the beginning of his poem "Younger Than War."
MOSAB ABU TOHA: (Reading) Tanks roll through dust, through eggplant fields. Beds unmade. Lightning in the sky. Brother jumping to the window to watch warplanes. Clouds of smoke after airstrikes. Warplanes, eagles searching for a branch on which to perch. No need for radio. We are the news.
SIMON: In the midst of war in Gaza following Hamas' October 7, 2023, attack on Israel, Mosab Abu Toha has a new book of poetry, "Forest Of Noise." The Palestinian poet, teacher and writer, who recently won an Overseas Press Club Award for his "Letters From Gaza" in The New Yorker, joins us now from Syracuse, New York. Thank you so much for being with us.
ABU TOHA: Thank you so much, Scott, for having me.
SIMON: As your poem notes, Gaza and Gazans are in the news so much in the West. What do you hope these poems might help depict that the news may not?
ABU TOHA: Well, what the news is doing is depicting a list of names. If someone has his names on the news, he's lucky to be recognized as a person with a name or an age. But what the news failed to do is to mention that these people existed as individuals - people with their dreams, their hopes, their previous lives, their family relationships. What the news does not recognize is that these people are not dying by themselves. They die with their children, their grandchildren, sometimes with their grandparents. So it's really devastating that the news generally does not recognize these facts, which I, as a Palestinian, know very well, because I lost 31 members of my extended family in one airstrike on October 14. And I didn't get the chance to see these people to bid them farewell.
SIMON: Well, let me ask you to read another one of your poems. May I ask you to read your poem "No Art"?
ABU TOHA: Yeah, sure.
(Reading) No art. The art of losing isn't hard to master - Elizabeth Bishop. You know everything will come to an end - the sugar, the tea, the dried sage, the water. Just go to the market and restock. Even your shadow will abandon you when there is no light, so just keep things that require only you - the book of poems that only you can decipher, the blank map of a country whose cities and villages only you can recognize. I've personally lost three friends to war, a city to darkness and a language to fear. This was not easy to survive, but survival proved necessary to master. But of all things, losing the only photo of my grandfather under the rubble of my house was a real disaster.
SIMON: What's the power of a poem now? Why do you devote yourself to poetry?
ABU TOHA: Well, I mean, the power of the poem is that it preserves, and it delivers the power of the experience and also the emotions and the feelings that come with it. So what I'm doing is documenting what I'm seeing and witnessing and also how I'm feeling - the devastation, the hopelessness, the fear. Because what happened to the people in the book could have happened to me. The girl whose body remained under the rubble for about 10 months, and when we removed the rubble, stone after stone and we found only a bone, that could be my daughter.
SIMON: I have to ask you a tough question. Do you think there are Israelis who have similar stories, particularly after October 7?
ABU TOHA: Yeah. I mean, I know that there are some Israelis who lost family members and who lived through horrible things. But the thing that I cannot compare here - what happened to Israelis on October 7 and what has been happening for us in Palestine for 76 years. I was born in a refugee camp. I was not born in Jaffa, the city where my grandparents were expelled from. My parents themselves were born in refugee camps.
And I told you, I lost 31 members of my extended family. I am one person. And I can't even think about the Israeli suffering because I have suffered all my life. I recognize that they suffer, but you can't bring this to me as a Palestinian who has lost 40,000 people. The last one was my student, Hatem al-Zaaneen. He was killed while he was looking for firewood in Beit Hanoun, north Gaza. How can I happen to think now what happened on October 7 on one day, and now, after a year, we are just trying to think about what happened to the Israelis?
SIMON: Do you see an end?
ABU TOHA: Yeah. The end will come when the United States stops supporting the genocide in Gaza. When you say that Israel has the right to defend itself, it's OK. I don't have any objection. You can say Israel has the right to defend itself. But on the other hand, when you say that Israel has to minimize the civilian casualties, what did you do exactly? Did the United States do anything in order to force Israel to minimize civilian casualties? No. They never did that.
SIMON: Mr. Abu Toha, how are you and your family getting by now? How are you doing?
ABU TOHA: I'm not living a normal life. I'm just spending my time. I'm not living. There's different between living and spending time. Just imagine, every day you wake up to watch the news. I was traveling from South Africa to back to upstate New York. It took me 16 hours on the flight. The moment I landed, I turned on my mobile data to see the names of the people who were killed. Just imagine, I'm doing this every day. Just every day, I look for the last names - Abu Toha, Abu Toha - no. We are good. We are good. I have been living this for a year. And I'm wondering how the United States, how the whole world really expect the people of Gaza to be like after this ends - do they expect that these people would be normal?
SIMON: Mosab Abu Toha - his new collection of poems, "Forest Of Noise." Thank you so much for being with us.
ABU TOHA: Thank you so much, Scott.
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