Forest of Noise, Mosab Abu Toha
Knopf,
2024
Writing about life amid bombs, dismemberments, and deaths; in cities and refugees camps; in the library he created and in the moment of forced flight; and in houses that continue to stand like the families that inhabit them, Mosab Abu Toha commits to life, beauty, relationship to the land, and continuity – all things that Israel seeks to destroy in Gaza through its genocide against Palestine.
Forest of Noise follows Things You May Find Hidden In My Ear (2022), a very well-received collection that brought wider attention to the founder of the Edward Said Library in Gaza (which Israel has since destroyed). By gathering, sharing, and writing books English-language books, Abu Toha participates in maintaining Gazans’ connection to the world, alongside the immense work of Arabic-language poets.
It may be unfair to read and contextualize Forest of Noise so squarely through this anti-imperialist and anti-genocidal approach. Even though Abu Toha does write to resist against these immense systems and their violence, even though he chronicles and widely shares this violence and its meaning for those it targets, a book of poetry can only appear slim and fleeting when compared to the enormity of this destruction.
And yet each of his poems affirms life and shares strength.
The book opens with the lines “Tanks roll through dust, / through eggplant fields.” The symmetry of syllables reinforces the contrast between what crushes and what is crushed, while the rhythm lets us feel the fragility, tenderness, and vitality of the land, especially in view of those parts that have already been reduced to dust. Composed of couplets, this first poem, “Younger than War,” presents a sequence of incisive images that work together to deepen the sense that each event is related and lived through all the others.
Throughout the collection, Abu Toha uses a variety of forms and rhythms to match a shifting tone and to accentuate each of the quickly morphing emotions he presents. Here, in “My Son Throws a Blanket over my Daughter. Gaza, May 2021,” and there, in “On Your Knees,” free verse allows for a slow, careful telling of atrocities and of the resistance to the destruction they are meant to cause. These two poems show the inhumanity of encounters with the military, whether it is at a distance, when a family comes together to wait out the bombings, or directly, when Abu Toha is separated from his family and arbitrarily and brutally abducted, detained, and beaten. Here, line breaks give respite and mimic breath: “Our backs bang on the walls / whenever the house shakes. / We stare at each other’s faces, scared yet happy / that, so far, our lives have been spared.” There, line breaks imitate the breathlessness and indignation of the exhausted prisoner who is repeatedly given the same order: “On your knees! / Yes, I’m a teacher, I say. / On your knees! / But I won’t reach the blackboard / when on my knees. / I’m handcuffed, blindfolded. / I’m shoved from the back of my neck.” The care with which Abu Toha tells these stories meets the contrast of the pain, fear, and shock to bodies that are shaken, banged, restrained, shoved – in no way free to move.
Aside from versified poems, short letters and journals that are just long enough to tell stories open up other possibilities for self-contained explorations of what can be told of the losses and destructions in Gaza along with what is kept and remade. Abu Toha also has recourse to even shorter fragmented poems, so that he may tell what remains possible without exposing the idea to its possible completion… and its likely end. Told in fragments or short forms, the moments and relationships he describes are full of hope and future – and violence and death take on a fleeting character in spite of their repetition.
And at times, Abu Toha refrains from relying even on such poetic effects and literary devices to simply tell, so that we may witness. In this self-restraint, which appears for instance in a short story-like telling of a bilingual letter left in a cemetery for the Angel of death, he indirectly highlights the reach of the poetic aspects of his writing, allows them to shine through more brightly, and lets us become explicitly aware of how he brings Gaza and Gazans to us.
Rhythm, and especially speed, meets the challenges in telling harrowing stories that might otherwise begin to sound repetitive. After all, who would not turn away from images and stories of genocide, after a while? And who would not begin to mix together the succession of persons and acts of violence (and reactions and counter-actions of hope) even as they are told? To Gazans, seeing the death and mutilation of people and the destruction of the places they inhabit as statistics or wholes is impossible: every person, every thing is a world of its own. Abu Toha paces his collection, creates effects of surprise, rest, and work, and brings his readers to participate in the telling by allowing themselves to be taken up by his voice. Aside from the slow pacing described above, there is panic, as in “1948,” where the Nakba is life and death both at a standstill, suspended, through short flurries of words interspersed with breathless silence (“ sparrow on window shrapnel on door / water leaks earth soaks blood”) – a panic that is also a refusal to tie organize this catastrophe into an event that bears its own meaning, awaiting instead its telling and its hearing.
And there is also the collapsing of free verse into a single paragraph interspaced with slashes, which brings a hurried, frantic rhythm to the poem “What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike.” What might have otherwise looked like a list poem becomes a fevered incantation where simple acts meant to increase the chance of survival morph into the gestures needed for life to continue, so that packing a bag leads to life-giving possibilities: “if you are a farmer, you should put some strawberry seeds, / in one pocket / and some soil from / the balcony flowerpot in the other[.]”
This reliance of the variation of form takes place against certain constants: oranges, the sea, the presence of the past through pictures, or through stories and dreams about grandparents or a deceased brother. These constants repeat through the collection just as they do in daily life. These poems are full of rooms, full of doors (which, unhinged, become stretchers or hide bodies), full of roads (and streets that are never flat), all spaces that do not truly have an outside or an inside since they are constantly surveilled, constantly about to be annihilated or become deadly rubble. Speaking of, or to, his brother, Abu Toha collapses even the representations of time and space: “I’m looking at the calendar. It’s October 13, You died eight years ago. The square that besieges number 13 reminds me of a grave[.]” That the resting places of the poet’s relatives are razed to the ground and gravestones destroyed only adds to the collapsing of representations and of the anchors that facilitate return to places and people.
In this collection, Abu Toha addresses us – readers of English-language poetry – and shapes us into the public Palestine needs. Though he has this public in mind, this is not a strategic decision, as he explains that “I can express my feelings and my observations better in English than in Arabic.” He shares and relies upon many of the central references of English-language poetry. He takes up poems after Ginsberg and Whitman, but quickly ends them: the great impetus of their long poems, which depends greatly on the others who are able to form a collective, is stopped short by brains “protruding from their slashed heads” and by falling rubble. He gestures toward a poem “After Bob Kaufman” but is interrupted by the pieces of shrapnel that can be found among the objects of everyday life. He prefaces the collection with a quotation from Audre Lorde and a poem with a quotation from Elizabeth Bishop, reminding us that all these poets can also bring our attention to those whose lives and deaths we allow to leave unheard (though regardless of who listens, they do not remain untold). And in every poem, through the collection, his numerous interviews, his social media account, he keeps us engaged, showing us that resistance is not to be romanticized but understood simply as the act of living as oneself, as one’s own people, when others seek to destroy that possibility.
Jérôme Melançon writes and teaches and writes and lives in oskana kâ-asastêki / Regina, SK. His third chapbook, Bridges Under the Water (2023), is not-so-newly out with above/ground press. It follows Tomorrow’s Going to Be Bright (2022) and Coup (2020), as well as his most recent poetry collection, En d’sous d’la langue (Prise de parole, 2021). He has also published two books of poetry with Éditions des Plaines, De perdre tes pas (2011) and Quelques pas quelque part (2016), as well as one book of philosophy, La politique dans l’adversité (Metispresses, 2018). He has edited books and journal issues, and keeps publishing academic articles that sometimes have to do with some of this, notably on settler colonialism in Canada. He’s on various social media under variations of @lethejerome, notably at bsky.social.
