By Kristina Tom

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Mosab Abu Toha
City Lights Books (2022) / 100 pages / SGD 20.78

For his debut book of poems Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, Palestinian writer Mosab Abu Toha won both the Palestine Book Award and American Book Award. He quickly emerged as an important voice on Gaza in the English-speaking world, earning recognition for the urgency of his themes as well as his fiercely understated approach to the lyric. His poems are grounded in lived experience: first as a child raised in refugee camps, then as a young father raising his own children in the same conditions of deprivation and violence. His experience of wartime Gaza underpins not only Things but also his second collection Forest of Noise, as well as his Pulitzer Prize-winning series of essays for The New Yorker.

In the span of a few years, Abu Toha left Gaza, obtained his MFA from Syracuse University, launched an international literary career, and moved his young family between Gaza and the United States, ultimately deciding to evacuate them permanently. During that final departure, he reported being detained and beaten by Israeli forces before eventually reuniting with his wife and three young children.

Though much has changed for Abu Toha personally, the same cannot be said of Gaza itself, and perhaps this fact alone justifies a critical reappraisal of Things three years after its publication. While international media sporadically report on fresh waves of violence and now impending famine, Abu Toha writes from the perspective of a refugee born to refugees, from a family that has seen four generations displaced from ancestral homes to refugee camps. There, people go about their daily lives cooking, cleaning, studying and working – living and surviving despite unreliable electricity, unclean water, and the regular, violent deaths of friends, family and neighbours. From this perspective, time stands horrifyingly still, a stasis most powerfully rendered in the poem 'The Wall and the Clock':

There is always that clock on the wall.
Every time I step into my room, I feel
curious, want to take it down, see
what's behind its face.
I want to see how old it has become.
My father bought it when I was a child.
I want to count its teeth
to know its age.

But the clock doesn't get old.
The numbers never change.
Only I do.

And then there's the rocking chair,
and I am sitting in it, just me
in the room, rocking back and forth,
doing nothing but
imagining the wall shout to the clock,
"Stop ticking! You're hurting my ears."

I look at the cracks in the paint on the wall.
It's more than just the sound of the clock.
Shrapnel holes stare at me
whenever I enter the room.

[…]

Number 4 falls from the clock's face
when I try to adjust the time.

As if a front tooth has fallen out.

Four days later,
my brother Hudayfah
passes away.

The enduring clock of inestimable age represents the interminable press of war on the speaker and his family, of a crisis that began so long ago it is difficult to conceive of life before it. As a metaphor for Gaza itself, the room is a space in which history resists movement, and any attempt to nudge it forward ends in violence. There is no reprieve from the noise of the clock or the shrapnel-shaped holes in the walls, and nothing to be done about it – complaining, waiting in place and adjusting the time all fail to effect change. Even a minor attempt to interrupt the clock's mechanical indifference results in further pain. The poem ends bleakly with a fallen number and a brother's death, catalogued simply as fact by a speaker confronted by his own futility.

The poem's finality speaks to a recurring theme in the collection: the near impossibility of change or escape. Indeed, the poems often describe life in Gaza as a kind of premature death. In the poem 'Death Before Birth (DBB)', the speaker writes: "the fear of dying before living / haunts us while we are still / in our mothers' wombs". Even before birth, the residents of Gaza exist under the spectre of anticipatory grief, and survival means a precarious, daily slog through the narrow space between life and death. The poem 'My City After What Happened Some Time Ago' first appears to end on a note of resilience – "In Gaza, some of us cannot completely die" – but this defiance is quickly undercut: "Every time a bomb falls […] / we are awakened from our temporary death." Here, life is more akin to an undead existence, with sudden violence provoking a brief flicker of animation between periods of stupor and dread.

As an eyewitness account of the human cost of war in Gaza, Abu Toha's writing is invaluable. As a work of poetry, it is devastating – and yet not without moments of beauty. Things bears witness to the horrors of Gaza (and often loudly protests them) with poems that remain intensely personal, attending closely to moments in which tenderness and brutality often coexist. 'The Wounds', a poem recounting Abu Toha's injury from shrapnel at age 16, offers a harrowing depiction of a bombed car loaded with abandoned supplies and the corpse of an 18-year-old friend:

The canisters had exploded, and the wheat
spattered on the ground.
Fresh bread baked with hot red blood,
and sand for yeast.

Death is a gruesome but regular occurrence in Gaza, and the image of freshly baked bread – a simple, mundane pleasure – intermingled with spilled blood underscores how violence saturates every corner of daily life.

The speaker goes on to describe his own hospitalisation after being presumed dead:

My brother points at the hole in my neck.
"Your index finger can fit in that hole.
It's centimeters from your windpipe."

If, when the rocket fell, I had moved my head a bit
to watch a bird on a tree or to count
the clouds coming from the west side,
the shrapnel might have cut through my throat.
I wouldn't be married to my wife,
father of three kids, one born in America.

Again, the poem presents snippets of everyday beauty (a bird on a tree, clouds drifting by) alongside bloody horror ("the shrapnel might have cut through my throat"), and again, the speaker somehow narrowly survives. One teenaged boy dies, and another lives to raise his own children. Who or why are not questions that the speaker has time or the wherewithal to entertain, let alone tease apart. There is no logic to war, at least not from the poems' civilian point of view.

Towards the end of the collection, the poem 'To My Visa Interviewer' admonishes the government official who will determine whether the speaker will be granted permission to travel to the US, a means of escape from Gaza afforded to few Palestinians. It is a proud defence of his life story in the face of interrogation, somehow maintaining civility without sacrificing dignity: 

You will ask me for my web site.
I am no spider, and my site is wherever
a rose grows,
wherever clouds cast their shadows on
roofless houses,
wherever a bomb does not fall,
wherever a child does not confuse a cloud
for bomb smoke.

The speaker asserts his identity not through the bureaucratic criteria of paperwork or digital presence, but through his resolve in imagining a space where his family might find respite from trauma and the possibility of growth. This determination crystalises in the final poem 'A Rose Shoulders Up', which closes the collection not in despair, but in defiant strength:

Don't ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear is at once testimony, protest and ars poetica. It documents not only the physical violence of war and displacement, but also the psychic injuries dealt to perception, identity and language under prolonged siege. What emerges is a poetics of endurance – of watching, cataloguing, documenting. Its sustained, unflinching attention reminds us that truths too horrible to witness must still be recognised – and spoken.

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