“A star said yesterday:
in Gaza we become light”
- Hiba Abu Nada, Palestinian poet and writer killed when an airstrike hit her home in October 2023. 

The poets writing from the wreckage of the ongoing Genocide in Gaza have a lot to say and we need to listen. That poetry would come out of unspeakable horror is not new; from the poems of holocaust survivor Paul Celan to Armenian poets like Daniel Varoujan, through Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia to those writing about colonial violence and the long shadow of Genocide on Turtle Island today. That poetry would specifically come out of Gaza is hardly surprising, though the besieged  and occupied strip is mired in death and destruction, the truth is that beauty, literature and art have always lived there. 

What the Genocide makes evident is  that poetry is the place where we go when there are “no more words”, only to go further and deeper. In this way, Batool Abu Akleen’s poems in 48KG straddle despair and hope beyond language; regularly expanding the limits of Arabic and English to contain even more. As a young writer, translator and even painter Abu Akleen herself embodies the future of Gaza as a place where one day hope will be more imaginable than despair.

In the introduction to the collection Batool writes that “in Arabic, I was losing myself; I was afraid of death […] but when I started to translate this book, I made peace with death”. On the page the poems stand side by side in two languages each with a different impact. In Desert , the final question is : “where can my heart grow again?” In Arabic the reader doesn’t need an answer, whereas in English it feels like there could be a place. 

Throughout this year, The Key will publish poetry from writers and poets whose voices are a reckoning for all of us. Whether they regularly publish or are writing for the first time, the editorial team will seek and curate pieces that continue to witness long after the headlines have moved on. 

Jehan Bseiso

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