The Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha received the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, for four New Yorker essays documenting the lives and suffering of Palestinians in Gaza during Israel’s genocidal war following the Hamas attacks of October 7, 2023.
The Pulitzer board praised his writing for capturing "the physical and emotional carnage in Gaza that combine deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience of more than a year and a half of war with Israel."
"Let it bring hope. Let it be a tale," Abu Toha posted on X after winning.
New Yorker Essays:
In my homeland, where we used to cook and celebrate together, my relatives are eating animal feed to keep from starving.
This year, I learned the difference between a traveller and a refugee.
I no longer recognize many parts of my homeland. Only my memories of them remain.
4) December 31, 2024: Requiem for a Refugee Camp
In October, 2023, I could not imagine anything worse than the destruction in Jabalia refugee camp. But what is happening now outstrips anything I saw there.
A Voice From the Rubble
Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet and scholar from Gaza, has experienced profound personal losses due to the ongoing conflict. Born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp in the northern Strip, he pursued English literature at the Islamic University of Gaza. In 2009, at the age of 16, he was injured during an Israeli airstrike. In 2014, both his home and office were destroyed in Israeli bombings that leveled the university's English department, wiping out his book collection. He received donations from Facebook friends to rebuild the collection, and in 2017, founded the Edward Said Library, Gaza's first English-language library.
In 2022 Abu Toha released his first poetry collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, which won the American Book Award. As an acclaimed poet, his work has been published in leading outlets such as The New York Times and The Washington Post. He is also a recipient of a prestigious Harvard fellowship for scholars at risk...
The helplessness of those living in Gaza resonates through poems like "My Son Throws a Blanket Over My Daughter" and "What a Gazan Should Do During an Israeli Air Strike," where survival is reduced to rituals of desperation - covering children's eyes while clinging to fragments of a life that could vanish at any moment...
Equally poignant are his poems about those left behind, such as "To My Mother, Staying in an UNRWA School Shelter in the Jabalia Camp" written after Abu Toha fled Gaza. Lines like: "I need you, Mother. You are my better heart / when I feel I am about to die. / I do not know / if you are even alive," capture the unbearable burden of separation and the agony of uncertain survival...
In "Two Watches," the tragic irony of a dual existence emerges: "He's wearing two watches, / one set to the local time in New York, / the other to Gaza's." This duality encapsulates the plight of those tied to Gaza. Leaving means remaining bound to its anguish, unable to sever the connection. Staying, however, makes any type of escape impossible - a state of helplessness that transcends geography, binding you to a place where identity has become inseparable from the experience of loss...
These poems are not merely condensed phrases or descriptions of events; they are fragmented evidence - a testimony.
What sets this collection apart is its raw urgency: it speaks of lives that have ended, are ending, or could end at any moment. And these endings are, in part, because of us, Israelis. These poems are not merely accounts of a distant witness; they implicate us all.
Abu Toha's poetry challenges us, as Israelis, to confront Gaza's destruction - to see, in stark black and white, the ruined houses, the burned books, the lost lives, and the generations erased. It demands that we recognize Gaza as a place - a place that, for many, no longer exists...
Abu Toha's poems encapsulate entire lives: his own, as he continues to write; a life lost to an air raid, buried under rubble; and perhaps most harrowing of all - a life that could be lost at any moment. A life that almost certainly will.
To conclude today's Cool Announcement post, I would like to share with you the latest two entries of Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, which were inspired by Mosab Abu Toha's two poems, "my grandfather and home" and "Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear" for Alicia M. Quesnel, MD, respectively:
CLXXX:
my grandfather
used to count the days for return
with his fingers
then stones, birds, flowers, Gazans ...
his thousand-yard stare nowhere
FYI: "The thousand-yard stare or two-thousand-yard stare is a military phrase coined to describe the limp, unfocused gaze of a battle-weary soldier, but the symptom it describes may also be found among victims of other types of trauma."
And CLXXXI:
doctor, you may find
these things hidden in my ears
a boy murmurs ...
buzzing of drones, roar of fighter jets
screams of Gazans, living and dead
FYI:
Haaretz, May 6:
Two Haaretz Reporters Win 2025 Award for Courageous Journalism During Gaza War
Jack Khoury and Sheren Falah Saab will recieve the Uri Avnery Award for Courageous Journalism. The judges panel noted that 'Haaretz is the only Hebrew-language media outlet that has not shied away from covering what is happening to the civilian population in Gaza'
Added: Against the Drowning Noise of Other Words, CLXXXII: "mow the grass"
breezy sunshine ...
row upon row of eclairs
oozing cream
glazed with blue wording:
let the IDF mow them down!
What does it say about a society that sells eclairs inciting IDF destruction in Gaza while Palestinian children wait in lines at community kitchens, unable to enjoy even one cookie?
...The Hebrew word written on the eclairs means "mow" as in to lawn-mow, but mowing is also a euphemism for something more brutal. "Mowing the grass" is a term popularized in 2013 to refer to Israel's "strategy of attrition designed primarily to debilitate the enemy capabilities." To put it more crudely, mowing the grass means bombing Gaza periodically to facilitate temporary quiet for Israel...
...I'm struck by the profound cognitive dissonance experienced by so many in Israeli society. We revel in sugary-and-creamy abundance, a year-round array of fresh vegetables and fruit and stores with names like "Meatman" that advertise marbled steaks. Not far away, Palestinians in Gaza burn plastic and toxic waste to cook the little food they can obtain or scavenge.''
