48kg by Batool Abu Akleen, translated from the Arabic by Batool Abu Akleen, Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher, Palestine, Tenement Press, June 2025
Batool Abu Akleen’s bilingual collection of poems, 48kg, is not solely a powerful literary work; rather, it is a testimony of the genocide that has been wrought upon Gaza for the past two years, written in a poetic verse and style. Her writing is urgent, heart-breaking, honest, and brutal; every line lingers long after reading.
A blend between personal witness and poetic verse, the collection was translated from the Arabic by Akleen herself along with Graham Liddell, Wiam El-Tamami, Cristina Viti, and Yasmin Zaher. The close collaboration ensured that the urgency of her voice was not lost in translation. Indeed, her first-hand experience of the genocidal war on Gaza is not hidden in gentle language, and the bilingual nature of the text puts the original Arabic side-by-side with its English counterparts. In translation, Akleen endeavors to convey her experience of genocide to a broader, non-Arabic speaking audience.
Through her poems, Batool reveals her experiences of the ongoing genocide taking place in Gaza. She wrote, “In this book, I am collecting the parts of myself I have found, in case there isn’t anyone there to do so if I am killed.” Her poems not only represent her personal recollections of the everyday struggle, but also mirror the collective story of the Palestinian people in Gaza and their survival over the last two years. Her narrative voice is both personal and collective, embodying the voices of the countless victims whose names we did not learn. Through this double approach, the poems are both an intimate testimony of Akleen’s experience and a form of collective witness, often blurring the line between the author and the unknown victim.
Indeed, in the two years of genocide, countless Palestinians have been killed by Israel, including writers who have been immortalised by the words they left behind. The martyr Refaat Alareer wrote: “If I must die, you must live, to tell my story,” and Hiba Abu Nada, who also provided her firsthand testimony of genocide before becoming a martyr, wrote in Passages through Genocide: “And if we die, to speak on our behalf, there were people here who dreamt of travel and love and life and other things.” Along with them, thousands of others have lost their voices.
48kg lays bare the atrocities the Palestinian people endure. It does not hide the Zionist intention behind abstractions, but rather confronts us with the stark realities of a genocidal war. Batool writes about ‘images’ that we have all seen over the last two years, images of a genocide in live streams. In her poems, you can see the flesh of people burned alive, “The smell of charred flesh rises from the mouth of hell its breath lines the souls of our living,” the dispersed bodies of Palestinians after Israel’s carpet bombing of Gaza:
I hold a needle & thread in one hand
& your features in the other.
I look among the doctors who are busy with the living
I look for someone to sew your torn face together again
so I can kiss it
for the last time.
In the writing of a twenty-year-old young woman, one can only see the ethnic cleansing, the starvation, the famine, corpses, death; “I stand in line with an endless crowd. I get two bags of flour, lentils, chickpeas, oil, tinned food, sugar.” In the genocide perpetrated by Israel, death is imminent. As she writes, “I can’t help but wait for him.” Hence, Akleen’s poetry exists within this context of death, with death not just a recurring topic in her poetry but the central, immutable constant. Her wishes and dreams do not correspond with what should be for a young woman her age. Instead, she simply writes about the desire of having a grave to herself:
I want a grave with a marble tombstone my loved ones irrigate it
they place roses on it
they weep when longing stings their eyes. Their tears can’t reach me
so I don’t get sad.
I want a grave for myself alone
so my friends can come & talk to me so that for the last time
I’ll have the right to be an individual.[…]
I want a grave
I don’t want my corpse to be decomposing in the middle of the street.
In a similar manner, amputation, the fragmentation of her body, remains a constant fear of hers, based on the haunting images of scattered bodies she has witnessed:
He raises his rocket
up
very high
then he lowers it
down
very low
& I die without a voice.
He skins me, flesh from bone.
Cuts me into forty-eight pieces.
Distributes the parts in blue plastic bags
& throws them to the four corners.
Akleen, like other kids and young people in Gaza, grew up sooner than she was supposed to. They age with Israel’s wars on Gaza, a never-ending reoccurrence in children’s lives in Palestine: “Death breaks into the classroom he reveals secrets to the children & suddenly they grow up…” Born and raised into an occupation, the first star they see in their lives was
a bright reconnaissance plane that hadn’t yet determined its target.
But he was very happy.
He jumped up & pointed at it: This is where I want to go.The plane found its target
wrapped him in death like a cocoon
tore him to pieces
grew wings on each piece
& sprinkled them on the stars
In Akleen’s verses, there is no space for laugh, love, or friendship. In over one hundred pages of poems, in more than seven hundred days of genocide, joy does not appear. This deafening absence echoes the words of the Palestinian poet Marwan Makhoul:
In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political
I must listen to the birds
and in order to hear the birds
the warplanes must be silent.
Akleen’s poetry is emotional, directly confronting the brutality of events taking place in Gaza. Her poems are haunting, provoking us to come face-to-face with these realities even if we had ‘chosen’ to ignore them, if we had chosen to close our eyes to genocide. The collection occupies a space in your mind; in its rawness, it compels you to be there; to witness and to carry the burden of history behind her verses.
Christina Chatzitheodorou was recently awarded her PhD from the University of Glasgow, which examined women’s participation in left-wing resistance movements during the Second World War. She will soon start a post-doc position at Ethnikon and Kapodistriakon University of Athens, exploring Greek and Portuguese solidarity with anticolonial struggles in the Third World during the Anti-Dictatorship Struggle in the late sixties and early seventies. Originally from Greece, she speaks Greek, English, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, and a bit of Turkish, and she is also learning Arabic. Along with her post-doc, she is the curator behind the visual archive focusing on Greek solidarity with Palestine.
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