Mosab Abu Toha: Shrapnel Looking For Laughter
I attended a live Zoom meeting today with Mosab Abu Toha, the award winning Palestinian poet known for his work in the New Yorker, who recently fled Gaza for Cairo. It was sponsored by Middle East Children’s Alliance and City Lights Bookstore. He began the meeting by mourning the recent murders of poet and teacher Refaat al-Areer and Doaa Al-Masra, a teacher and musician. He described al-Masra’s joy of making music with children, and commented, “There is no music now, except for the music of death, and the musician does not grow tired, because he is constantly fueled by the US administration.”
Abu Toha described how as he attempted to leave Gaza with his wife and children in November, he was pulled aside by IDF soldiers who grilled, terrorized and humiliated him, stripped him naked in front of many other people and accused him of being a Hamas terrorist and murder of women and babies. He was cuffed and blindfolded, then marched with other men to a facility where he was interrogated (an essay on his experience will soon appear in the New Yorker). As he was interrogated he could hear occasional gunshots in a courtyard outside which he was sure was where he would be executed. After a few days he was released. As he was taken outside some officials apologized to him for the “mistake.” He heard some others asking “is this the writer?” Unbeknownst to Abu Toha, a major effort for his release was underway in the US led by activists and literary organizations and it appears this resulted in his freedom.
Abu Toha, released, then desperately sought his family. When called away by IDF soldiers, he had left his young children and wife behind in the crowd and he didn’t know where they were. Though he reunited with them, he is now disconnected from the rest of his family in Gaza, whose whereabouts and condition — alive or dead — are unknown.
Abu Toha is far from alone, of course. His situation — humiliated and brutalized by the IDF, mourning for the deaths of irreplaceable loved ones, dehumanized by Kafkaesque bureaucracies and traumatized is a common one for Palestinian victims of the Israeli occupation. The only thing that makes Abu Toha unusual is his ability to leave, which he noted with a voice tight with survivor’s guilt.
“You can defend yourself by killing the militants who raided your towns and killed your people,” appealed Mosab Abu Toha on the zoom call, “but you cannot kill women and children, you cannot kill the pregnant wife of my brother…you cannot destroy schools…..this is inhuman.”
“You do not have to be a Jew to be a Zionist, and likewise you do not have to be a Palestinian to love Palestine, you must just be a human being.”
One person asked Mosab how he continues as a public intellectual and writer even though this might endanger his family. “You do not have to be a writer to be endangered or to have an endangered family in Gaza,” said Abu Toha. “You just need to be a Palestinian.”
Abu Toha concluded with the following poem, Shrapnel Looking For Laughter:
The house has been bombed. Everyone dead:
The kids, the parents, the toys, the actors on TV,
characters in novels, personas in poetry collections,
the I, the he and the she. No pronouns left. Not even
for the kids when they learn parts of speech
next year. Shrapnel flies in the dark,
looks for the family’s peals of
laughter hiding behind piles of disfigured
walls and bleeding picture frames. The radio
no longer speaks. Its batteries have burnt,
the antenna is broken.
Even the broadcaster felt the pain when the radio
was hit. Even we, hearing the bomb
as it fell, threw ourselves
to the ground,
each of us counting the others around them.
We were safe, but our hearts
still ache.
