This past summer, the celebrated Palestinian poet and essayist Mosab Abu Toha was unable to attend a book signing at Revolution Books, where he told me had appeared before. But on Monday evening at Columbia University, in a ninety-minute event replete with a video presentation of war-torn Gaza, an interview, and his animated account of his experiences in his homeland, Toha was brilliant. The event was sponsored by the Center for Palestine Studies, and uniform security was stationed at every stop, given the number of threats on Toha’s life.
Those threats had grisly precedents in Gaza before he left the country, his wife and three children remaining behind (they eventually reunited). He recounted how he was abducted by what he called Israeli “terrorist forces…I was tortured for three days. I was sexually abused by the soldiers, just like so many others.” The imagery he related about the death and destruction that surrounded him was like “sitting in the middle of a beast.”
Along with reading excerpts from his latest book, “Forest of Noise,” published in 2024, and also his 2022 poetry collection, “Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear,” he dramatically put the poems and reflections in brutal context, his voice rising and falling to capture how horrendous some of the situations were for him and other Palestinians. Some of the most gripping passages are his memories of watching family members “erased.”
“My wife lost her great uncle in October 2024, along with his wife…and then three daughters, one daughter was married, she was killed with her husband, and they had two children. So, these are entire families…we’re talking about. Entire families were gone.”
For several minutes, he discussed a litany of family trees that were decimated, and then in startling repetition, he said, “This is more than genocide.” His poem, “No Art,” dedicated to the American poet, Elizabeth Bishop, begins “You know everything will come to an end…Even your shadow will abandon you when there is no light.” Most of all, he lamented losing a photo of his grandfather “under the rubble of my house.”
During the interview, he was asked how it felt to be addressing Americans whose government had been complicit in the destruction and killing of his people; he was asked to elaborate on his earlier remarks that the conflict in Gaza was more than genocide, which, despite a so-called peace agreement, continues to eliminate Palestinian lives. I have neither the time nor the space here to properly deal with his cogent responses. Let us hope that it was recorded, which it should have been.
Toha’s memories and especially seeing the video brought back the time when Eddie Harris and I were in the Middle East, particularly in Gaza, to make our documentary “Trek to the Holy Land” in 2009, a trip made possible by Rev. Al Sharpton. Back then, Jabaliya was not the ruin it is today, but we knew then how ominous things were, and Toha has given us the terrible update.