He speaks quickly, as if time is running out, and has a mix of anger, energy, and sadness in his voice. The day we caught up with him by phone, in early November, Mosab Abu Toha is in San Francisco, on tour to promote noise forestKnopf Editions, untranslated), his latest collection of poems, which has just been published in English. A few days later he traveled to France to talk about the precedent, What you will find hidden in my ear (Julliard, translated from English by Eve de Dampierre-Noiray).
Published in 2022 in the United States, this collection of poetic reports immerses us, with words that stand out even more than the images that reach us today, into their daily life in Gaza. These texts were written before the Hamas massacres, on October 7, 2023, and the bloody response of the Israeli army in its territory and in its own, but in the long litany of war events that have marked its existence, independently, ultimately. The violence that Mosab Abu Toha describes has been in his heart and in his flesh since his birth, thirty-two years ago, in the Al-Shati refugee camp, in the north of the Gaza Strip.
“ Obviously this trip will be my first time in Paris. I am Palestinian! Until I was 27 I couldn’t leave my country.” he explains. He applied for and received a Schengen visa last month while attending a poetry festival in Greece. When asked how he is, his response explodes: “ Better than my family members who remained in Gaza. » In November 2023, the writer embarked on the path of exile with his wife and three children. They now live in the United States, not far from the campus of Syracuse University, in upstate New York, where Mosab Abu Toha graduated in 2023 and where he teaches today.
English, it’s sesame.
For several months it has appeared on the pages of New Yorker an irregular chronicle of his existence. He has also written articles in the New York Times and the Washington Post. But the poetic words abandoned him. “I can’t find the time, he saidand then all my work right now is in English. Since the Western media is not doing its job [rendu très difficile par la situation matérielle sur place ainsi que par les limitations imposées par Israël pour accéder au terrain]I became a reporter. I read the news in Arabic, translate it and publish it on social networks… It’s a bit as if Anne Frank, instead of writing her diary from her hiding place in Amsterdam, had posted her daily life on Facebook. My compatriots are losing their lives, but also their past, their present and their future, and if I don’t do something to make their stories seen, people won’t know what is happening. »
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