Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

The proximity of death is palpable in Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s devastating debut collection, Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear:

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. […]

So persistent and absolute is the carnage that even language itself is at risk of obliteration, and, in this poem, line breaks underscore the uncertainty of the children’s future. Indeed, violence infiltrates every aspect of life on the ground in Gaza, transforming everyday objects into repositories of suffering. After an airstrike, the speaker, age 16, hurries with his family to “the radio, that old dirty box / that usually vomits / blood and body parts into our ears.” In another poem, the speaker hears a voice that asks him “to stop writing heavy poems, / poems that have bombs and corpses, / destroyed houses and shrapnel-covered streets, / lest the words stumble and slip into the bloody potholes.” Instead, “[s]creams fill the cracks in the walls / and the potholes in the nameless roads.”

But even in the face of interminable violence, there’s an ironic distancing at work, as in Abu Toha’s description of the aftereffects of a failed missile attack: “Shrapnel cuts electric wires. / Dust tops off our tea, / like latte foam.” An “interlude” includes a series of photographs and accompanying captions. One depicts a schoolyard filled with children, and below it the words “Mid-Term Test” are followed by a question: “When a drone follows you on your way to school, what is it doing[?]” A range of possible answers are offered in multiple-choice format, including: “It’s counting your steps to make sure you’re getting your daily exercise.” Such subdued humor filters through many of the poems in this collection, and the book closes on a hopeful note:

Don’t ever be surprised
to see a rose shoulder up
among the ruins of the house:
This is how we survived.