Forest of Noise by Mosab Abu Toha

A book review

Salaam readers, Medina here,

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Since we’re in a poetry-appreciating mood, I want to share some thoughts about Forest of Noise by

Mosab Abu Toha

. I picked it up a few weeks ago, when my head was full of Iran, during its recent spat with Israel.

I wanted to be diving into Persian classical poetry, perhaps finish reading Fariduddin Attar’s magnificent Conference of the Birds which I’d intended to read in Ramadan (oh, reading goals…how they dazzle sadly as they flutter out the window). But instead, it was Mosab’s poems, the ones that have laced the edges of these grim last few years, that whispered to me out of my bookshelf.

Forest of Noise speaks with the searing voice of a painfully changing epoch. Abu Toha is relentlessly clear in his witnessing, unflinching in his poignancy. Not only are these words written by a man who knows they are his only escape, but they are a document for us – for the future – of the Gaza genocide.

These poems haunt with their evocation of a world in which farms, strawberry plants, cats, clouds, and smashed masonry remembers, talks, refutes every cynical argument – simply by being. These poems have the power to raze the heart of the reader, exhuming the graves of every one of our buried truths to testify for or against us.

This is the poem not just as a work of literature but as reality, a reality that is unbelievable, despised, monstrous, that we fruitlessly wish could unhappen.

But now that it’s happening, and is committed to paper, in books, in the Library of Congress, in libraries, on people’s shelves, I get the sense that poetry this perceptive is more than poetry. These words constitute the drops in the ocean on which the ship of history glides, forming waves that might rise high enough to alter its direction, maddeningly slow, yet once its course is changed, equally difficult to arrest.

They expose much of contemporary Western art as so much privileged thrill-seeking, flirting with every kind of boundary because the boundaries don’t cross us, sever our torsos from our legs or our ears from our skulls. These are poems the poet wished he never had to write. And here were are, reading them, musing on their literary qualities. We make me sick sometimes.

And yet there is boundless tenderness in these poems, for the lost grandfather’s photo holding up a house, for the mother gathering her children around her in her bed like luggage before leaving on a holiday, saying anything to cover the sounds of drones and the howl of bombs falling, in the chickens and ducks of the village that have no idea of occupation, drinking from puddles of rain like they know all this will one day be history.

Still, there’s no getting away from the horror of what Mosab has seen, as expressed in the desperate, timeless urge to protect one’s child, from the poem Gaza Notebook (2021-2023):

upon birth, mask up your children and leave them unnamed
so
the angel of death can’t find them

someone may ask
why not paint their faces change their names
every day

a nightingale on the tree of dusk exclaims
what if both the painter and the paint
work for the angel of death

a stone near the cemetery suggests
why give birth to children
at all

There’s a evocation of the Unseen here too, of the continued, expansive presence of the ancient co-existing in our time, as in these lines, recalling Abraham’s maqam (station) by the Ka‘abah, from the poem My Grandfather’s Well:

My grandfather stands still close to the well.
He never abandoned it, even after the Nakba,
Even after death.
His hands pour water
Down into the well.

In the refugee camp,
where land is strewn with
debris, where air chokes with rage,
my harvest is yet to arrive,
my seeds only sprout on this page.

There are lines here that transcribe the haunting reality of people made landless – the original meaning of flamenco, fellah mankub, the dispossessed peasant – as in the poem We Are Looking for Palestine:

Sir, we are not welcome anywhere.
Only cemeteries don’t mind our bodies.

And there are moments that reflect the real-life horror movie that is the Gaza genocide, as in these lines from Under the Rubble:

The scars on our children’s faces
will look for you.
Their amputated legs
will run after you.

There is also alchemy in these poems, the poet forced to resort to the poem as a technology of survival. In My Library, Abu Toha transfigures a pen into a ventilator for the main characters in the theatre of his life:

The pen inside the book is still intact,
But some ink drops have leaked
Some words breathe its ink,
The pen like a ventilator
For a dozen patients:
Home, Jerusalem, the sea, Haifa,
the rock, the oranges, the sand,
the pigeon, Cairo, my mother,
Beirut, books, the rock, the sea, the sea.

I won’t quote more lines because I want you to buy the book. To participate not only in memorialising Gaza, as though Gaza has already died, but sequencing Gaza into the genes of our world, grafting them like vine shoots into our very bodies, through our witnessing eyes.

Free Palestine.

With love and salaam,

Medina, MWS co-founder

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