The Thick Muddy Soil of Language: On Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise

Growing up in Cairo, I’d heard a verse of the Quran—verse 55 of Surat Taha—ring in every room of mourning:

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From earth We created you, and into it We will return you, and from it We will extract you once more.

The same verse looped in my head throughout Mosab Abu Toha’s Forest of Noise. Wherever I turned to look, I met—in various incarnations—the land, the soil, the earth.

In one of the early poems in the collection, “My Grandfather’s Well,” the voice of Abu Toha’s late grandfather, whom he’d never met, comes to him. His grandfather’s phantom hovers by the well in Yaffa, the hometown from which he was displaced in the Nakba. The grandfather asks Abu Toha where he has been, his voice weary of plowing the thick, muddy soil of language.

Abu Toha ends his poem by returning to the soil—of mud and letters—once more, to his own plowing and sowing, saying that his seeds only sprout on this page.

These recurring cycles across the collection culminate in the final piece, “This is Not a Poem,” where Abu Toha returns to Earth. But this time it’s not seeds beneath. He says:

This is not a poem. This is a grave.

As I read, the collection takes on many shapes, but I consider how, if each poem is a grave, then one thing this collection might be is a cemetery. I realize that dead bodies are but one thing buried beneath the thick, muddy soil of its language.

When the Israeli occupation launched its most recent assault on Gaza, an Israeli airstrike destroyed Abu Toha’s home in Beit Lahiya. It had housed the Edward Said Community Library, which Abu Toho had founded and meticulously curated. In October 2023, following warnings of imminent bombings in Beit Lahiya, Abu Toha, along with his wife and children, evacuated to the Jabaliya refugee camp. Like tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, Abu Toha and his family found themselves displaced within the original displacement of their ancestors’ exodus in the Nakba.

Amidst this extraction within an extraction, in the heart of a genocide, Abu Toha continued to write poems. Born from the throes of war, these poems move from grand reflections on the human condition to a practical manifesto on surviving air raids, then transition into lyrical snapshots of serenading his children in the precarious calm before the next explosion. Together, the poems in Forest of Noise emerge as a potent invocation, an act of writing not only about survival, but as survival.

In “Palestinian Village,” Abu Toha captures the rhythms of life in a traditional Palestinian village—a life he, born in 1992 in the Al-Shati refugee camp, had never experienced. The poem paints striking imagery: relaxing under a pomegranate tree, listening to a canary sing, and returning to the land to unearth a worm in freshly rain-revived soil. It also offers a warm portrait of everyday acts of community, such as sharing tea infused with sage or mint with a passing neighbor.

While incredibly heartwarming, the poem is haunting in its subtext. There’s an underlying sense of longing for something irrevocably lost. As one reads, one cannot help but wonder: has the pomegranate tree been blown to splinters in an airstrike? Has the canary burned to ash? Is the neighbor now buried under the rubble, dismembered?

But the possible dual interpretation of the poem further elevates its texture: is it mourning a village decimated in an occupied Palestine, or imagining a village revived in a liberated one? Elegy, memory, and fantasy hum juxtaposed notes within the lines of the poem, morphing into an exquisite dirge that might also be a lullaby.

But language does not exist in a geographical vacuum, untainted by the political implications of its wielding. The poems in Forest of Noise reflect both the immediate reality of living through a genocide and the broader global context that imposes these conditions in the first place.

One of the poems I returned to repeatedly was “Request Letter,” an epistolary poem written in the form of a gutting letter to the angel of death, imploring it to leave a sign on the loved ones it takes so their families can tell who is who.

On the page, both an English and an Arabic version of this letter appear, the only instance where Arabic calligraphy enters the text. In the transition between them, Abu Toha writes:

On the back of the paper, he pens the same letter in Arabic, because who could know what language the angel of death uses, the most-spoken language in the world, or the language of God

As an exophonic writer myself, this has thrown me back to a question that has weighed on me and many Arab writers since the most recent wave of genocide began in Gaza last year. What does it mean for any of us as Arab writers to be writing in English, the language of the major perpetrators of our suffering, in a country that is the main funder and backer of the genocide of Palestinians, and addressing its audience? How do we inhabit the linguistic and political tension between Arabic and English?

We tell ourselves that the language of our colonizers holds the greatest political sway. Only its imperial vocabulary can allow us to lay it bare, then offer our words to be witnessed—legible, and distributable. This, however, doesn’t stop the disturbing sensation in the pit of our stomachs that somehow, even this partaking in hopes of short-term relief from suffering constitutes a degree of complicity, a perpetuation of the apparatus of Western supremacy designed to subjugate our people.

Abu Toha captures this relentless tension in “True or False: A Test by a Gazan Child.” The poem nods to the Western myths of complication and nuance always invoked when it comes to Palestine. It takes the form of a true or false test on Palestinian history, which Abu Toha notes any child in Gaza is easily capable of grading. The tension arrives early with the subtitle of the poem, “To the West.”

When I read the poem, I have a visceral reaction, because it summons another West-addressed letter from Gazan children: In November 2023, Palestinian children in Gaza held a press conference outside al-Shifa Hospital to plead with the world, specifically the West, to end the genocide.

No one, let alone children, should need to audition for their humanity. To me, what defies comprehension is that even then, it did not work. Yet, I observe how we cannot help but ache to humanize our people in the eyes of the West, in hopes of mitigating the suffering.

I hold these thoughts in my mind as I come to the end of the poem “Gazan Family Letters.” There’s a young Palestinian man walking amid the rubble, hauling a suitcase filled with his meager belongings and the remnants of his massacred family, who were killed in an Israeli airstrike. A sibling’s clothes. Their shoes. A pair of slippers. Scattered memories. He refers to the suitcase as their new home. He ends with:

I also have my father’s favorite books, mainly poetry books and short stories. He never had the chance to finish a novel. You know, wars and work.

I’ve returned often to this line, wars and work. How closely linked, almost mundane. Because of the recurrence, because it’s always “wars and work,” the perception almost becomes that our people were made to suffer. The weight of broken Palestinian bodies bears less heft because they are broken often, thus expected to break, and in this part of the world, it reaches a point where the breaking ceases to be newsworthy.

The tension not only evokes incredulity at the status quo but also necessitates a rigorous interrogation. How do we alleviate the suffering without engaging the racist Western premise that perpetuates it? How can we reckon with the demand to—as Mohammed El-Kurd puts it—”stitch the wings of angels and saints” onto our people, our children, to afford them basic humanity?

Much of Forest of Noise, implicitly or explicitly, confronts us with the need to we examine what it means to be screaming in the language of one’s torturers at a world that views their suffering as an inescapable, even necessary part of how it functions.

In Rescue Plane, Abu Toha lists some things he wishes for: a rescue plane, to drop aid to Gazans under bombardment, for flour and flowers. But he ends on the wish behind all the wishes:

I wish we never had to wish.

The poem reminds me of Noor Hindi’s iconic poem, “Fuck Your Lecture on Craft, My People are Dying,” which begins:

Colonizers write about flowers.
I tell you about children throwing rocks at Israeli tanks

Hindi ends her poem with One day, I’ll write about the flowers like we own them.

I think about the endings of both Abu Toha’s and Hindi’s poems, and how they express the same longing: a world where Abu Toha no longer has to wish is a world where Hindi can finally write about flowers like she owns them. And I wonder, when the day comes when Palestinians no longer have to wish, when they can write about flowers like they own them, what kind of poetry will Abu Toha and his fellow Palestinian artists choose to write—if they would even feel the need to write at all, once poetry is no longer an indispensable mode of survival.

There’s an urgency, now more than ever, to engage in the critical work of imagining such a day. To colorize the specter of the Palestinian village that hovers on the blurred edges between the memory of a pulverized past and the bloom of a possible tomorrow. Forest of Noise exists from and for the literal and linguistic land in the sharp gaze of a documenter, the fractures of a griever, and a dreamer’s yearning.

Until that day arrives, we continue to write despite the cognitive dissonance the act of writing demands, despite the failure of discourse and the colonizers’ language, and despite the imperial violence of the Western allyship industrial complex. We continue to emerge from the thick, muddy soil, return to it, and sprout from the land and the page anew. We do this for the same reason that an entire convoy of Palestinians in Abu Toha’s poem holds the frail, dead body of a girl—and runs, runs, runs to a probably bombed hospital while knowing the child is already dead:

You are alive,
for a moment,
when living people
run after you.