Review | Forest of Noise

David L reviews a new collection of poetry by Palestinian poet and writer Mosab Abu Toha.

Forest of Noise is the second of Mosab Abu Toha’s works, after his collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza, published in 2022 by City Lights Publishers. The first collection was a pocket sized collection of poems and images about everyday life in Gaza under Israeli apartheid and occupation. The second is written in the context of Israel’s genocidal campaign against the Palestinians. Much of it was apparently written whilst under bombardment, forced movement and eventual evacuation to the US. As a result, it understandably feels a lot sparser than the first collection.

The titular Forest of Noise is the cacophony produced by Zionist bombardment, as described in the poems’ lines:

A car slides on our asphalt street,

like an iron running on an ironing board.

But in my city, streets are never flat.

Potholes from bombs are everywhere,

like crows’ nests in a forest of noise.

The poems are all in Toha’s usual style of unrhymed verse and prose poems, but in this collection the quiet and tender moments, the moments of survival are fewer and far in between the bombing of Gaza. Descriptions of destruction and death pervade the book’s poems, several of which are dedicated to Abu Toha’s brother, Hudayfah. But these poems cannot simply be remembrances, for Israel does not allow peace even for the dead. Abu Toha writes to his brother in ‘A Blank Postcard’: ‘Now it’s 2024, and the cemetery you were buried in was razed by Israeli bulldozers and tanks. How can I find you now?’

The collections covers this necro-violence and more, with poems on Abu Toha’s children, his abduction and imprisonment by Israeli soldiers, and the historical context of this current violence. In his poem ‘1948’, the poet draws links between now and the original catastrophe, lest we forget that the Nakba is a process and not an event. The current campaign is not self-defence provoked by Palestinian resistance, but the end point of a genocidal logic which has existed in Israel since its foundation.

It was hard, whilst reading this collection, not to think of Adorno’s statement in ‘Cultural Criticism and Society’:

Cultural criticism finds itself faced with the final stage of the dialectic of culture and barbarism. To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric. And this corrodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poetry today. Absolute reification, which presupposed intellectual progress as one of its elements, is now preparing to absorb the mind entirely. Critical intelligence cannot be equal to this challenge as long as it confines itself to self satisfied contemplation.

What does it mean to write poetry mostly in English, when it is English speaking countries such as Britain and the USA which have created the conditions for genocide and support it to this day? 4th Estate (an imprint of HarperCollins) has published Abu Toha, true, but a backer of Israeli enterprises like Baillie Gifford was a massive part of the publishing world (one of the big literary prizes was named after them). When Fossil Free Books campaigned against them in part for its investment in Zionist companies and technology, there was a strong response in support of the investment management company. And it is common knowledge that many Palestinians speak English in part so they can fight against their own demonisation by Islamophobic and anti-Palestinian Western media. But why should they have to in order to get sympathy? It is this disparity that Abu Toha calls attention to in his poem ‘Request Letter’ in which a Palestinian writes a letter for the Angel of Death in English and then ‘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’.

When held to the harsh light, our words read hollow and false. Our words fail, and Abu Toha says as much in his poem ‘My Library’: ‘My books remain on the shelves as I left them last year, but all the words have died.’ Should it not make our blood boil, when an entire people are being murdered, and space is given not to them but the writers of twee murder mysteries to defend those funding their murderers? In the English language, Palestinians have had to fight an uphill battle just to be able to ask not to be slaughtered. Against the Palestinian struggle for liberation, all of Western culture is thrown into question.

Abu Toha makes this question explicit by putting himself into conversation with several American poets. Two of his poems are named ‘After Allen Ginsberg’ and ‘After Walt Whitman’, both poets famous for writing very long works which marked turning points in the history of American literature. The works which bear their names are in opposition to them; short, no metaphorical destruction such as Ginsberg describes but the real dead and brutalised of Gaza. Perhaps, in another lifetime, some link could have been drawn to the radical, democratic spirits of these poets’ works. But no such attempt is made: what use is that to the dead? 

Throughout the collection, Abu Toha describes the dead in a more plain, descriptive detail than people might expect from poetry. When words fail, what is the use in being poetical? Any literary precedents and comparisons come from Arabic, not English; in his autobiographical novel For Bread Alone, the Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri describes his intoxicated and starving father twisting the head of his infant brother and killing him in a similar manner. In circumstances such as these, degradation must be recorded in direct and unpretentious language.

For me, the collection only confirmed a long held suspicion that culture and its various industries are, as a review of Roberto Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas put it, an ‘anaesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings.’ It’s as Adorno says: ‘No society which contradicts its very notion – that of mankind – can have full consciousness of itself.’ Reading this collection reminds us of what is exactly at stake. Forests worth of trees have been cut down to produce the literature we hold so high – perhaps someday soon, if the poets aren’t so busy, they might try cutting down the Forest of Noise. Words fail, when it comes to genocide. Perhaps the only thing left worth writing then is a call to action.

Forest of Noise is published by 4th Estate.