Skip to main content

Contemplating the Abyss beneath Me

Mosab Abu Toha and Fatima Bhutto

Debate

The poet Mosab Abu Toha, one of his generation’s leading exponents of Palestinian literature, speaks with the writer Fatima Bhutto about life in Gaza and the role of poets in times of injustice and violence.

Mosab Abu Toha has not yet turned thirty and his life has been continuously marked by the violence of the war and occupation in Palestine. Despite or perhaps because of this, Abu Toha has not stopped writing. Warm memories of his family, his home, the sea of Gaza, his orange trees, and others of everything shaking when missiles hit, and of the anxiety permeating a life that is constantly imperilled shine through his poetry. Abu Toha, who saw how the bombs reduced to dust his house and the community library that he himself had built, is now forced to live in exile from which he keeps giving voice to the suffering of his people. Author of Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (in Spanish, Cosas que tal vez halles ocultes en mi oído, Ediciones del Oriente y del Mediterráneo, 2022) and Forest of Noise (Knopf, 2024), he will speak with the Pakistani writer Fatima Bhutto about the sense poetry can have, even amidst horror.

Moderators: Fatima Bhutto

Participants: Mosab Abu Toha

Related contents

Contemplating the Abyss beneath Me

Mosab Abu Toha and Fatima Bhutto

The poet Mosab Abu Toha, one of his generation’s leading exponents of Palestinian literature, speaks with the writer Fatima Bhutto about life in Gaza and the role of poets in times of injustice and violence.

Watch the video

You might also be interested in

Organised by

Collaborators

With the support of