Mosab Abu Toha, a Palestinian poet, won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for a set of four essays published in The New Yorker, but the high of the victory dropped flat almost immediately.
His series, written during the last year and a half of Israel’s genocide in Gaza, merges “deep reporting with the intimacy of memoir to convey the Palestinian experience,” per the award committee. The recognition comes at a time when Gazans are facing the realities of a still broken ceasefire, the threat of Israel seizing new territory, and a crippling blockade on food and supplies.
Abu Toha takes up this difficult mantle in each piece of written word, whether it was one of the winning essays or not.
He interweaves reflections on his childhood and young fatherhood in Gaza with a clear and personal documentation of the horrors that followed October 7th, 2023: Israel destroying his family’s home in Beit Lahia, where he founded Gaza’s first English-language library; their time in the Jabalia refugee camp and its subsequent bombing; being detained and beaten by the Israeli military while fleeing to Egypt with his wife and young children; and, eventually, making it to the United States, the very nation funding his family’s suffering back in Gaza.
As a result of the blockade, starvation is a present danger in Gaza, a fact that Abu Toha, who is still in the United States, centered in one of his pieces selected for the Pulitzer. In “My Family’s Daily Struggle to Find Food in Gaza,” he writes:
“I have felt a sort of hatred for the food in front of me. I think of the hunger in my homeland, and of all the people with whom I want to share my meals. I yearn to return to Gaza, sit at the kitchen table with my mother and father, and make tea for my sisters. I do not need to eat. I only want to look at them again.”
DETAILS OF THE CRISIS
Without proper nutrition, 57 people have already starved to death in Gaza, while an estimated 3,500 children under the age of five are at risk of the same. In total, about 290,000 children are “on the brink of death,” according to Al Jazeera.
“This prize means a lot to me, but it also reminds me that there is a lot to work on,” the poet told Amy Goodman of Democracy Now. “Not only by writing, but also encouraging people who have the power to take action to stop all of this.”
“Their only ‘crime’ is being Palestinian,” activist Lucas Febraro said of the at-risk children in an Instagram video, before calling for more people to stand up for Palestine and join the Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions movement. “We don’t need everyone to do everything. We need everyone to do something.”
Other aspects of the Pulitzer win hardly gave Abu Toha reason to celebrate. Following the announcement, Israeli and American right-wing media outlets attacked him and his work, and Meta briefly suspended his account. Plus, the far-right Zionist group Betar US continues to target him. Just as it did with Mahmoud Khalil and other pro-Palestinian voices, the group is pushing the Trump administration to deport the poet, Artists at Risk Connection explained.
In 2024, Abu Toha and his immediate family returned to his former graduate school, Syracuse University, through the international Scholars at Risk program. Before that, he was a visiting poet and librarian-in-residence at Harvard University.
His parents, siblings, in-laws, and extended family all remain in Gaza. However, many of his loved ones have not made it this far. They include 31 family members who were killed by a single Israeli airstrike, and his dear friend and fellow poet, Refaat Alareer, who was also assassinated by the Israeli military, Abu Toha writes in his essays.
EXCERPTS OF ABU TOHA’S WORK
Below are additional excerpts from The New Yorker publications. To read more of Abu Toha’s work, check out his books of poetry, “Forest of Noise,” and “Things You May Find Hidden in my Ear,” which are both available for purchase online and in bookstores.
“More notifications are lighting up my phone. Sometimes I decide not to check the news. We are part of it, I think to myself.
… I hear another blast but don’t see any smoke. Panic runs through me. When you can’t see the explosion, you feel like you’re blind.”
— The View From My Window in Gaza, October 20, 2023
“I’m being killed every day with my people. The only two things I can do are panic and breathe. There is no hope here.
… If not for the war, I would be playing soccer with my friends twice a week. I would be watching movies with my wife. I would be reading the books on my shelves. I would be taking my kids to the playground, and to the beach. I would be riding my bike with my son, Yazzan, on the beach road. But now there are no books and no shelves and no beach road.”
— The Agony of Waiting for a Ceasefire that Never Comes, November 6, 2023
“In Gaza, a child is not really a child.
… We want to stay for our family, and we want to leave for our family … in a low voice I tell my parents that we are going to try to leave Gaza. My mother goes pale. She looks at my children, tears in her eyes. I don’t want to hug anyone, because I don’t want to believe that I am leaving them.
What I am feeling is not guilt but a sense of unfairness. Why can I leave and they cannot? We are lucky that Mostafa was born in the U.S. Does it make them less human, less worthy of protection, that their children were not?”
— A Palestinian Poet’s Perilous Journey Out of Gaza, December 25, 2023
“In the new photos, I could see little more than piles of concrete, blurred by dust that probably came from non-stop bombardments. There were no green areas, no soccer fields, no colorful buildings or roofs. Only the streets and clearings could be made out. I looked at the photos again and again, and an image of a graveyard that grows and grows formed in my mind.”
— Requiem for a Refugee Camp, December 31, 2024
This year’s Pulitzer winners were announced on May 5, including books such as “James” — Percival Everett’s decorated revoicing of “Huckleberry Finn” — as well as “Combee: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee River Raid, and Black Freedom During the Civil War,” by Edda L. Fields-Black.
However, the Pulitzer Prizes have always honored more than the world of books. In total, the awards recognize “distinguished” work across 23 different forms of journalism, literature, drama and music.
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