Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear
Reflections on the sounds of war, in response to the work of Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha.
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD i When you open my ear, touch it gently. My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside. Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness. You may encounter songs in Arabic, poems in English I recite to myself, or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard. When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear. Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf. ii The drone’s buzzing sound, the roar of an F-16, the screams of bombs falling on houses, on fields, and on bodies, of rockets flying away— rid my small ear canal of them all. Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision. Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up. Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours, my doctor, day and night. - Mosab Abu Toha, 2021 [Source: Poetry Foundation]
There have been many shocking stories to emerge from Gaza in the past month, but one which stuck with me was a post on Instagram that was shared from a man who said he had learned to identify the degree of imminent danger he was in by distinguishing between the sounds of different types of bomb, drone, shell or artillery fire heading his way.
As someone who has never experienced this, I am in no position to write about its effects. The sonic impact of this and other conflicts is rarely, and perhaps rightly not, the focus of attention. However, in Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha’s poem above and in the accounts of others on the ground in Gaza, there is something particularly urgent and distressing about descriptions of auditory assault that is impossible to ignore. Maybe to witness a bomb strike with your eyes is to know you have survived. To hear it approaching is to fear you may not.
Several months ago, a friend put me onto a book called Listening to War: Sound, Music, Trauma and Survival in Wartime Iraq, by J. Martin Daughtry. In the introduction, Daughtry states his intention to explore “violence through the prism of sound and sound through the prism of violence,” speaking to both civilians and the military who experienced what he calls the “belliphonic” sounds of the war in Iraq. (Belliphonic combines the Latin word for war [bellum] and the Greek word for voice [phone]). That is, “the imagined total of sounds that would not have occurred had the conflict not taken place.”
The book contains a number of fragments – first-person accounts of the sounds of war - which give a sense of what it meant to listen to the conflict for one’s own survival. The first fragment comes from a young Baghdadi engineer called Ali S. Like the man whose post I’d seen on Instagram, Ali had learned to read the behaviour of missiles from their sounds.
Describing the moment before a building nearby was hit, he says:
“The cruise missile flies horizontal, [at a] maximum [height of] 20 meters … And then it goes up, and then it [he uses his hand and makes the shhhhhhhhhh sound with his mouth to indicate that the missile ascends sharply; then he falls silent and tilts his fingers downward to show how it cuts its motor, and in freefall] hits the building from above. So you can hear the sound of the missile coming [horizontally] … And once you start not hearing the sound, it means it’s coming down … When it goes down, there is no sound. So after you hear the ‘shhhhhhhhhh’ you have two seconds to … predict that there’s gonna be an earthquake. [He chuckles at his turn of phrase.]”
The attempt to theorise listening in the context of ongoing destruction feels woefully inadequate. In Daughtry’s words however, it does offer a new perspective on “the directed but immersive nature of violence, the expansive but unequal distribution of victimhood, and the ever-present potential for violence and aggression that lurks within sound itself.”
From those close to me who have been in war zones or undergone Hostile Environment Awareness Training (HEAT), listening is spoken of as the primary sense of danger perception, whether identifying instructions within air raid sirens or understanding the types and trajectories of incoming fire. If the shooting sounds regular it could be a training exercise, if it’s erratic, seek shelter.
Daughtry continues: “While the auditory dimension of war is much more central than most people realize … it also allows one to gesture toward the totality of war’s pansensorial onslaught and long half-life, the “excess of evil” that will always evade description.”
In the last few days, news surfaced that Mosab Abu Toha was detained on his way to the Rafah crossing in the south of Gaza, where he and his family were on the list to be allowed safe passage to Egypt. [He has since been released.] Abu Toha has won awards in the US, was a finalist in the National Book Critics Circle prize, founded Gaza’s only English-language library and has been writing about the war for The New Yorker.
In a piece written just two weeks ago, Abu Toha recounts how his sister had asked him to warn her of falling bombs so that she could cover her ears. “My ears are aching,” she says. He and his family had taken refuge in the Jabalia camp, suspecting that they would be safer there than in their own homes. One afternoon, Abu Toha returned to see if he could salvage some of his books.
“As I approach the wrecked area of my house, I stop in a panic—not only because of the scene but also because of the sounds of drones and jet planes and bombs falling on nearby neighborhoods,” he writes, echoing the 2021 poem with which this post began. One thing is now different. “I plan to go back through the wreckage for my books and rescue whatever I can. I will not put them on bookshelves this time.”
Mosab Abu Toha’s collection Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza was published in 2022 by City Lights.
Beautifully written, Anton. Thanks for sharing.
One of the most impactful pieces I've read in a long time.