Death Bed No. 12

"Death in Bed No. 12" is the first collection of short stories published by Ghassan Kanafani. It was released in Beirut in 1961 with a brief introduction written by the author, in which he states: "I believe that a book should present itself, and if it fails to achieve even a part of its author's ambition, then the author must simply accept that, just as he has accepted – many times over – tearing up stories to rewrite them. And so, I push 'Death in Bed No. 12' to make its own way, if it can find the beginning of the path by itself, without intercession, without mediation, and without a pass."

As it was his first collection, "Death in Bed No. 12" contains the main directions that Kanafani's creative experience was attempting to explore and develop.

We can distinguish three main threads in the collection: The first thread: is the Palestinian thread, so to speak, where the short story emerges as a compilation of historical plans and an interrogation of memory to formulate a new Palestinian vision that stems from lived reality and its multiple possibilities. In these stories, the fervent pulse of Kanafani's prose and his ability to condense narrative moments into a vision that blends the bitterness of reality with the possibilities of changing it are evident.

The second thread: the thread of realistic observation, where Kanafani presents a collection of realistic stories describing the lives of people in the Gulf (where he resided), and these realistic attempts would be the seed that would grow and develop in Kanafani's later writings.

The third thread: is the thread of posing existential questions, from Mohammed Ali Akbar's question about death, to the question of the story "The Swing" about love and human relationships.

These threads are not parallel; rather, they intersect in more than one story, and their intersection forms the unique tone that Kanafani managed to establish in the Arabic short story.

Through the intersection of the first and second threads, the novel "Men in the Sun" will emerge to present, through the reality of Palestinian migrants to the Gulf, a symbolic picture of the entire Palestinian and Arab reality. This thread will also develop in the novel "Umm Sa'd" to present a revolutionary tableau of the Palestinian refugee camp experience amidst the fighting. The third direction will allow Kanafani to write his novel "The Blind Man and the Deaf Man," which he was martyred before completing, but which expresses the new way in which existential questions are posed within the Palestinian experience.