Death Bed No. 12

"Death of Bed No. 12" is the first collection of short stories published by Ghassan Kanafani. It was published in Beirut in 1961 with a short introduction by the author in which he says: "I believe that a book must present itself, and if it fails to achieve even a part of its author's ambition, the writer must simply accept that, just as he accepted - time and time again - tearing up stories to rewrite them. Thus, "Death of Bed No. 12" pushes it to pave its own way, if it can find its way, by itself, without intercession, without mediation, and without a passport."

As the first collection, “Death of Bed No. 12” carries the main trends that Kanafani’s creative experience was trying to discover and crystallize.

We can distinguish three main themes in the collection: The first is the Palestinian theme, so to speak, where the short story emerges as a synthesis of the historical plan and an interrogation of memory in order to formulate a new Palestinian vision based on lived reality and its multiple possibilities. In these stories, the ardent pulse of Kanafani's prose shines through, along with his ability to condense prose moments into a vision that blends the bitterness of reality with the possibilities of changing it.

The second line: The realistic observation line, where Kanafani presents a collection of realistic stories that describe 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 line: is the line of posing questions about existence, from Muhammad Ali Akbar’s question about death, to the story “The Swing”’s question about love and human relationships.

These lines are not parallel, but rather intersect in more than one story, and their intersection forms the special tone that Kanafani was able to establish in the Arabic short story.

Through the intersection of the first and second lines, the novel "Men in the Sun" will emerge, presenting, through the reality of Palestinian immigrants to the Gulf, a symbolic image of the Palestinian and Arab reality as a whole. This line will also develop in the novel "Umm Saad" to present a combative portrait of the Palestinian camp experience amidst the fighting. The third direction will allow Kanafani to write his novel "The Blind and the Deaf," which he was martyred before completing, but which expresses the new way in which existential questions are raised within the Palestinian experience.