Rijal Fil Shams

Men in the Sun is a novel about humiliation, struggle for life, and succumbing to death. Three Palestinian refugees seeking to travel from the camps in Iraq to Kuwait where they hope to find work as laborers. I have used the kafiyyeh motif, cut out, not only as a symbol of Palestine, but also a metaphor of entrapment and struggle. The pages of the book are folded (French folds) and each die cut relates to the events taking place on the page. The first three chapters introduce each character, designated with a color (red, green, and black- colors of Palestine and other Arab nations). The men are forced to ride in the back of the truck across the desert on their way to Kuwait. At several check points, the men hide in a large, empty, water tank in the stifling mid-day heat as the driver arranges paperwork to get through. The kafiyeh motif here represents the door of the truck, and as time passes by and the men await in the extremely hot tank, the holes get smaller and smaller through out the pages; expressing the ample amount of air passing through to the tank. After going through the last check point, within easy driving distance of the travelers' ultimate goal of Kuwait, the driver opens the tank to let the men out only to find they have died- here the holes are gone, the three Palestinian refugees have suffocated to death.