When Prisoner of Love was first published in France in 1986, Le Matin declared that “Genet was assuredly one of the greatest French prose poets of this century, reaching the same heights as Proust and Céline. Un Captif Amoureux has all the sacred fire and poetry of his earlier works.” Yet today several bibliographies do not list the book and even readers familiar with Genet are sometimes unaware of its existence. I was amused to see that when Compagnie Lara, a French theater group, adapted Captif into a play and performed it in April 2002 as part of the Prague Writers’ Festival (dedicated to Genet), the performance was mentioned in the British press as “a new production of Genet’s last play”.
In fact Genet’s last play, Les Paravents (The Screens), about the Algerian revolution, was written on the eve of Algerian independence from France in 1961. Three years later, after the death of his companion of nine years, the high-wire artist Abdallah Bentaga, Genet left France (having, it is said, destroyed his manuscripts).
Genet’s extraordinary 1940s saw him in and out of prison while producing the great narratives that won him the admiration and solidarity of Cocteau, Sartre and André Breton: Journal du Voleur, Miracle de la Rose, Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, Pompes Funèbres and Querelle de Brest. In the 1950s he created the plays that are his great bequest to European post-war theater: Le Balcon, Les Bonnes and Les Nègres, followed in 1961 by Les Paravents.
“Obviously,” Genet said in an interview in the early 1980s, “I am drawn to peoples in revolt ... because I myself have the need to call the whole of society into question.” But if all Genet’s preceding work subverted the values and arrangements of society, Les paravents was the first to engage with a specific revolt. Perhaps it was this that then drew other “transgressors” to appeal to him. Genet, as he said in the same interview, responded. He wrote an hommage for the French young revolutionary Daniel Cohn-Bendit in 1968, smuggled himself across the Canadian border into the US to speak on behalf of the Panthers at Stony Brook in March 1970 and, in the autumn of that year, fetched up in the Palestinian bases in Jordan. He was to stay till the end of May 1971 and then — intermittently — till the end of 1972. His involvement with the Palestinians is the story of Prisoner of Love.
In September 1982, Genet (at the request of his Palestinian friend, Leila Shahid) visited Beirut and found himself in the middle of the Israeli invasion of the city. He was, it seems, one of the first foreigners to enter the Palestinian refugee camp of Shatila after the Christian Lebanese Phalange, with the compliance of the Israeli command, tortured and murdered hundreds of its inhabitants. There, pushing open doors wedged shut by dead bodies, Genet memorized the features, the position, the clothing, the wounds of each corpse till three soldiers from the Lebanese army drove him at gun point to their officer: “’Have you just been there?’ [the officer] pointed to Shatila. ‘Yes.’ — ‘And did you see?’— ‘Yes.’ —‘Are you going to write about it?’ — ‘Yes.’”
The essay “Four Hours in Shatila” was published in 1983 and in October of that year Genet began writing Prisoner of Love. It is as if, through the long years of virtual silence, everything was being saved up for this last book, which he finished just before his death from throat cancer in 1986. Serious and playful, romantic and unflinching, literary and factual, Prisoner of Love is a coming-together of everything that was Genet: his art, his politics and his humanity. But Genet is at pains to point out that “I’m not an archivist or historian or anything like that.” Prisoner of Love accumulates its power though a staggering display of leaps between times, places, styles and modes of consciousness. Taking in events from the beginning of the 20th century to the time of writing, shifting from polemic to lyrical, from exposition to prophecy, fusing disparate bits of the world into living images, it refuses to be confined by definitions or summaries. “This,” said Genet, “is my Palestinian revolution, told in my chosen order.”
His revolution is — at the beginning, amidst the hills of Ajloun — “a party that lasted nine months. To get an idea of what it was like, anyone who tasted the freedom that reigned in Paris in May 1968 has only to add physical elegance and universal courtesy.” And at the heart of the party were the young guerrillas, the fedayeen.
The root “Fida” in Arabic signifies something relinquished in the certainty of gaining something more precious: a ransom, perhaps, or a sacrifice. “What made the fedayeen supermen,” Genet wrote, “was that they put the predicament of all before their own individual wishes. They would set out for victory or death, even though each still remained a man alone with his own sensibilities and desires.” In them he rediscovered one of the central themes that had occupied his earlier work. In The Miracle of the Rose, Genet had written: “Only children who want to be bandits in order to resemble the bandit they love ... dare have the audacity to play that character to the very end.” In the Palestinian fedayeen in 1970 he finds young men — boys almost — with the audacity to play the revolutionary to the very end. And with them, this “pink and white” 60-year-old French eminence, although he never thought of himself as Palestinian, felt “at home”.
One of the unique qualities of this book is that Genet never exhibits any of the characteristics we have learned to expect from white men or women writing about Arabs. He has no inclination to “go native” but he never goes in for generalizations on “Arab customs” or the “Arab mind” in either his descriptions of the Palestinians or his reflections on them and on his feelings for them. More than that, his opening scene, where he finds himself sipping tea among the women in the camp at Baqa — women who laugh and joke when he asks if their husbands would mind his presence among them — is set up as a swipe at “orientalist” references and as a joke at his own expense: “Something told me my situation was not what I’d have expected from my previous knowledge of the east: here was I, a man, alone with a group of Arab women. And everything seemed to reinforce this topsy-turvy vision of the orient.”
From then on, in image after image, he fuses together his own French, Catholic world and this new one he is experiencing: the Bedouins dance, “twelve or fourteen soldiers holding arms like Breton bridegrooms”, an annexe of the Fatah office makes him think of “the 1913 Russian Ballet: with five Parisian stagehands standing by, several Nijinskys in striped costumes flecked with moss and dead leaves waiting to leap on-stage in Le Prélude a l’Après-midi d’un Faune,” a Circassian village on the Golan Heights, after six years of Israeli occupation, like a village “in Normandy after the landing at Avranches. Looted by the Yanks.” Time and time again as I read Prisoner I found myself wishing that Genet were alive today. As Edward Said wrote in 1990, he “fully intuited the scope and drama” of what the Palestinians were living through, recording “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden”. And in doing this he was also reading the future.
It could be said that for Genet the enemy was always the rigid form: a movement that became a government, a revolution that turned into an authority. The Palestinians were the antithesis of rigidity; he was captivated by the flexibility of their identity. It could embrace, it seemed, anyone who wanted to be part of it: German and Cuban doctors, a French priest, a nun, two young Frenchmen called Guy, a young Israeli who had renounced Zionism: everyone was welcome at the party. And — as is testified to by Genet’s failure to realize that the fedayee leader he knew as “Abu Omar” was in fact a Christian — “Palestinian” always came before “Christian” or “Muslim”.
Yet this openness itself, Genet saw, could in the prolonged absence of victory prove a weakness. In a passage just after the middle of the book he examines the French expression “entre chien et loup” — literally “dusk”: a time when one creature might metamorphose into another. For a moment Genet pulls back from his image: “In order to record the next phase of the story,” he suggests, “perhaps I ought to draw back at first and take a run at it.” What he is taking a run at is his fear of the fedayeen metamorphosing into Islamic militants; the “logical conclusion” of his feeling that “the expression entre chien et loup, instead of connoting twilight, describes any, perhaps all, of the moments of a fedayee’s life”.
— This is an edited version of Ahdaf Soueif’s introduction to Prisoner of Love, by Jean Genet, translated by Barbara Bray, published by Granta.
- Arab News Features 17 July 2003