Un captif amoureux is Jean Genet’s last work which was published posthumously in 1986. It is a work in which Genet writes on his activism in the 1970s, including his journeying around universities with the Black Panthers in the United States, but for the most part on his two-year long stay among Palestinian fedayeen and civil refugees in Jordan as well as his travels in Lebanon. Yet this depiction is not really of the documentary kind, as he writes of certain events ten years after the fact, and organizes said writing in the last two years of his life. It was translated under the title Prisoner of Love into English.
The work has been described as belonging to a variety of genres, from a political memoir (cf. Bendhif-Syllas 2012) to a “prose poem” (cf. Baty-Delalande 2010) and, lastly, as a form of novel which experiments and builds on historical writing (cf. Fredette 2001). The relevance of the “novel” qualification has to do with the fact that firstly, the chronological progression of the events more or less witnessed is not respected by the narration. Secondly, there is a narrative disconnect between the everyday life of Palestinians that is described and the historical events that are recorded by the narrator. Thirdly, Genet, though present, is far from the main subject of his own writing and is rather self-effacing in his recalling of what he saw in Jordan and Lebanon. Lastly, the events, for many, are either described as explicitly reconstructed through the veil of memory, or imagined by the narrator, or, perhaps most important, often made into myths and symbolic abstractions rather than historically or objectively described. The style alternates between historic and oneiric or symbolic writing.
The subject matter of the book brings me to consider it under the scope of the geopolitical, but there is also an element of deconstructing the geopolitical to the extent that “memories” (“Souvenirs” is the name of the book’s successive parts, and is said to have been a likely contender for the title) are juxtaposed in a way which uses language and free association as a thread rather than geographic continuity. This disregard for spatial continuity shows a perception of the world as a whole that is decorrelated from ethnonational borders.
The disarray in which Genet’s writing stands, although it has been viewed as an effect of the physical and psychological distress of old age and agony by the English translator Barbara Bray (Bray 2003), is nonetheless the result of several years of composition and editing work, which leave the text still in flux, but not unfinished. The confusion it may cause in the reader, perhaps even more than in other works of the author, is the result of a certain deliberate arrangement.
In fact, as editor Laurent Boyer tells us, he had originally thought of disposing the text in the form of a juxtaposition of columns or of squares of text to emulate a chessboard (Boyer 2003), which goes to show that the final “anarchy” pointed out by Barbara Bray is in fact more legibly organized than it seems.
The meandering nature of the narration appears to be a literary way of de-centering the author and to focus on the region and the people that surround him, and of eluding borders. The border question appears in several passages as a source of incredulity or of ridicule: “We were only one before the French and the English drew lines we don’t understand over us with their rulers” (Genet 2003, 143). Or, more humorously: “The emirates supplied the Palestinians with cigarettes to teach them the geography of the Gulf” (Genet 2003, 128) – that is, to assert their sovereignty in the Gulf, implying that the seemingly objective “geography” is in fact a camouflage for the mutable regional political order. If, in the words of Deleuze and Guattari, “writing has a double function: to translate everything into assemblages and to dismantle the assemblages” (Deleuze/Guattari 1986, 47), how does Genet show the logical inconsistencies of the geopolitical assemblage, and to what extent does he manage to hollow out the conventional geopolitical concepts at work in the Arab-Israeli conflict?
1. Challenging geopolitical certainties through writing
Throughout the novel, Genet unravels the thread of geopolitical certainties which he reveals to be geopolitical myths of sorts.
Territorial borders are among those elements. Genet’s writing formally reproduces the notion of territorial transgression, which is thematically seen through the description of North African supporters to Palestinians who travel through the desert and mingle with Bedouin nomads to avoid being contained at the borders. The way in which Genet uses temporal, and spatial jumps especially liberally in this book, lets the reader think that he does not care for territorial continuity. One of the literary manifestations of this territorial disdain is the fact that several times over the course of the book, the narrator will recount an event or conversation and describe an episode, and end the passage with the spatio-temporal indication as though it were an afterthought. On the setting of his work of “memories”, which he says could be its title, Genet concludes “The space will be the whole world, the time chiefly the period between 1970 and 1984” (Genet 2003, 77; emphasis mine).
The fixity of national identities is also challenged. Within the Middle Eastern setting of Genet’s narrative, there appears a form of ambivalence where national identities are concerned. The shifting nature of imperial and cultural domination over the region through the ages, paired with frequent geopolitical changes, leads both individual characters and entire national groups to reach a certain confusion as to what their identity is. One of the characters rather humorously summarizes his national belonging by the words: “As a Turk I was a Palestinian. Now I’m practically nothing” (153). As for an entire people, the Lebanese in particular are mocked by Genet for their reclaiming of a Phoenician heritage, which was triggered by the Syrian invasion of Lebanon in 1976. Genet reacts:
Not only the search itself but also the wholesale identifying of one people with another, root and branch, struck me as undignified, a pretentious vulgarity worthy of Paris. It’s a form of laziness to think nobility is proved by ancestry […] (77)
The dignity of the diplomatic corps is defied by Genet in the text. Diplomats are ridiculed in a specific episode where before an embassy dinner, all the ambassadors are frisked by police, which reveals their fragile and somewhat ridiculous humanity behind their national insignia, as they are patted down “for the entertainment” (512) of the policemen. Their re-humanization behind the national narrative composed by their outfits challenges their validity as individuals metonymic of the States they represent.
2. The Palestinians, a “people without soil”?
At first, there appears on multiple occasions the notion that the Palestinians are “a people without a country” (in French le peuple sans terre, literally “the people without soil”), which makes them into a ubiquitous, rather looming presence, in the collective mind. But, ironically, this impression of ubiquity is maintained by Western media itself, which is constantly fighting to photograph the fedayeen in Jordan. Maintaining the appearance of ubiquity is used by the Palestinians both as a tactic to appear strong to Israel, but this only highlights their military inferiority:
We made our way round another hill, the same one as before, though I’d thought we were several hills further on. This was a pathetic trick to make the enemy think the Palestinians were everywhere at once. For ten years, against the hyper-sensitive equipment of Israel, the Palestinians used ruses that were both dangerous and useless, but often amusing and even poetic (73).
Yet through this “ruse” and through the media and communication tactics that make the Palestinian struggle known to the world, the reader perceives that this is merely an image that Palestinians give off.
In contrast, the connection of Palestinians with the land, and with soil in general, is highlighted in the work, perhaps to contradict or counteract the commonplace idea of a landless people, which would be in a position to threaten the global order as a whole. On one occasion, a Jordanian character says that the Palestinians showed her family “how to turn the soil, how to choose the seeds, and when to water them.” This makes the Palestinian people appear deeply grounded in the region under Genet’s pen, even while they are in camps in Jordan and in Lebanon. The image of Palestinian’s connection to the soil is symbolically contrasted with Israel’s dominance in the sky:
It wasn’t impossible that, deep down, every Palestinian blamed Palestine for lying down and submitting too easily to a strong and cunning enemy.
“Why didn’t she rise up in revolt? Volcanoes might have erupted, thunderbolts might have fallen and set fire to everything . . .”
“Thunderbolts? Haven’t you realized yet that Heaven’s on the side of the Jews?” (119).
Such an interest in the land is reflected by Genet’s lyricism when it comes to depicting the landscapes of the region, as opposed to the cool, cynical manner in which he recalls major geopolitical events in the chronology of the Palestinian struggle.
3. The geopolitical abstraction as farce
The spectacle that is asked for in front of Western journalists for newspapers and magazines has nothing in common with the violence of guerilla war and the persecutions that civil refugees face in Lebanon, where the Christian phalangist militia cuts off a woman’s fingers and crucifies her alive – and where massacres were recorded in the refugee camps of Sabra and Chatila –, or in Jordan, where the Bedouin’s ethnic contempt for Palestinians leads them to have mutable attitudes in their regard: “And after being humiliated by the Palestinians in 1970, they were only too delighted to kill them in June 1971. There was no reason for the slaughter, but there was joy in it” (36). Genet’s gaze at ground level, that is his observation of the terrain and his life among the soldiers, goes against abstract geopolitics, and brings forth an existential and ambiguous reflection on what it means to inhabit a land and to desire a homeland that can only be done in a literary form, which avoids both the potentially tepid neutrality of the historical account and the fallacious objectivity or scientism of the political treatise.
There also appears a questioning of the notion of “terrorism”, particularly coming from an entity (the Palestinian Liberation Organization) which pretends to a form of statehood but has been left without a fixed territory because of military action and expulsion from the lands that composed the British mandate of Palestine.
As far as terrorism is concerned, we’re nothing compared to them [the Israelis]. Or compared to the Americans and the Europeans. If the whole world’s a kingdom of terror we know whom to thank. But you terrorize by proxy. At least the terrorists I’m talking about risk their own skins. That’s the difference (35).
Here as elsewhere in Genet’s work and particularly his political stances, violent action, qualified by dominant powers as “terror”, is met with the defiant idea that there is a brutality at work in the institutions that decide that which is terror and that which isn’t, and that said institutions (here Western states) hide under the terror accusation to avoid accountability.
The notion of a Palestinian national identity itself is critiqued throughout Genet’s book, but that is what makes the Palestinian struggle a revolution to Genet. The notion of a Palestinian people is questioned by the Jordanian mother, who says that Palestinians and Jordanians were one and the same people under Ottoman rule, while Genet himself writes in his own name: “The Arab people was skewered on an age of nations” (30). Nonetheless, it appears as though the mediatic image of the Palestinian as a ‘landless people’ makes the idea of their struggle extensible to all the indigenous peoples who were cast on the wayside by nation-States: “The shiny pictures lend the camps an air of peace that diffuses itself through the whole cabin [of a plane], whereas really they are just the discarded refuse of ‘settled’ nations” (36).
The geopolitical is thus presented by Genet as an amalgamation of abstract images, that have little to no grounding in the realities of the terrain, which gain the favour of lyrical style and are invested with the most “images” of language. These images are what allow him to unravel geopolitical abstractions, which is one of the ways the epigraph of the book’s French edition can be read: “Put all the images in language in a place of safety and make use of them, for they are in the desert, and it’s in the desert we must go and look for them” (9), wherein the “desert” is the documentary Real which is full of uncertainty and tends to lack constant substance, and where the “images” are what humans resort to to make sense of reality. The work that Genet does in Un captif amoureux is the revealing of these images as images, in the geopolitical realm.
Opening: Genetian geopolitics and the indeterminacy of physical space
On a more speculative level, one could say of Jean Genet’s final work that it foregrounds phenomenological questions that were long fundamental to Genet’s writing practice (cf. Brueton 2022) and applies his thought of the uncertainty of physical space to geopolitical myths. As Genet’s previous works were often concerned with blurring ontological boundaries between beings, Un captif amoureux marks a complete transition from fantasy into the Real which moves the question from the ideated entanglement of souls to the concrete establishment of borders, and a conception of geography that moves away from a vertically imposed cartography to a horizontal, ground-level vision of the land as continuous. It is in this perspective akin to that of some phenomenologist thinkers that an alternative global politics, if any, seems to lie for Genet.
References
Bendhif-Syllas, Myriam. 2012. “La révolution palestinienne à l’épreuve de l’intime : Un captif amoureux de Jean Genet.” Itinéraires, 2012.2, 119-130.
Baty-Delalande, Hélène. 2010. “La réception critique de Un captif amoureux.” Jean Genet et son lecteur, ed. by Dominique Carlat ans Agnès Fontvieille-Cordani. Saint-Étienne: Presses universitaires de Saint-Étienne, 111-176.
Brueton, Joanne. 2022. Geometry and Jean Genet: Shaping the Subject. Cambridge: NED-New edition.
Deleuze, Gilles/Guattari, Félix. 1986. Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature. Translated by Dana Polan. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Fredette, Nathalie. 2001. Figures baroques de Jean Genet. L’enjeu du style. Saint-Denis / Montréal: Presses universitaires de Vincennes.
Genet, Jean. 1986. Un captif amoureux. Paris: Gallimard.
Genet, Jean. Prisoner of Love. 2003. Translated by Barbara Bray. Introduction by Adhaf Soueif, New York: NYRB.
Guattari, Félix. 1989. “Genet retrouvé.” Cartographies schizoanalytiques. Paris: Galilée, 269-290.
Mishima, Yukio. 1981. “Sur Jean Genet”. Le Magazine littéraire 169, 37-40.
