Ben Jelloun, Jean Genet, and Cultural Identity in The Street for Just One: Alberto Giacometti

Contemporary Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun and Jean Genet, the provocative postwar writer of France, have intertwined biographies, both in their personal lives and their work. Ben Jelloun, born in Morocco in 1944, went to France to pursue doctoral studies in social psychiatry in the late sixties. While completing his degree, he began what has become a distinguished career in both fiction and non-fiction. A highly prolific author, he is best known for his narrative- and gender-bending novels, The Sandchild (L'Enfant de sable, 1985) and its sequel, The Sacred Night (La Nuit sacrée, 1987), winner of the prestigious French literary award, the Prix Goncourt. Ben Jelloun has also published numerous essays, many on the political and social difficulties of Arabs in the Middle East, the Maghreb, and France, ranging from "The Highest of Solitudes"¹ ("La plus haute des solitudes," 1977), treating the plight of North African immigrants in France, to "Racism Explained to My Daughter" ("Le Racisme expliqué à ma fille," 1998).

Ben Jelloun's first meeting with Genet came about in 1974 after Genet had published an article on several neglected Maghrebine authors, Ben Jelloun among them. Genet, by this time in his life, had moved from the period of most of his major literary works, novels such as Lady of the Flowers and The Thief's Journal and plays (The Maids, The Blacks, The Screens), to one of greater involvement in political causes. He worked, for example, with the Black Panthers in the US and, most importantly to him, with the Palestinians and other Arab groups. Genet's and Ben Jelloun's friendship, which lasted until Genet's death in 1986, was grounded in their common concern for Arab people, including immigrant workers in France. During those years, Ben Jelloun asked Genet to contribute to journals on the subject of the Palestinians, wrote about Genet, and interviewed him for the French newspaper Le Monde and other periodicals.

Considering the importance of political issues in the relationship between Ben Jelloun and Genet, it is interesting that their connection surfaces in an essay by Ben Jelloun on a quite different subject: artistic creation. His Tahar Ben Jelloun & Alberto Giacometti, first issued in 1991,² was reprinted four years later in smaller format as The Street for Just One (La Rue pour un seul): Alberto Giacometti. As the title indicates, it treats the Swiss sculptor and painter, Giacometti, who lived and worked in Paris from the 1920s until his death in 1966. In his essay Ben Jelloun describes his reactions to the artist, one of the major forces in postwar modernism, with his trademark thin, majestic figurative sculptures and intense portraits and still lives. In addition to Giacometti, however, Jean Genet also occupies an important place in the piece. Genet had published a seminal essay on the artist, The Studio of Albert Giacometti (L'Atelier d'Alberto Giacometti), in 1957;³ and Ben Jelloun, in his exploration of Giacometti some thirty-five years later, makes frequent reference to his predecessor. He quotes liberally from The Studio, stating on the back cover of the 1995 edition, "I was led to Giacometti by Jean Genet."

The inclusion of Genet in Ben Jelloun's text is significant in biographical terms as a sign of the friendship of the two authors. In addition, it permits one to see and investigate another, more complicated question: that of language and cultural identity in relation to Ben Jelloun's work. Ben Jelloun writes in French, the language in which he was educated. The much-discussed issue of writing in the tongue of the colonizer is especially pertinent and complex in Ben Jelloun's case because he has lived mainly in France for the past several decades and become a celebrated personality there. As a result of both his social journalism and his writing of fiction and poetry, he is a...