GENET'S PRISONER OF LOVE: THE EVOLUTION OF A MUSLIM SAINT

1 R G E N E T ’ S P R I S O N E R O F L O V E T H E E V O L U T I O N O F A M U S L I M S A I N T E D M U N D W H I T E Un Captif amoureux (translated into English as Prisoner of Love rather than more accurately as A Prisoner in Love or The Loving Prisoner) is a memoir about Genet’s experiences with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians that has puzzled readers since it first came out in 1986, not long after Genet’s death. It was his first proper book in nearly forty years and many of his admirers expected prose as baroque as that found in the novels. Those readers were disappointed and thought that Genet had simply lost his talent. What a new generation of readers has discovered, however, is language that is every bit as poetic as that of the five great novels, but poetic in a di√erent manner. The centennial of Genet’s birth occurred in 2010, and many readers have returned to Prisoner of Love only to find that it is not the political harangue they imagined it to be. It is an old man’s book in that it grumbles to itself, keeps coming back to certain themes again and again, though adding something new each time. Despite its length it telegraphs its meanings somewhat in the manner of another old person’s novel, Sybille Bedford’s Jigsaw, or William Burrough’s last book, My Education: A Book of Dreams, or Céline’s Castle to Castle 2 W H I T E Y (D’un chateau l’autre). Ideas are not developed at length; even stories are not told sequentially or in order. Rather the reader is plunged (in the case of all four books I’ve mentioned) into the memories and experiences of the narrator that unfold in a dreamlike manner. Sometimes the story starts at the middle or even the end. The language and even the syntax is stripped down, and the ordinary logical connections have been elided, though not eliminated . As Cli√ord Geertz said in his review of Prisoner of Love, ‘‘Genet does not seem to think that one thing flows from another, cause after cause, but that everything jostles together in a space of memory.’’ The text still makes sense, but the leaps from one sentence to another are sometimes perilous. In this posthumous memoir Genet ranges freely over his knowledge of Mozart, sex changes, Tunisian and Japanese politics, debates on the existence of God, and his own extensive experiences in Brazil, Japan, the United States, France, and Syria. He presents many of his perceptions in a mythic, often contradictory way – and in a way so casual and oblique it might be called parenthetical . For instance, he tells us repeatedly that he is an atheist, and yet he surrounds the dominant figures of Hamza and his mother (Palestinians he met in real life only very briefly many years earlier) with the aura of the Virgin and her dead Son; he gives us, quite reluctantly, a modern Pietà. Perhaps this notion is linked with the idea, hinted at elsewhere in the book, that the Black Panthers adopted a child but that their child was not a black infant but an old pink-and-white man – Genet himself. He is something like a cherished Christ Child to the strong but surprisingly gentle Black Panthers. This self-presentation suggests that other people, male warriors, want to possess Genet, to own him as one might own an amulet, and that possessing him is a way of invoking his magical powers. This very material form of relic-possession has replaced metaphorical sexual possession in Genet’s cosmology. Other themes that are peculiar to Genet get recycled with great e√ect – for instance, the idea that blacks are the letters printed on the white page of America or the idea that the whole of Prisoner of Love has been written to revive the dead. Or we are told in varying ways that everything...