Jean Genet and the Position of Sudden Departure

by Leila Shahid (Palestine) [1]- AUTODAFE n°2 - Autumn 2001

"To shelter all the images of language and make use of them,
for they are in the desert, where they have to be sought out."
-Epigraph of Jean Genet's Un captif amoureux

If Genet's first contact with the Palestinians, in 1970 after the September massacre, was emotionally intense, it was certainly with women that he had the most complicity, shared mischief, and genuine communication…. The camps are the bit of Palestine the Palestinians carried with them into exile-the life, the memory, the village they packed when they had to take to the road after the destruction of their villages in 1948. They all believed that they were leaving to flee the combat zones, like the refugees in Vietnam, Cambodia, and El Salvador, and that they would return home within a few months when the situation calmed down. They left with a bundle and the bare necessities (often taking their house key, believing they would be back soon). And they never returned.
In this perpetual exile, in this departure, the woman always carries the most. In Arab society, the woman keeps hold of the family. As for the men, they experienced the exile as the greatest humiliation of their history. They were peasants and lived off their land. And when the land is taken from a peasant, it is like dishonoring him, castrating him, taking his soul.

Women had another outlook. The exile was of course an immense tragedy, but not being the ones who till the soil, they internalized the land, the village, and the culture. They learned to bear the negation of their identity, their nationality. By internalizing their Palestinian identity, and carrying it with them into the refugee camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, they reinvested it in other, often cultural forms of expression, which served as roots linking them to their land.
Embroidery is one of the forms of this identity that they internalized and retranslated onto fabric with cross-stitches. Originally, the embroidery was the bodice of a dress. Peasant women in Palestine wear long black, navy blue, or mauve dresses. They embroider at a very early age because they will wear those dresses at their wedding. From the age of twelve, girls collect silk threads (Syrian silk thread is very expensive). They sew the dress and start to embroider. From the time they are twelve they embroider the dress they will then wear at their wedding at age sixteen or seventeen. They also embroider a cushion as a symbol of the house, the marital home.

When these women left on the road to exile in 1948, they left with their dresses. And, of course, in the horror of exile in the camps-this unsanitary life in shantytowns-tradition is almost dead. For who still had the chance to embroider with silk threads? Most of the time, their main worry was survival.
But many of the women refugees still managed to recreate a small Palestine in these camps, and that's where I found my Palestine, in the Chatila camp. It was almost stronger than the real Palestine. And that's why I find it so beautiful that Jean Genet says in the opening pages of Un captif amoureux: "What is truer, the black mark on the page or the white next to it?" That is: Which is stronger? The land of Palestine or the homeland you created when the right to live on that land was taken from you?

In this recreated Palestine, there was a strength that Jean Genet felt when he spent some time in Amman in the enormous refugee camp called Wahdate, and that he spoke about in Un captif amoureux. He discovered that the women had kept their humor, unlike the men, who were utterly downcast by the experience of exile and the dispossession of their land. When you enter a camp, the first people you see-standing, heads held high, shoulders straight-are the women, not the men. The men are all there with drooping shoulders, their keffieh dangling, and they look completely inert, especially the old men. The women are very strong, their sons by their sides, the feddayin; the sons are still on their feet, because they have guns, and in a way the gun gives them a strength that they used to get from the presence of the land. The women impressed Genet enormously. For they have a power, a dignity…. Besides, nobody has ever spoken of women like Genet-women in general but especially women of the third world, poor women. For he understood them wordlessly; there was a complicity between them. He did not speak Arabic, it is true, and they did not speak French. All communication between him and the Palestinian women in the Jordanian camps took place via winks. He understood them, and they saw that he understood. The extraordinary thing is that he is coming to the East (let us not forget that he was raised in a French school in the Morvan, went to catechism, and was a choir boy; he was impregnated with an entire Judeo-Christian culture that depicted the East as a great mystery where women are veiled and do not assume any responsibility in the society), and he arrives there in 1970 in Jordan, where he discovers that the real "men" are women. There they are strong, take the initiative, lead the men, even though officially they have the mere position of women!

He is very impressed… but I don't want to rehearse Un captif amoureux since the women are described there. They are wonderful, whether on account of their strength when facing the Jordanian army or in their mischievousness, deflating men's seriousness and putting them on, demystifying their virility, belittling them: "See this one, the great fighter, I wiped his butt, washed him, I know him, I'm the one who took him out of my belly."
It was therefore under the aegis of women that Genet truly met the Palestinians and began to love them.

But I would like to come back to his fascination with embroidery. The next time he saw bodices like those of the peasants' dresses in the Amman camps was in Rabat. For my mother lived with me at that time-she was born in Jerusalem in 1920, spent her entire childhood in Palestine, and witnessed the Palestinian struggle against the Mandate and against the creation of Israel, since her father was himself involved in the nationalist movement (and was in fact arrested and deported by the English for four years). My mother was in Amman at the time of the war between Israel and the Arab countries in 1967, and during the exodus she saw women selling their gold bracelets and their dresses in order to have enough to survive while they waited for the United Nations to come with their supply trucks to feed them. And my mother was heartbroken to see these women selling their dresses, for it was as though they were losing yet again their roots, their land.
When she returned to Beirut, she contacted support groups that aided the refugee camps, and she proposed that instead of the usual knitting they recover the national tradition of embroidery and preserve the culture represented in the traditional dress of peasant women. But as it took years to embroider such clothing, she suggested making little square cushions whose basic pattern would be modeled on the dresses. Therefore, she and her sisters studied the patterns of the dresses bought along the routes of exile, and these patterns go back a thousand years. Each one has a significance, a name; they evoke a village, a region. For the idea was not just to embroider but to make Palestinian culture live, to resist the negation of their identity.

So it came about that Jean, sitting in Rabat, watched my mother embroider for hours. (My mother lived through the whole war in Palestine, the whole war in Lebanon. She was exiled from Palestine and from Lebanon. Embroidery was her therapy. Each time you stick the needle in the fabric, you have the feeling of renewing your tie with something. For the cross-stitch is like a knot. That was her way of resisting. My generation resisted by making revolution and her generation resisted by embroidering.) And Jean, sitting in the living room in Rabat, wondered what this Palestinian woman was doing recopying in Morocco, on cushions, patterns that came from the bodices he had seen on the breasts of Palestinian women in the Baqa and Wahdate camps. He was trying to figure out the relation between the refugee camps in Jordan, my living room in Rabat, and my mother's needle embroidering the fabric. And this story, this life that is embroidered (and one cannot not think of the Greek legends, of the meaning of Ariadne's thread and Penelope's embroidery, of memory, identity, time and space) suddenly became very symbolic for him. He had established with my mother-who should have profoundly irritated him because of her social origins, and indeed he refers to it in a very moving way in Un captif amoureux-a very beautiful relationship because he found dignity in her. He would tell me about her shoulders: "How beautiful she is, from the back," for he found in her the dignity of women who have known how to resist, each in her own way, dispossession and exile. And he would ask her about what she was embroidering; she would recount the history of the making of the dresses. He tirelessly asked her questions about Jerusalem, her childhood, her family, history.

In 1982, we went to Beirut. He had forgotten the embroidery.
There was a woman living with us who had lost her apartment. She would sit around and watch us scramble in all directions because of the invasion of West Beirut, and she wanted to make herself useful since she felt a bit like an intruder. One day, Jean and I are coming home from one of our excursions in the city. The building where my mother lives is long and narrow; it overlooks the sea, along large steep avenue. We are coming up the street (from the top you can see our thirteen-story building). I look up… What do we see on the balcony of my mother's apartment? Dozens and dozens of Palestinian dresses are hanging there. And Jean says, "Leila, look!" And we see all those dresses hanging on the balcony. We go tearing down the avenue and climb nine floors shouting, "Get the dresses in! Get the dresses in!" The Israeli army was in town and Palestinian dresses were hanging on the balcony. I say to this woman, "What have you done? Why are the dresses hanging on the balcony?" And she says, "I had nothing to do. You were all gone, I was left alone. I found all those dresses in the chest in your mother's bedroom. I thought they should be aired out a little, so the moths don't gobble them up." She did not, of course, understand that these dresses were like flags, and were the Israeli intelligence agents in their cars to see all those dresses hanging there, it would be as if we were flying Palestinian flags.

This episode quite amused Jean, and he grasped the relation between what was going on and the meaning of the embroideries, which he had first seen on the bodices of women in Amman, then in my mother's living-room in Rabat, and again on the Beirut balcony at the moment the Israeli army invaded. He saw in this a form of expression far more subtle than that of the men, a form of communication and speech about Palestine that was not channeled through the usual political discourse. Indeed embroidery was a discourse too-everything that can be said about our relation to the land, identity, memory, but it was not channeled through the obvious words but through subtle signs, colors, an aesthetic symbolism. […]
It was in fact the gesture in embroidering that most fascinated Jean. When one puts the needle through the fabric, one traces a circle. As for me, I was always saying apropos of his life: it's come full circle. Jean's life comes full circle: it begins somewhere with public assistance, passes through rebellion and prison, goes toward the East when he is a soldier, returns toward the East with the Palestinians, and ends in front of the corpses he finds at his feet in Chatila.

It's also what Un captif amoureux is all about. The weaving of his life. In this book which is above all about Genet but also about Palestinians, a book on everything that mattered to Genet, it's as though he were telling us: "I've always lied to you. It's not true that I wrote because pieces were assigned to me" (which indeed was always his mantra). […]
This idea that embroidery inspired the structure of this text is very beautiful, and I do believe the book was poorly received because people did not understand it. When he delivered the manuscript to Gallimard, conformists, critics, readers, and the editors of the collection immediately wanted to know: "What is this? An essay? An autobiography? Reporting? A poem?" Then he really unsettled them, for what Jean called it was "the bit of disorder in the order."

And since they could not find a definition to paste on this text, they said, "It's not important. It's not interesting. He's getting senile. This is a text where Genet is pimping everybody." They did not understand that it was exactly the contrary. Facing death, Genet does what he refused to do for seventy years; he lays himself bare, completely, with a limpidity, a transparency that I can only regard as mystical. […]
The images of weaving, net, and spider web that recur so frequently in Un captif amoureux disclose the unique way Genet had of inhabiting the world. The day he got out of prison, he went to Damascus and then back to Paris. In Paris, he was imprisoned again. When he got out he left for Germany, then Greece, then Tangier; he came back to Paris and from Paris left for America. From America, he went to Amman; he went to Rabat, from Rabat to Beirut, and finally to Paris. He spent his life weaving his life, across continents, peoples, cultures, languages. An incessant back-and-forth that destroyed space and time, as does his book.
In the nomadism of the Palestinians in exile there is the same itinerary of perpetual displacement. That's why the Palestinians in exile captivated him far more than those who remained on the land.

Genet always put himself "en position de départ soudain" as he put it in Chatila, in order to abandon the culture in which he was born, the language in which he was born, to go toward another. For it's in the in-between, in the white space between the two black marks, that the real things are. Genet saw the main traces of life, the life that interested him, in the cracks-precisely where something does break order. […] And that's exactly what one should do with Genet's work: be inspired by Genet's gesture and not necessarily adhere with absolute loyalty to his text or message.
Un captif amoureux, a book on writing and creation (and also on the Black Panthers and the Palestinians) is a treasure of thoughts on creativity. A creativity embedded in the reality of the world today. With blacks, whites, Palestinians, Arabs, Islam, Christendom, conformism, revolution. It is not limited to a national boundary, or to the cause of the Palestinians, or that of American blacks; it is universal. And whoever thinks it is limited to a single border is stupid.

In this back-and-forth, this weaving, lies the entire universe. The choice is open to everyone. There is an invitation to writing, to creation. A kind of wavelength, crossing space and time, gives literature, music, painting a common language that goes beyond human beings in their everyday life.

I hope that others will demonstrate, with Genet or other writers, the same courage to create things that are waiting in the void, in the desert. As Jean so well put it: "To shelter all the images of language and make use of them, for they are in the desert, where they have to be sought out."
I saw this phrase when his friend Jacky gave me the manuscript a few hours after Jean's death. Jacky, who knew Genet by heart and had left him the night before, never to see him again, says to me, "It's funny, this notation wasn't there yesterday." So, I look. Even in the signs, the white on the page, there was a feverishness and certainly the trembling of Jean's hand as, on the verge of dying, he needed to put these lines as the epigraph for Un captif amoureux. I have probably read them a thousand times, trying to go through the wall of death that separates us and wondering, What was he wanting to tell us?

And here we are talking about inventing, being at the origin of the new, and suddenly I understand this phrase yet differently. The images are in the desert where they must be sought out. It is a challenge to all creators: you must always seek elsewhere, where there's desert.

1. This text is an excerpt from a long interview conducted by Jérôme Hankins published in Genet à Chatila (Actes Sud, Babel), an adaptation from the production of Quatre heures à Chatila directed by Alain Milianti in 1991 at the Volcan du Havre. (Editor's note)