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Spring 2007 | ArteZine

Jean Genet and the Middle East: Sexuality, Politics and Literature

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Jean Genet’s first encounters and homosexual experiences in North Africa and the Middle East were part of his tours with the French army in the early 1930s, with the most time being spent in Syria and Morocco. For his stay in Syria, he first arrived in Beirut, where he witnessed the hanging of four men, an event recounted much later in Un Captif amoureux. (1) In Damascus, he fell in love with a young hairdresser, an experience he mentions in the interview with Fitche:

 

When I was eighteen, I was in Syria, I was in love with a little barber in Damascus. He was sixteen, I was eighteen….And everybody, in the street at least, everybody knew that I was in love with him, and they laughed, well, the men did, the women wore veils and were never to be seen…but the other boys, the young people, and older, too, smiled about it and made jokes. They said to me, “Well go ahead, go with him.” And he himself was not at all embarrassed. I know he was sixteen. So I was eighteen and a half, more or less….And I felt very comfortable with him. Very comfortable with his family, very comfortable with the city of Damascus. (2)

Genet’s position as a French soldier also differentiates him from other sexual tourists such as André Gide, who traveled in search of relaxation and recovery, rather than out of military duty. Genet was also keenly aware of his role as a representative of the colonial power. Is the love Genet describes more than sexual attraction? Can it be viewed as deeper than that felt by Gide? Genet’s further interactions with Arabs, personal and political, might suggest so, as we will soon see.

Two of Genet’s most significant, long-term relationships were with men who were at least in part of Arab descent. (2) Genet spent the late 1950s and early 1960s with Abdullah Bentaga, a half-Algerian half-German circus performer whose career as a tight-rope walker Genet intensely supported. This was hardly a typical relationship—Genet’s interest waned after Abdullah incurred a career-ending injury, the slept together only on occasion, and Abdullah had a Greek girlfriend during his relationship with Genet. Yet there was clearly an emotional attachment: Genet’s neglect of Abdullah after his injuries contributed to his suicide, which affected Genet profoundly. In 1974 he met his last significant companion, Mohammed El Katrani, on a street in Tangier. He took him to France, and later built a house in Morocco for El Katrani and his wife. Genet and El Katrani’s relationship was at times rocky, and helped precipitate the separation of El Katrani and his wife. The degree of the sexual component of this relationship remains unclear, and the financial and emotional bonds may have been stronger. After succumbing to throat cancer, Genet was buried in Larache, Morocco. A picture was taken of El Katrani, his son, and Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri at Genet’s humble grave. (4)

The third major component of Genet’s interactions in the “Arab world” is the time he spent with Palestinians in the early 1970s and in Lebanon in the early 1980s, experiences he set down in Un Captif amoureux and “Quatre heures à Chatila.” In 1970 Genet traveled to Beirut with the intent of joining the Palestinian fedayeen in Jordan. He was only to stay in Jordan for a few days, but remained for more than six months and made a number of return visits to the region in 1971 and 1972. During his stay in the camps he became a sort of revered figure, despite his homosexuality and atheism, and completely apart from his literary fame. In 1982, he traveled to Beirut. Days after his arrival, Israeli forces allowed the massacre of Palestinian refugees at the Shatila camp in Lebanon, the subsequent visit to which he chronicled in one of his most notable articles, “Quatre heures à Chatila.” (5) He returned to the Middle East once more before his death on a visit to Jordan in 1984. (6) The motives of his political involvement with the Algerians and the Palestinians are not always clear, as a simple kinship with another group of marginalized or oppressed peoples is muddied by Genet’s sexual attractions. Genet admits that his support of the Palestinians is in part based on some level of attraction, yet he remains uncertain of the totality of his reasons, writing that “[the Palestinians] are in the right because I love them. But would I love them if injustice had not turned them into a wandering people?” (7) It is clear, however, that it is difficult to discuss Genet’s political involvements without consideration of his personal experiences.

Despite Genet’s involvements with Arabs, his later writings do not reflect the same level of sexuality as his earlier novels, especially with respect to the sexualization of Arabs. Saïd is not fetishized sexually in Les Paravents, (8) and the moments of sensuality in Un Captif amoureux are subtle, secondary to political struggles. Desire, crucial in novels like Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs and Miracle de la Rose (9) is not as prominent: “the first two fedayeen I saw were so handsome I was surprised at myself for not feeling any desire for them,” (10) writes Genet. There is also a relative absence of desire amongst the fedayeen. There is talk of love, but it is a love linked with friendship and the revolution, rather than one of desire and sexuality. One of the Palestinians, Abu Kassem, admits to Genet that despite the collective brotherhood of the revolutionaries, they tend to have their favorites. Abu Kassem is not afraid to use “love” to speak of friendship: “Do you think at a time like this I’m afraid of words? Friendship, love?…I maybe a revolutionary, but in moments of relaxation I turn to friendship—friendship’s restful, too.” (11) The most sustained narrative focused on one specific individual is that of the short period of time Genet spent with a young soldier named Hamza and his mother, followed by Genet’s search for Hamza years later. Genet’s portrayal of Hamza is not one of love or desire, but one in which he is inextricably linked with his mother in an “oft-repeated, profoundly Christian couple” (12) —Mary and Christ. This image that haunts Genet also haunts the second half of his book. Genet never approaches the level of explicit eroticism and sexuality with respect to the Arabs in his later works as he does with the criminals of his earlier novels.

Un Captif amoureux is a poetic and complex work, weaving together narratives of Genet’s time with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians, through a proliferation of images, ruminations and observations, and defies easy analysis, including charges of an orientalized eroticism of its subjects that would be more easily placed against Joe Orton or André Gide. The strands of eroticism and desire present in Un Captif amoureux as well as the possibility of non-political influence leading Genet into the Palestinian’s cause, are not without foundation in Genet’s biography. The same could be said for Les Paravents, despite a greater lack in explicit eroticism of Arabs. The context of sexuality in Genet’s life and works to Les Paravents is less focused on Saïd and issues of race, however. This connection would be best explored in the scenes with Warda in the brothel, a setting that formed the central world of his earlier play Le Balcon. (13) Les Paravents is also connected to Le Balcon through the theme of revolution and the attempt to transform a person into a symbol of the revolution—Chantal in Le Balcon and Saïd in Les Paravents.

France’s control of Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries contributed to a rise in sexual tourism in North Africa, where gay, bisexual or merely curious men could vacation and solicit sexual activities from native boys and men. Among these tourists were a number of known writers, including Oscar Wilde, André Gide and Joe Orton, and a number of their experiences ended up in various forms in their writings. Joseph A. Boone notes the strong theme of commoditization in these experiences and writings, where the procurement often includes as a monetary exchange and the Arab boys are viewed as objects more than people. (14) While it might be easy to lump Genet with a writer like Guide in terms of contributing to a broad concept of orientalism by exoticizing the “Oriental Other,” what we have already discovered about Saïd’s relationship with Genet’s biography and works might suggest otherwise. A key scene in Gide’s L’Immoraliste is when Michel observes the theft of a pair of scissors by one of his wife’s “favorite” Arab boys. (15) Michel writes:

 

One morning I had a curious revelation about myself: Moktir, the only one of my wife’s protégés who didn’t annoy me, was alone in my room with me. I was standing near the fire, both elbows on the mantel in front of a book in which I appeared to be absorbed, but I could see reflected in the glass the movements of the child behind me. A curiosity I could not quite account for made me follow his every movement. Moktir did not know he was being observed, and thought I was deep in my book. I saw him stealthily approach a table on which Marceline had put down, beside some sewing, a pair of tiny scissors, which he had furtively snatched up and in a single gesture stuffed into his burnous. My heart pounded a moment, but the most prudent rationalization could not produce in me the slightest feeling of disgust. Quite the contrary, I could not manage to convince myself that the feeling which filled me at the moment was anything but amusement, but delight. When I had given Moktir all the time he needed to rob me properly, I turned toward him again and spoke to him as if nothing had happened. Marceline was very fond of this child; yet it was not, I believe, the fear of giving her pain which made me, when I saw her next, instead of denouncing Moktir, devise some story or other to account for the disappearance of the scissors. From that day on, Moktir became my favorite. (16)

Michel’s tacit acceptance of Moktir’s theft reflect’s Genet’s acceptance of theft at the hands of a young Arab in the interview, and the two writers are linked by a shared attraction to young Arab men. However, Genet’s experience with crime, as it informed the construction of Saïd in Les Paravents, changes the perspective on his comments, differing greatly from Gide’s upper-class Protestant upbringing. (17) While I would not like to go so far as to argue that Gide is wholly objectifying an exotic “Other” and Genet is doing nothing of the sort, Genet’s comment warrants consideration of the complexities of his views, backgrounds and constructed selves before labeled “orientalist,” “racist,” or otherwise.

 

Footnotes:

1. Jean Genet, Prisoner of Love, trans. Barbara Bray (New York: New York Review of Books, 2003).

2. Jean Genet, interview by Hubert Fitche, trans. Jeff Fort, in Fragments of the Artwork: Jean Genet (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003),146.

3. For the following account, see Edmund White, Genet: A Biography (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 442-473, 578-635.

4. White, n.p.

5. Jean Genet, “Four Hours in Shatila,” trans. Daniel R. Dupêcher and Martha Perrigaud Journal of Palestine Studies 12, no. 3 (spring 1983): 3-22.

6. White, xlii.

7. Genet, “Four Hours in Shatila,” 13.

8. Jean Genet, The Screens, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1962).

9. Jean Genet, Our Lady of the Flowers, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1963); Jean Genet, Miracle of the Rose, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

10. Genet, Prisoner of Love, 205.

11. Ibid., 101.

12. Ibid., 204.

13. Jean Genet, The Balcony, trans. Bernard Frechtman (New York: Grove Press, 1966).

14. Joseph A. Boone, “Vacation Cruises; Or, the Homoerotics of Orientalism” in PMLA 110, no. 1 (January 1995): 89-107.

15. This occurs before Marcel’s homosexual inclinations have been implicitly crystallized.

 

 

Bio:

Jordan Sudermann is currently finishing an MA in Near Eastern Studies at the Hagop Kevorkian Center for Near Eastern Studies at New York University. He is finishing his thesis on Jean Genet’s The Screens, performing an analysis of Genet’s the screens with a specific regard to historical, biographical and literary contexts.

 

(This article can be considered to be an excerpt from a larger project that the author is undertaking as part of his MA thesis in Near Eastern Studies at NYU.)

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