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THE HANDSTAND |
JANUARY 2003 |
 ..Jean Genet and the Position
of Sudden Departure ..by
Leila Shahid (Palestine) "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." 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.
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 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 In 1982, we went to Beirut. He had
forgotten the embroidery. This episode quite amused Jean, and he
grasped the relation between what was going on and 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) samia@rcn.com Tayseer Barakat "I do not use the flag or the olive tree. I try to use the spirit of the place. I see Palestine as the most beautiful land in the world and it has all of nature's various atmospheres from cold mountains to hot desert to wet areas. I find the variation beautiful. It affects me. I love the desert and the sea and the mountains. I lived in the Negev desert in the south of Palestine and I had Bedouin friends. I spent a lot of time with them. When I was 17 I lived in Gaze near the sea. And here in Ramallah I see the mountains. I love the architecture of Palestine. I also love the people of Palestine; I love their faces, their movements, their speech, and their habits." "It began with the art history of all those who lived in this area. It began in ancient Iraq as early as 3500 BC." Discussion on this subject extended for several meetings. We agreed that most of contemporary Arab artists from Palestine, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Iraq, and North Africa, consider the ancients as their ancestors. This is seen as natural in spite of manifold Arab nations and religions. We understood that the "West" applies labels to us and to our ancestors in such a way as to make us seem separate from our ancient. The too numerous labels create confusion and fragmentation. It aids hostile ideologies which imply that Arab lands and their resources do not belong to Arabs but somehow belong to Israelis or to the 'West.'" "The ancients had a philosophy. They drew how they understood life with all their senses not only how they saw it with their eyes. The ancient arts had a paradigm, a style, and one component of it was rhythm. The ancients utilized rhythm as the infrastructure of the story. Often, they used row after row full of pictorial narrative. The horizontal rows form a time-line for the events of life. They told and can still tell the story of life while they portray the passage of events. The rhythm of the art is the rhythm of life. When I draw I try to be unaware on a conscious level. Another aspect of rhythmic structure is the way it aids in the transformation of the conscious into the intuitive. As I work I try to put my thoughts into an intuitive level through visual rhythm." THE ARAB WOMAN'S CALL Over the far
hills, brother, Here I, in a long
high chant, Over the
sensitive dawn No columns of
metal or armies, brother, jocelyn braddell©
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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.
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! 
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.
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. 
