Genet’s “Prisoner of Love”: The Evolution of a Muslim Saint

Other themes that are peculiar to Genet get recycled with great effect—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 Genet is experiencing is a dream and that he is the dreamer inside the dream. Or Genet insists again and again on his non-adherence to any cause, including that of the Panthers or the Palestinians. As he says in one of his most beautiful utterances: “Le coeur y était; le corps y était; l’esprit y était. Tout y fut à tour de role; la foi jamais totale et moi jamais en entier.” (“My heart was in it; my body was in it; my spirit was in it. Everything was in it at one time or another; but never my total belief, never the whole of myself”; trans. Barbara Bray). In this passage Genet emphasizes the theme of being an outsider, central to his work and life. Even if he espouses a cause, he can never commit himself entirely to it. Just as in his play The Screens (produced in 1966) he portrays Arabs who have betrayed their own revolution, in the same way he reminds us often in Prisoner of Love that he will never be a whole-hearted partisan.

One of the themes that Genet massages and repeats is that he is himself something like a saint and that whoever will possess his bones will inherit his aura. Many pages in A Thief’s Journal, written in the 1940s, suggest that already at that time he wanted to be a (Catholic) saint: “Though saintliness is my goal, I can not tell what it is. My point of departure is the word itself, which indicates the state closest to moral perfection. Of which I have known nothing, save that without it my life would be vain. Unable to arrive at a definition of saintliness—no more than of beauty—I want at every moment to create it, that is, to act so that everything I do may lead me to what is unknown to me, so that at every moment I may be guided by a will to saintliness until the time when I am so luminous that people will say, ‘He is a saint,’ or, more likely, ‘He was a saint.’”

Since Genet is sensitive to every paradox and is a being of inner contradictions, he is also capable of saying in Prisoner of Love that he perceives himself as a little old man, a dwarf, who is heading for the horizon and will soon disappear altogether. This method of unfolding contradictory images of himself is very effective rhetorically; we cannot object to Genet’s more extravagant claims because he himself has already undercut them.

He introduces the idea of his sacred bones almost parenthetically far into his narrative: “In a little while I’ll tell about Ali, the young Shiite who if anything went wrong wanted to have my bones so that they could be buried some day in Palestine.”

What is this interest in bones and how is it linked to Muslim saints? According to Scott Kugle’s Sufis and Saints’ Bodies, bones are a reminder of both death and resurrection, since the reborn body will be woven by Allah onto the loom of the bones. In particular, saints are seen as something like tent pegs, which give structure and coherence to the material world. “The bones of dead saints are pegs that secure the foundation of our human social world, acting as pivot points in time and space that establish a sacred order.” The dead saint’s personality becomes transparent, like glass, and can take on the reflective qualities of a mirror: “The social public can see its most cherished values and aspirations reflected in a saint.”

With no drama and no explanation, suddenly Genet announces that he is God or something very much like God (that being he does not believe in). Although elsewhere he has argued that his book has no value and will be read by no one—certainly not by the Arabs but not by the French either—here he announces that in this journal every recessive detail has a protruding correspondence in reality. He has already developed the image of damascening, the method of gouging out runnels in metal and filling them in with gold seams that protrude. His written words are the damascened negative space filled by the positive protrusions of the real world; this interconnectedness of text and reality is almost biblical. Like the Bible, Prisoner of Love is about chosen people. Like the Bible, Genet’s book is an invitation to exegesis. Like the Bible it is a book of memory, of names. It alternates history and poetry, epic and lyricism. Like the Bible, it is the Only Book, one meant to be read again and again, and it is constructed canonically, as though the first-time reader had already read it.

In a flight of mystic intuition, Genet declares that by staying with the Palestinians he was staying within his own memory. “By that rather childish expression I don’t mean that I lived and remembered previous lives. I’m saying as clearly as I can that the Palestinian revolt was among my oldest memories. ‘The Koran is eternal, uncreated and consubstantial with God.’ Putting aside the word God, their revolt was eternal, uncreated and consubstantial with me.”

Even indirect and seemingly irrelevant passages keep coming back to Genet’s contemplation of his own death. For instance, a Panther tells Genet that revolution is the most joyous of all times in life, that it permits the sort of gaiety one feels when someone who has lived a long time finally dies. Obviously, Genet is thinking that his own imminent death is bestowing a youthful cheerfulness on the Revolution.

Genet’s mystical association of the revolution and God is seconded by one of the heroes of his narrative, Abu Omar, who only once becomes angry with Genet, when the French writer appears to be denying the existence of God. As Abu Omar announces unequivocally, God “is the First Fact. Uncreated.”

“And the Second?” Genet is quick to ask.

Just as quickly Abu Omar replies, “The Revolution.”

When a Lebanese newspaper referred ironically to Genet’s presence among the militant Palestinians as being parallel to the presence of St. John the Baptist among the early Christians, one of the Palestinians says, “The essential thing is that you are here with us.” Genet was linked with John the Baptist (a prophet venerated by Islam) because both Genet and St. John were associated with the Jordan River, where the Palestinians were camped at that moment. Or perhaps because St. John’s bones and especially his skull were the sacred goals of many Muslim pilgrimages, most notably to the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus.

Later, Genet asserts that like the sheiks of the past he has flown from place to place on a magic carpet composed of the looks, the gleaming teeth, and the strong legs of young men. He has been accompanied by the sound of two young fedayeen beating out exciting, unpredictable rhythms on the coffins of two of their martyrs. As Genet concludes about his eighteen months among the Palestinians, “Throughout that journey whenever I realized how tired I was a twenty-year-old fedayee handed me a cloth; diced for my bones; listened to me and I to him, all night; stood before me taller than a minaret; smiled as we shared a sardine. And always the ray from his eyes took over from the ray from the eyes of the two fedayeen who smiled as they drummed on the two coffins from Deraa. All those rays transported me, and I still wonder whether a large part of my happiness didn’t derive from the fact that I was being carried along in a sort of mobile barracks.” In this passage Genet, the edgy artist always intent on destabilizing his reader, juxtaposes minarets and sardines, all-night talks and the soldiers’ squabbles over who will possess his bones.

Finally there is this scrap of dialogue between Genet and a soldier:

A paragraph later someone tells Genet he cannot mourn a single soldier, he must mourn thousands of names of the dead written in registers—"you can order yourself a few kilometers of crepe.”

Perversely, Genet concludes, “Palestine is no longer a territory but an age, since youth and Palestine are synonymous.” As Hadrian Laroche points out in The Last Genet, his highly poetic study of Genet’s last words, this sentiment echoes a passage in Gérard de Nerval’s nineteenth-century Voyage en Orient: “When I set foot upon this eternal land and immersed myself in the venerable source of our history and beliefs, I felt as though my years would stop, I would return to infancy in the cradle of civilization and be young again amid this eternal youth.”

Genet is suddenly talking with a soldier named Ali, who died at Tell Zaater in 1976. Genet asks this long-dead soldier: “What would you do with my bones? Where would you throw them? You don’t have a cemetery.”

Ali responds:

Many pages later Genet returns to this idea.

He thinks, “As for the cemetery they were talking about I could only think of a moveable cemetery [une cimitière ambulante] similar to the one Ali was probably thinking of when he wanted to divide up my bones among several fedayeen if I died—until they found a cemetery where they could bury them looking out on the Dead Sea.” Although Genet insists repeatedly on his worthlessness, his age (which he exaggerates), his atheism, and his homosexuality—admissions that startle and sometimes even amuse the Palestinian soldiers—nevertheless he also entertains the idea that he may be attached to them, to everyone! through an invisible thread. In another, much earlier essay, he had written about a sort of miracle that occurred to him once when he sat on a train opposite a very ordinary man, and suddenly he, Genet, felt his soul pouring into and out of this man, back and forth from the man to himself and from himself into the man. He realized that they were interchangeable.

Now in Prisoner of Love he talks of a period of five years in the 1970s in Turkey when he felt cut off from everyone else. He was living in a sort of cell (reminiscent of the invisible cell that God granted St. Elizabeth of Hungary so that she could live her normal life as a monarch while she remained cloistered), from which he could observe others and within which others could see him, but “I could no longer lose myself in anyone whatsoever.” Everything was equivalent to everything else; the Pyramids of Egypt had the same value as a handful of sand. “The most beautiful boys had the value and power of all the others but no one had any power over me.” Genet was so filled with sadness thinking about this lack of differentiation between one person and another, one thing and another, that he decided to search out its meaning. No sooner had he come to this resolution than a light suffused his entire room. He hid under the cover to see if the light was coming from the space above the door, but nothing could block the light out. “For a few seconds something in me was phosphorescent, I even thought my skin might have become luminous as a parchment shade does when a lamp is lit.”

How to explain this miracle? Genet did not turn to the idea of God. He preferred the notion of chance, an idea that seemed more elegant and droll to him than the idea of One God. The weight of faith in God crushes and weighs heavily on the believer, whereas chance lightens burdens and laughs out loud. Even Paul Claudel, the most religious of all French poets, had spoken of “The jubilations of chance.”

In the last pages of Prisoner of Love, Genet imagines inhabiting a house—he who has never owned a house or even a room anywhere, though he has given houses to his friends. Now he imagines living in a house on the Turkish coast in a little Byzantine city where “I want to remain until my death, that is for only two or three hours, not more.” He imagines he was there late in the day and the sun was coming from the west, “which permitted me to sleep, since I had to have a shelter now that the shadow and age had arrived. A couple of sailors had proposed a shelter which would enclose me in the hollow of space and time.” Genet wishes he could see from his window a naval battle taking place on the sea and the shores of Cyprus, could observe the drowned sailors washing up and floating on the becalmed waters.

These mystical experiences—Genet’s soul flowing into and out of the little man seated opposite him on the train, or the light illuminating everything and turning his body phosphorescent, or even this vision of a house on the Turkish coast—are so vivid and we might say so arbitrary, certainly so detailed and precise, that they can’t be explained as literary tropes or inventions. They must have really happened as mental events or else Genet wouldn’t have bothered to explain them to us, his readers, in such quirky, insistent detail. Of course there are literary, even religious antecedents for these visions; one thinks of the legend that the Virgin Mary’s house (with her in it) was translated from the Holy Land to the coast of Turkey soon after her death. It would be appropriate for the gender-bending Genet to become the Holy Mother rather than the Father or the Son. It also seems appropriate that Genet’s holy relics would be translated to the Dead Sea; on the south shore of the Dead Sea were located Sodom and Gomorrah and the other Cities of the Plain.

Why would Genet have wanted to be a saint, a Muslim saint, a wali? Muslims do not normally worship saints with the same veneration as Catholics, though in certain places and cults Muslim saints have their shrines and their holy days and are even considered to confer blessings on their adherents.

Genet of course was aware that the Palestinian leadership was mostly secularized, left-leaning and sometimes Communist, certainly highly educated; for them a saint was a superstitious notion. For the Palestinian soldiers a wali was something they scarcely thought about, especially since they possessed no land where a shrine could be situated. But Genet’s ambition to be a saint, to be buried near the Dead Sea after Palestine was reestablished, meant that he wanted his shrine to become a timeless and eternal part of the nation that had adopted him and that he had adopted. To be sure, Genet had said repeatedly that he loved the Panthers and the Palestinians because they were stateless. Like him, Jean sans terre. And he’d warned that if they acquired land he would part ways with them, just as he’d told Castro that he would visit Cuba only if it got rid of its national anthem and flag. Genet was against all the trappings and the reality of statehood.

This opposition makes his yearning to be a Muslim saint all the more ambiguous and touching, since it seems to contradict his oldest, deepest, most anarchic impulses. Of course we must not forget that Genet chose to be buried in Larash, Morocco, near the house of his last Muslim lover and within the view of three of the central tropes of his work—a bordello, a prison, and the sea. Since he was not a Muslim convert he had to be buried in a long-disused Spanish Catholic cemetery. Soon after he was buried the headstone of his grave was stolen, and Genet’s adopted son, Jacqui Maglia, who’d been taught to write by Genet when he was a child, wrote the inscription again in cursive letters—Genet’s own handwriting. So we could say that Genet signed his own final work, his tomb. The tomb of a very strange kind of modern saint.