Jean Genet

• 1. Introduction

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  Jean Genet spent his first seven months in the care of a prostitute mother before she placed him for adoption, and from that beginning he built one of the most fiercely original bodies of work in twentieth-century French literature. He was a vagabond, a convicted thief, a soldier dishonorably discharged for a homosexual act, and eventually a playwright whose name would be spoken alongside Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso. How does a man detained in a penal colony at fifteen end up reading his own writing in Vienna at the invitation of an Austrian philosopher? And how does a novelist once threatened with a life sentence become one of the most restless political voices of the era? Those are the threads this documentary pulls.

• 2. Colony and Discharge

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  On the 2nd of September 1926, Genet arrived at Mettray Penal Colony. He was fifteen years old. His foster family in the provincial town of Alligny-en-Morvan, in the Nièvre department of central France, had been headed by a carpenter and described by biographer Edmund White as loving and attentive. Whatever stability that home provided, Genet's childhood had still been marked by repeated attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft, and those misdemeanors, compounded by acts of vagrancy, landed him at Mettray.

  He remained there until the 1st of March 1929, when he turned eighteen and joined the Foreign Legion. His military career ended with a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency, having been caught in a homosexual act. What followed was years moving across Europe as a vagabond, petty thief, and prostitute. He would later set those years down in the novel The Thief's Journal, published in 1949. Mettray itself became the raw material for Miracle of the Rose, published in 1946, his account of that first period of detention.

• 3. Prison, Poetry, and Cocteau

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  After returning to Paris in 1937, Genet cycled in and out of prison on charges ranging from theft and use of false papers to vagabondage and lewd acts. Inside those cells he wrote his first poem, "Le condamné à mort," which he had printed at his own cost, and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers, published in 1944.

  In Paris, Genet sought out Jean Cocteau and introduced himself. Cocteau read the work and was impressed, using his contacts to get Genet's novel published. The relationship proved decisive when, in 1949, Genet faced a potential life sentence after ten convictions. Cocteau joined Sartre and Pablo Picasso in petitioning the French President directly, and the sentence was set aside. Genet never returned to prison.

• 4. The Sartre Silence

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  By 1949, Genet had completed five novels, three plays, and numerous poems. Much of this work was controversial for its explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality. In 1952, Sartre produced a long philosophical analysis of Genet's development from vagrant to writer, titled Saint Genet, which was published anonymously as the first volume of Genet's complete works.

  The effect on Genet was profound and, by his account, paralyzing. Sartre's analysis affected him so deeply that he did not write for the next five years. When he returned to work, between 1955 and 1961, he produced three more plays and an essay with one of the stranger titles in French literary history: "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet." That essay would later serve as the hinge for Jacques Derrida's analysis of Genet in his seminal work Glas.

• 5. Theater of Masks

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  Genet's plays work through ritual, role reversal, and the deliberate layering of identity. In The Maids, written in 1946, maids imitate one another and their mistress in a cycle that never quite resolves. In The Balcony, first performed in 1957, clients of a brothel simulate roles of political power before, in a dramatic reversal, actually becoming those figures, all surrounded by mirrors that both reflect and conceal.

  The Blacks, performed in New York in 1961, ran for 1,408 performances, making it the longest running Off-Broadway non-musical of the decade. Originally premiered in Paris in 1959, the New York production featured James Earl Jones, Roscoe Lee Browne, Louis Gossett Jr., Cicely Tyson, Godfrey Cambridge, Maya Angelou, and Charles Gordone. His most openly political drama, The Screens, written between 1956 and 1961 and first performed in 1964, was an epic account of the Algerian War of Independence.

  The Maids was the first of Genet's plays to be staged in New York, produced by Julie Bovasso at Tempo Playhouse in 1955. Its 1974 film adaptation starred Glenda Jackson, Susannah York, and Vivien Merchant.

• 6. Political Witness

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  Starting with a tribute to Daniel Cohn-Bendit following the events of May 1968, Genet stepped into open political life. He participated in demonstrations focused on the living conditions of immigrants in France, and that same year he was censored in the United States and later refused a visa.

  In 1970, the Black Panthers invited him to the United States, where he spent three months giving lectures and attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton. He published articles in their journals, including "Here and Now for Bobby Seale" in Ramparts. Later that same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. He also supported Angela Davis and George Jackson, and worked alongside Michel Foucault and Sartre to protest police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem traceable to the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were found floating in the Seine after the 1961 Paris Massacre.

  In 1977, Genet expressed solidarity with the Red Army Faction of Andreas Baader and Ulrike Meinhof in an article titled "Violence et brutalite," published in Le Monde. In September 1982, he was in Beirut when massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. His response was "Quatre heures a Chatila," a firsthand account of his visit to Shatila after the event. On the 19th of December 1983, at the invitation of Austrian philosopher Hans Kochler, he read from his work during the inauguration of an exhibition on the massacre, organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna.

• 7. Final Works and Death

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  The memoir that gathered all of Genet's political experience into a single volume was Prisoner of Love, a documentary account of his encounters with Palestinian fighters and Black Panthers. It was published posthumously in 1986, carrying a notably different tone from his fiction.

  Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead at Jack's Hotel in Paris on the 15th of April 1986, where his photograph and books still remain. He may have fallen and fatally struck his head. He is buried in the Larache Christian Cemetery in Larache, Morocco. Two of his poems, "The Man Sentenced to Death" and "The Fisherman of the Suquet," were adapted, translated by Jeremy Reed, and set to music for the 2011 album Feasting with Panthers by Marc Almond and Michael Cashmore.