Jean Genet

Jean Genet (Paris, December 19, 1910 - Paris, April 15, 1986) was a French novelist, playwright, and poet whose work expresses a profound rebellion against society and its customs.. His mortal remains rest in a cemetery in Larache, a city in northern Morocco, of his own free will.

Biography

Early Years

He was born in Paris on December 19, 1910. His father was unknown, his mother, Camille Gabrielle Genet (1888-1919), handed him over to public assistance when he was seven months old. The young Genet was raised with an adoptive family from Morvan (the Régnier family, artisans from the village of Alligny-en-Morvan (according to Edmund White's biography), with whom he stayed until he was 13 years old, and provided him with schooling, in a protected environment and with a foster mother who took care of him. During his school years he was an outstanding student, and obtained the highest grades. Despite this, he was not allowed to continue his secondary studies, and he was ex officio removed from his family adoptive and forced to enter a vocational boarding school in 1924. Due to his artistic vocation, he escaped a month later, and escaped after escaped, wandering, until he was finally arrested in 1926. He entered the youth prison of Mettray, until reaching the age of majority.^{[citation required]}

At the age of ten, he committed his first robbery. Edmund White suggests that criminal details about his childhood and adolescence may have been exaggerated by Genet himself to found his own mythology and justify a "deep associability." About his life as an adolescent prisoner he wrote in 1946 Miracle de la Rose (The Miracle of the Rose) (Paris: Gallimard, 1951).^{[quote required]}

At the age of 18, he voluntarily enlisted in the foreign legion, in order to get out of reformatory, which led him to discover North Africa and the Near East. He deserted and returned to Paris, where he survived on petty theft and prostitution, which landed him several times in jail, spending a total of four years there. When he escaped from her he continued his wanderings as a vagabond, thief and hustler throughout Europe. He wrote about these personal adventures in Journal du voleur (Thief's Diary) (Paris: Gallimard, 1949).^{[citation required]}

Back to Paris

In 1937 he returned to Paris, where he was in and out of prison on numerous occasions accused of theft, begging, falsifying documents, and lewd and obscene conduct. Once again in prison he wrote the poem Le condemné à mort (1942), whose edition he paid for out of his own pocket, and in 1944 the novel Notre Dame des Fleurs (Saint Mary of the Flowers in the Spanish translation) (Lyon: Barbezat-L'Arbalète, 1948).

After ten consecutive convictions, Genet was threatened with life in prison. It was thanks to Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Cocteau (who used his influence to publish Notre Dame des Fleurs), Pablo Picasso and other figures from French artistic and intellectual life who personally requested pardon from the president of the republic and his sentence was finally overturned in 1948. Genet would never be imprisoned again.

By 1949 he had already published five novels, three plays, and several poems. In them he portrayed both crime and homosexuality in a totally explicit and provocative way, which is why his work was not only censored, but also banned in many countries. On the other hand, due to the devastating depression caused by Genet's own analysis of him in Sartre's long essay Saint Genet comédien et martyr (1952), he stopped writing for years.

In 1961 he had written new plays as well as the essay Ce qui est resté d'un rembrandt déchiré en petits carrés, analyzed by the deconstructivist philosopher Jacques Derrida in his work Glas .

Her love life during this time was closely linked to Abdallah, a tightrope walker who ended his own life in 1964. Following this event, Genet also attempted suicide.

Political Activism

At the end of the 1960s, his political commitment increased, especially after the events of May 1968 (he even paid homage to Daniel Cohn-Bendit, leader of the revolutionary students), declaring that although it was a revolution impossible, the important thing was that "the ideology of the French May is a mixture of exaltation of youth and rejection of authority and hierarchy". He participated in demonstrations to draw attention to the poor living conditions of immigrants in France. His political convictions also led him to support the Black Panthers, who invited him to the United States. There he lived for three months in 1970, giving talks, attending the trial of Huey Newton (his leader of his), and writing articles for his newspapers. Also in 1970 he had access to the refugee camps in the Palestinian Territories, meeting secretly with Yasir Arafat. Deeply influenced by these experiences, he wrote his last, posthumous and long novel Un Captif Amoureux (A captive in love) (Gallimard; 1986 which was translated into Spanish, for Editorial Debate, María Teresa Gallego Urrutia and María Isabel Reverte Cejudo in 1988). In it Genet collects the texts produced during his stay in Jordan and Lebanon alongside the Fedayeen. He also supported the information group for prisoners with Angela Davis, George Jackson, Michel Foucault and Daniel Defert. He worked with Foucault and with Sartre in their protests against police brutality against Algerians in Paris. This brutality was permanent since the Algerian war of independence, and caused the appearance of beaten and tortured corpses floating in the Seine.

Last years

In 1982 Jean Genet, who was in Beirut, was one of the first Europeans to enter the Sabra and Shatila Palestinian refugee camp where only hours before the Lebanese Phalangists (kataeb) hundreds of its inhabitants had just been murdered. The result of this visit is his text Quatre heures à Chatila ( 4 hours in Chatila ), which was published in a censored version in the January 1983 issue of the Revue d'Etudes palestiniennes. A translation of the official version of this text into Spanish can be found at CSCA^{[which one?]}. On December 19, 1983, in one of his rare public appearances, he read excerpts from his work at the opening of an exhibition on the Sabra and Shatila massacre organized by the International Progress Organization in Vienna, Austria. He had been invited by the philosopher Hans Köchler. ^{[citation needed ]}

In 1983, the French Ministry of Culture awarded him the French National Prize for Letters.

Shortly thereafter, Genet developed throat cancer. He was found dead on April 15, 1986. Of his own free will, he was buried in the Spanish cemetery in Larache, Morocco, in a tomb facing Mecca.^{[citation needed]}

Style

His literature is remarkably autobiographical but, at the same time, mythical, because it turns the criminal into a hero. Genet's hero is a man who inverts the values of society. He perverts the figure of the good thief and turns him into a hero who accesses the absolute through evil. He turns the sordid into a kind of poetry. His literature plays with moral provocation and mixes the fictional and the real. Witold Gombrowicz said of him that he turns ugliness into beauty.

In his work we continually find the portrait of a lyrical misery, in which love stories prevail, and where delinquents reveal their tenderness.

Work

From 1940 to 1946, he wrote his first works in the prisons of Fresnes, Tourelles and Santé. His first novel, considered his best, was Santa María de las Flores (1944), which narrates a journey through the underworld of the Parisian underworld. Two years later, in The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he writes about his life in prison and his reunion with former juvenile lovers from reform school. However, in 1947, his prose took an unexpected turn with the novel Funeral Parlors , written in a more hermetic and experimental language than the previous ones. In this, his third novel, Genet recalls the fighting in Paris, in the last moments of the Nazi occupation, and does so through one of his former lovers, a member of the Resistance. However, the plot is a mere narrative framework to develop a devastating exercise in literary style and moral provocation. A provocation that will become even more evident in his next novel: Querelle de Brest (1947), undoubtedly his best-known and most celebrated work, always on the edge of the abyss, with a hard and impressive style, which narrates the redemption of a murderer through debasement. A very different vision of the delinquent saint, the eternal vagabond that he stars in his autobiographical work Diario del ladrón (1949), where he recalls his own adventures as a globetrotter, pickpocket and prostitute in the thirties; in Barcelona's Chinatown, in the years before the Civil War.^{[citation required]}

Autobiography

• Diary of the thief (1949)

Novels

• Santa María de las Flores (1944)
• The Miracle of the Rose (1946)
• Funeral pops (1947)
• Querelle de Brest (1947)

Theater

• The maidens (1947)
• Severa vigilance (1949)
• The balcony (1956)
• Black people (1959)
• The biombos (1961)
• Elle (1989)
• Splendid's (1993)
• Le bagne (1994)

Cinema

• A black d'amour (1950)

Texts

• 4 hours in Chatila (1983)
• A captive in love (1986)

Poetry

• The sentenced to death (1942)
• La Galère (1944)
• Chants secrets (Le Condamné à mort, Marche funèbre), L'Arbalète, Décines (Lyon), 1945.
• A black d'amour (1946)
• Le Pêcheur du Suquet (1946)

About Genet

• Saint Genet comédien et martyrby Jean-Paul Sartre.
• Querelle de Brest, whose film version was the last feature film by Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
• The movie PoisonTodd Haynes (1991), was based on Genet's work.
• The song Jean GenieDavid Bowie, she's inspired by him.
• The song Beautiful BoyzCocoRosie, is a tribute to his life.
• The song Lady of the Flowers, from Placebo, is thus titled by the novel Santa María de las Flores.