Jean Genet’s vertical geographies: on travel, politics, and form

ABSTRACT

This article explores the travel writings of dissident, anti-nationalist French writer, Jean Genet (1910-86) and argues that they use the geometry of place to resist the violence of political cartography. Traversing diverse geographies, from the domestic (Chartres) to the distant (Palestine, Japan, and Vietnam), it focuses on how Genet's vertical signifiers reveal an oppressively monolithic vision of a homeland. Genet encourages the reader's microspection into the flattening orthodoxies of a native soil to make visible the exploitation of those without a home. This emphasis on verticality helps him delve into the 1970s Palestinian revolution, his geometric writing excoriating the demarcation lines of imperial rulers seeking to appropriate, know, and dominate a non-Western other. This article reads Genet's vertical travel in two ways: a microscope into the hierarchies of oppressed peoples; and a voyage into travel writing itself, a literary process of “unearthing” that locates home in a perennial departure.

KEYWORDS:

• Palestine
• Israel
• deterritorialisation
• imperialism
• migration
• vertical travel

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 For more on cultural imperialism, see Mairéad Hanrahan (2007).

2 With the Socialist election led by François Mitterand in 1981, discussions around cultural pluralism and improved integration of immigrant populations swept France. This challenged the Jacobin French model of French politics where the Republican values of universalism took precedent over difference. See Judith E. Vichniac (1991).

3 Genet’s nomadism has been much documented and debated. Notably, he spent eleven months in Damascus with the French Foreign Legion in 1930; six months in Palestinian refugee camps from Autumn 1970 to Spring 1971, and subsequent returns throughout 1972; a trip to Beirut in 1982, bearing witness to the massacres in Sabra and Shatila; stayed with the Black Panthers throughout 1970; and was buried in Larache, Morocco 1986. The personal often seeps into the political, and scholars have grappled with the ethical tightrope Genet walks between anti-imperialist struggle for solidarity and orientalism (Said 2006; Amin 2017; Marty 2003; Provencher 2017; Hayes 2000; Neutres 2002; Taïa 2017; Khatibi 2008; Choukri 2008; Ben Jelloun 2010).

4 These pieces are collected in Genet (1991) and in Genet ([1991] 2004).

5 See Clare Finburgh Delijani (2020) for an exemplary exploration of the thanatocentrism that hauts Genet’s writing. See René de Cecatty’s article (2008) for an extended exploration of the spectre in Genet’s work.

6 Derrida riffs on the term “tombe” in Glas as follows: “relève la chute dans le monument. La chute s’y maintient, embaume et momifie, monumémorise, s’y nomme – tombe. Donc, mais comme chute, s’y érige” (1974, 7b) [relieves the fall [chute] into the monument. There the fall maintains, embalms, and mummifies itself, monumemorizes and names itself – falls (to the tomb(stone)) [tombe]] ([1974] 1986, 1). By contrast, Genet’s irrepressible poetics “laisse[nt] tomber le reste” (8b) [let[s] the remains fall] (2).

7 At the Théâtre de Gennevilliers in 1992 Jacques Derrida used the image of a cemetery without gravestones to describe Genet’s text.

8 Hadrien Laroche argues that “in the terrible discontinuity of the letter (Hebrew), he sees the frightful continuity of a people (Chosen): procreation, birth, ejaculate” ([1997] 2010, 315); while Hanrahan claims that “if the Hebrew writing troubles Genet so deeply, it is because [of …] the impossibility of figuring time directly” (2004, 52). See Bruno Chaouat (2010): “the anxiety triggered by this incised and incisive writing is a death anxiety […] staring at the face of the dead letter as if by Medusa’s head” (150).

9 See Genet’s interview with Rudger Wischenbart and Layla Shahid Barrada on 6 and 7 December 1983, during which Genet professes allegiance only to a “Palestine in revolt”, not one that is territorially satisfied (L’ennemi déclaré, 251).