Exhibition, Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris

Two weeks before his death in April 1986, Jean Genet gave his lawyer Roland Dumas two suitcases of manuscripts. What did they contain that was so precious? His entire life. At first glance, a jumble of letters, hotel bills, notes on everything and nothing, on prison, writing, homosexuality and cinema. But they also held the vivid traces of a sixteen-year association with the Black Panthers and the Palestinians.

They also revealed another story: the story of a writer who, at the age of 50, gave up on literature. What did he do with his life after then? What does a writer who no longer writes write?

The suitcases provide an answer to this question: despite himself, despite his vow of silence and his “sealed lips”, Genet wrote. He wrote on everything that came into his hands, on envelopes, hotel stationery and torn-up pieces of newspaper… Everywhere, he scribbled his life.

And, one day, mysteriously, from these thousands of scattered notes, emerged the manuscript of a book combining literature and politics, and connecting the great adventure of the Black Panthers and the Palestinian feddayeen with the story of the life of a child of welfare services.

One month after Jean Genet died, his Prisoner of Love was published, arguably the most important book written by a Western artist about the Palestinians’ struggle – reflecting Genet’s first-hand experience of the massacres of Palestinian civilians in the camps of Sabra and Shatila.

Genet’s two suitcases now belong to the IMEC in Caen, and are on display in central Paris at present within an exhibition dedicated to the contribution of Palestinians to the cultural and social heritage of the world.

Ce que la Palestine apporte au monde, exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe, Quai Saint-Bernard, opposite the Pont de Sully in Paris – continues until 19 November 2023.