Jean Genet … the magic bag

In the early spring of 1986, when Jean Genet (1910-1986) learned that he had only a few days left, the writer who suffered from laryngeal cancer went to the luxurious home of his lawyer, Roland Dumas, in Paris. A place full of works of art where Cami Claudel’s workshop is located. Genet tossed two bags on the table: one was black leather and the other was brown. “Roland, here’s all my current work, do what you want with it.” At that time, the author of The Two Servants (1947) and The Diaries of a Thief (1949) had fasted for 25 years since their publication. After categorically refusing to publish the contents of the “treasure” when Albert Ditchie, a specialist in Genetian antiquities, first raised the subject of the “Genet Deposit” in 1990, Roland will always hand over both bags to the “Institute for the Memory of the Contemporary Writing “currently directed by Ditchie himself, provided they were on display. In front of the public later this month near the city of Caen, something that journalist Gaspard Delim * revealed in a major investigation recently published in the French daily “Le Monde”.

“When I first opened the bags, I was mesmerized by this incredibly rich mess, which is like Alibaba’s cave,” says Ditchie. A copy of Rambo’s “Al Ishraqat”, a cotton shirt, a fly that was wrapped around his neck like school students, many erasers, envelopes, notes, notebooks, graphics, advertisements, vaccination notebook, messy wrappers and ready-made texts or almost complete, including the beginning of a second part of your book. The latest is “Prisoner of Lover” (1986), and a strange screenplay written by Genet at the request of his friend, the British singer and actor David Bowie, a fan of “The Lady of Flowers”, who dreamed of playing the role. from “Devin” the bisexual hero of the novel (1943), plus two texts about Japan. A nice surprise to the Arab world, in two bags from Genet, is a great book about Palestine that Genet made with a sugar cut on the tops of sugar bars and on the back of hotel bills. After the events of May 1968, Genet discovered that his internal revolution could be linked to a revolution abroad. Genet’s election of the Palestinians, the people driven from their lands in the last colonial case of the 20th century, culminated in his commitment to the text “Four Hours in Chatila” when he finally described the sacrifices of the Fedayeen in the Trojan saga: “The battle for the country can fill a very rich life, but a short one. And this, as we mentioned, is Achille’s choice in the epic of the Iliad. “To know the meaning of the event of the” magic bags “, it is necessary to go back to the beginning of the meeting of Jeanette Brulan Dumas in the early sixties of the last century, when he was always a lawyer for the French and European intelligentsia. He was entrusted with the ammunition of Jacques Lacan and the painters Marc Chagall and Pablo Picasso, and Genet would love him for his “southern accent, and because he does not preach like his colleagues do. Parisians. “Douma will become Genet’s friend and keep her secrets, united by his love of art, the Arab world and even the desire to violate taboos. Genet, his lawyer friend, will convey his sadness and depression over the death of his lover Moroccan Abdallah, a circus performer and rope dancer: “No, Roland, I don’t want to do anything anymore. By the way, I broke all my scripts. Death must be useful in something!” The two suitcases that accompanied Genet in all his voyages, from its circumnave The passage between the bodies of the martyrs in Sabra and Chatila, and his travels in the black ghettos in the United States, until his residence in the house “blue candles” that he built for Abdullah in the Moroccan town of Larache, reveal two contradictory things to Genet : Tramzan To the absolute freedom of a homeless man (and this is one of the reasons why his genetics stick to the Palestinians) and without limits, but on the other hand, it indicates that Genet, despite his bohemianism, was interested in an “eschatological” life that was included in writing. The gigantic writer who, in his youth, endured incarceration, reformism and the situation of social control and family adoption, developed a perception of writing that resembles life: taking it out theatrically to the street, so that “tragedy than to live it, not to dramatize it ”. This resemblance between the life of the writer and his text is not only guided by his genius to another giant, Antonan Arto. But the difference between them is that when Arto attacks in his writing, he is pierced and burned and burned, while his genes are caressed and he walks briskly and flies like a “rope dancer”.

* (Translation and quotes from Gaspar Delim’s investigation into the Genet bags and the secret writings discovered in the newspaper “Le Monde”, October 9, 2020)

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