Jean Genet

Jean Genet born 19 December 1910 (d. 1986)

Jean Genet was a prominent, sometimes infamous, French writer and later political activist. Early in his life he was a vagabond and petty criminal; later in life, Genet wrote novels, plays, poems, and essays, including Querelle, The Thief's Journal, Our Lady of the Flowers, The Balcony, The Blacks and The Maids.

Genet's mother was a young prostitute who raised him for the first year of his life before putting him up for adoption. Thereafter Genet was raised in the provinces by a carpenter and his family, who were loving and attentive. While he received excellent grades in school, his childhood involved a series of attempts at running away and incidents of petty theft.

He was eventually detained at the youth prison of Mettray. In The Miracle of the Rose (1946), he gives a fictionalised account of this period of detention which ended when at 18 he joined the army. He was eventually given a dishonorable discharge on grounds of indecency (having been caught engaged in a homosexual act) and spent a period as a vagabond, petty thief and prostitute across Europe, a time later he gave a fictionalised treatment in The Thief's Journal (1949).

After returning to Paris, France in 1937 Genet was in and out of prison through a series of arrests for theft, use of false papers, vagabondage, lewd acts and other offences. In prison, Genet wrote his first poem, Le condamné à mort, which he had printed at his own cost and the novel Our Lady of the Flowers (1944). In Paris, Genet sought out and introduced himself to Jean Cocteau, who was impressed by his writing. Cocteau used his contacts to get Genet's novel published and when in 1949 after ten convictions, Genet was threatened with a life sentence, Cocteau, joined by other key figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo Picasso, successfully petitioned the French President to have the sentence set aside. Genet would never again return to prison.

By 1949 Genet had completed five novels, three plays and numerous poems. His explicit and often deliberately provocative portrayal of homosexuality and criminality was such that by the early 1950s, his work was banned in the United States. Between 1955 and 1961 Genet wrote three more plays as well as an essay called What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn Into Four Equal Pieces and Flushed Down the Toilet. During this time he became emotionally attached to Abdallah, a tightrope walker. However following a number of accidents and Abdallah's suicide in 1964, Genet entered a period of depression and attempted suicide.

From the late 1960s Genet became politically active. He participated in demonstrations drawing attention to the living conditions of immigrants in France. In 1970 the Black Panthers invited him to the USA where he stayed for three months giving lectures, attending the trial of their leader, Huey Newton and publishing articles in their journals. Later the same year he spent six months in Palestinian refugee camps, secretly meeting Yasser Arafat near Amman. Profoundly moved by his experiences in Jordan and the USA, Genet wrote a final lengthy novel about his experiences, A Prisoner of Love, published posthumously. He worked with others to protest against police brutality against Algerians in Paris, a problem persistent since the Algerian War of Independence, when beaten bodies were to be found floating in the Seine. In September 1982 Genet was in Beirut when the massacres took place in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Shatila. In response, Genet published Quatre heures à Chatila (Four Hours in Shatila), an account of his visit to Shatila after the massacres.

Genet developed throat cancer and was found dead on April 15, 1986 in a hotel room in Paris. Genet may have fallen on the ground and fatally hit his head. He was buried in the Spanish Cemetery near Larache, Morocco.