The suitcases in which the writer Jean Genet packed his writings at the end of his life are open in Paris, exhibited at the Institute of the Arab World (IMA) which underlines his love for the Palestinian people. Jean Genet, novelist, playwright and poet, decided to stop publishing after the suicide of his former companion Abdallah Bentaga in 1964 and the scandal of his anti-militarist and anti-colonialist play Les Paravents in 1966. But he continued to write, without defined form. , and kept everything in two suitcases. They are behind display cases, one in black leather, the other in brown leatherette.
These suitcases were the subject of an exhibition at the Abbaye d’Ardenne near Caen, which only had its opening, then stopped. It was late October 2020, when the Covid-19 pandemic forced all cultural venues in France to close for six months. The exhibition finally finds its place at the IMA, as part of a cycle of exhibitions, concerts, films, meetings and debates entitled “What Palestine brings to the world”, until November 19. Because Jean Genet (1910-1986) was one of the great defenders of the Palestinian cause.
In 1970, the writer traveled to Jordan. “He thinks he will stay eight days, he will spend two years in the Palestinian camps”, tells AFP Albert Dichy, curator of the exhibition and literary director of the Institute of Memoirs of Contemporary Publishing in Caen. “It’s a love story, the Palestinian people will become the major emotional concern of his last 15 years. And through the Palestinians it is his own life that he tells, him the abandoned child who finds himself in this people without territory, ”he adds.
The suitcases are the symbol of the wanderings of a man who no longer had a fixed address. Witness the letters addressed to him, still published by Gallimard, or hotel bills. Their content revealed, among other things, the scenario of Divine, an adaptation of his novel Our Lady of the Flowers written at the request of singer David Bowie who dreamed of playing the protagonist. The project did not succeed.
A fortnight before his death, Genet gave these suitcases to his lawyer, Roland Dumas, who kept them for 34 years. In his accounting for the year 1985, the writer made projections for 1986, but not for 1987, the year for which he writes: death. His last, posthumous work, A Captive in Love, is an ode to the Palestinians.
