Saturday, June 5, 2010

My hero / Jean Genet by Ahdaf Soueif


Jean Genet


My hero: 

Jean Genet

by Ahdaf Soueif

 Imprisoned for petty crime repeatedly in the 1940s, Genet had at the same time produced the masterpieces that attracted the attention and solidarity of Cocteau, Sartre and André Breton


Ahdaf Soueif
Saturday 5 June 2010

T

he last week has been difficult. So has the last month, and the last year. In times like these there are particular voices one longs to hear. I've found myself turning to Jean Genet, particularly to Un captif amoureux, the book in which he describes his "Palestinian revolution, told in [his] own chosen order".

Genet liked rebels. Having written a homage to the young leader of the Paris student revolution, Daniel Cohn-Bendit, in 1968, and spoken on behalf of the Black Panthers at Stony Brook in 1970, he spent a year with the young fighters of the Palestinian revolution in their camps in Ajloun, Jordan. The fruit of this visit came in 1986.

Genet's last work before Captif was completed in 1961. Three years later, following the death of his companion Abdalla Bentaja, he destroyed his manuscripts and left France. He had always had a conflicted relationship with his homeland. Born in 1910, abandoned and brought up by the state, homosexual, imprisoned for thieving at 16, sent out to join the foreign legion at 18, then imprisoned for petty crime repeatedly in the 1940s, he had at the same time produced the masterpieces that attracted the attention and solidarity of Cocteau, Sartre and André Breton. When he left in 1964 he was one of France's most eminent writers, but in an interview with Australian radio he said he no longer had the need to write: "I have nothing further to say."

But in 1982 he visited Shatila camp in Beirut after the massacre of the Palestinians. And then he wrote.

Un captif amoureux is an amazing legacy. When Genet died of throat cancer, the corrected proofs of his book were neatly stacked. On top of them a note exhorts: "search for the image". "It's not enough," he writes in Captif, "just to write a few anecdotes. What one has to do is to create and develop an image or a profusion of images." And he shows us how it's done. Captif is a masterclass for artists seeking to find, not an accommodation, but a creative fusion between their art and their political sensibilities.


THE GUARDIAN




2009
001 My hero / Oscar Wilde by Michael Holroyd
002 My hero / Harley Granville-Barker by Richard Eyre
003 My hero / Edward Goldsmith by Zac Goldsmith
004 My hero / Fridtjof Nansen by Sara Wheeler 
005 My hero / Mother Mercedes Lawler IBVM by Antonia Fraser
007 My hero / Ernest Shepard by Richard Holmes
008 My hero / JG Ballard by Will Self
009 My hero / Alan Ross by William Boyd
010 My hero / Ben the labrador by John Banville
011 My hero / Vicent van Gogh by Margaret Drabble
012 My hero / Franz Marek by Eric Hobsbawm

2010

017 My hero / Jack Yeats by Colm Tóibín
018 My hero / Francisco Goya by Diana Athill
019 My hero / Max Stafford-Clark by Sebastian Barry
020 My hero / Arthur Holmes by Richard Fortey

036 My hero / Robert Lowell by Jonathan Raban
037 My hero / Beryl Bainbridge by Michael Holroyd
038 My hero / Charles Schulz by Jenny Colgan
039 My hero / Oliver Knussen by Adam Foulds
040 My hero / Annie Proulx by Alan Warner

041 My hero / David Lynch by Paul Murray
042 My hero / Edwin Morgan by Robert Crawford
043 My hero / Anne Lister by Emma Donoghue
044 My hero / Jane Helen Harrinson by Mary Beard
045 My hero / Edmund Burke by David Marquand
046 My hero / Shelagh Deleaney by Jeanette Winterson
047 My hero / Christopher Marlowe by Val McDermid
048 My hero / Gwen John by Anne Enright
049 My hero / Michael Mayne by Susan Hill
050 My hero / Stanley Spencer by Howard Jacobson

051 My hero / William Beveridge by Will Hutton
052 My hero / Jean McConville by Amanda Foreman
053 My hero / Alexander Pushkin by Elaine Feinstein
058 My hero / Cy Twombly by Edmund de Waal

2011
079 My hero / Gene Wolfe by Neil Gaiman
087 My hero / Alberto Moravia by John Burnside
096 My hero / Isaac Babel by AD Miller
097 Lucian Freud by Esi Edugyan
100 Thomas Tranströmer by Robin Robertson
102 My hero / David Hockney by Susan Hill

2012

190 My hero / Iris Murdoch by Charlotte Mendelson
194 My hero / René Descartes by James Kelman
199 My hero / Albert Camus by Geoff Dyer

2015
2016


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