From the last page of Jean Genet’s last great work, “Prisoner of Love”:
Any reality is bound to be outside me, existing in and for itself. The Palestinian revolution lives and will live only of itself. A Palestinian family, made up essentially of mother and son, were among the first people I met in Irbid. But it was somewhere else where I really found them.
Perhaps inside myself. The pair made up by mother and son is to be found in France and everywhere else. Was it a light of my own that I threw on them, so that instead of being strangers whom I was observing they became a couple of my own creation? An image of my own that my penchant for day-dreaming had projected onto two Palestinians, mother and son, adrift in the midst of a battle in Jordan?
All I’ve said and written happened. But why is it that this couple is the only really profound memory I have of the Palestinian revolution?
I did the best I could to understand how different this revolution was from others, and in a way I did understand it. But what will remain with me is this little house in Irbid where I slept for one night, and fourteen years during which I tried to find out if that night ever happened.
This last page of my book is transparent.
