Black on White: Language and Revolution in Genet's Political Writings

Author(s): Gisèle Child-Olmsted

Source: L'Esprit Créateur, Vol. 35, No. 1, Jean Genet Littérature et Politique (Literature
and Politics) (Spring 1995), pp. 61-69
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26287556
Accessed: 23-09-2019 23:01 UTC

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide
range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and
facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at
https://about.jstor.org/terms

The Johns Hopkins University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and
extend access to L'Esprit Créateur

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Black on White: Language and Revolution
in Genet's Political Writings

Gisèle Child-Olmsted

in 1970, his initial concern for Black issues was more than a
WHEN GENET BEGAN his involvement with the Black Panthers
decade old: his play The Blacks was written between 1957 and
1958, and its first stage production took place in 1959. One can suppose
that Genet's close connection to Sartre accounts for much of his interest
in and knowledge of Black issues, for Sartre played a crucial role in
introducing radical Black writers to the European intellectuals and to the
world at large. Published in 1948, "Orphée noir," Sartre's groundbreak
ing preface to Léopold Senghor's Anthologie de la poésie nègre et
malgache de langue française had great repercussions in intellectual
circles and generated increasing interest in Black poets. Sartre also wrote
the preface to Les Damnés de la terre 11961), Frantz Fanon's masterpiece
which became one of the most influential works on Black activists of the
Sixties. Many of the topics developed by the poets of "Négritude," or by
Sartre in "Orphée Noir" and in Saint Genet can be found in Genet's
play. Like the poets and ranon, the Blacks in Genet s play experience lin
guistic and cultural alienation and fight psychological domination by
seeking a new identity through the creation of a new language. Genet's
Blacks use language in a very sartrian way, as a weapon that attempts to
sap the very foundations of society. It would seem that The Blacks,
viewed as a revolutionary play, should more accurately be considered a
reflection of the aesthetic and political ideology prevalent among certain
radical Caribbean and Black African Parisian groups in the time frame
that spans the two wars. Genet's genius is to give violent poetic expres
sion to these revolutionary concerns.
Although The Blacks remains a violent critique of racial discrimina
tion, its fundamental theme is more universal in scope. This can be seen
in Genet's use of Black actors to play the role of the White Court, a tech
nique that blurs the distinction between the races, and focuses on the fact
that discrimination based on pigmentation of the skin is but the outer
garment, easily stripped and replaced by another that hides an issue of
concern to all mankind: the exploitation and subjugation of man by his
fellowman. Hence, even in 1959, the use of "black skin, white masks" is

VOL. XXXV, NO. 1 61

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Créateur

not just a pirandellian gesture or merely a clever concretization of the

title of Frantz Fanon's famous book published in 1951, it is Genet's
attempt to say that the racial problem is just one more paradigm of the
master and slave dialectic that continues to afflict all the races. Later on,
this thought, which is presented in a latent and symbolic way in the play,
will acquire more precise political overtones when Genet, a member of
the Communist Party, joins the fight for the Black Panthers: in "Le
Rouge et le Noir," an article which addresses the relationship between
communism and the Blacks, Genet states specifically: "Racisme et lutte
de classe sont la même chose" (ED 103).1 One can therefore conclude
that when Genet writes about the Blacks some twelve or thirteen years
before his experience with the Black Panthers, he is more concerned with
showing the Blacks as an example of a more general problem, as a sub
group of a much wider category that includes all the alienated, the per
secuted and the oppressed. Thus he quips, when recalling how he had
been commissioned to write a play for Black actors: "Mais qu'est-ce que
c'est donc qu'un Noir? Et d'abord, C'est de quelle couleur?" (N79). It is
in this light that we should understand his words to Hubert hichte: "je ne
pouvais me retrouver que dans les opprimés de couleur ou dans les
opprimés révoltés contre le Blanc. Je suis peut-être un Noir qui a les
couleurs blanches ou roses, mais un Noir" (ED 149). Blackness is used
here as a synecdoche, since one element of the group, the Blacks, is used
to represent the whole group, all the oppressed people of the world.
When Genet attempts to blur the distinction between Blacks and Whites,
he is perhaps also responding to new ideological pressures that were
being felt in Black Parisian circles, and subtly pointing to a future stage
beyond the preliminary stage of revolt, hatred and black racial solidarity.
If "négritude," the search for Black values and a Black identity was to
initially turn its back on Western values and life styles to create a new
Black man liberated from the old colonial domination-submission roles,
the definition of Black values against White values was merely the initial
step on the road to a future solidarity that would transcend racial divi
sions and encompass all of mankind. This position very much reflects the
ideological path that many Black francophone authors have followed, as
can be seen in René Depestre's excellent essays grouped under the title
Bonjour et adieu à la négritude (Laffont, 1980). It should be noted that
the evolution beyond the negative stage of rejection also reflects the early
history of the Black movement in the United States, as exemplified by the
position of Black Muslim leader Malcolm X who, in his final years,

62 Spring 1995

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Child-Olmsted

abandoned the racism and separatist stand of his mentor Elijah

Muhammad, and came to believe in a more open society that would
admit the brotherhood of Blacks and Whites.
It appears that when Genet shifts his writing practice from fiction to
politics, he views a problem in a less abstract way and becomes more
aware of the specificity of the issues at stake. After living with the Pan
thers for two months, after experiencing their fears, humiliations and
persecutions, his judgments seem more sensitive, his manner more
careful and humble. He reverses his stance and comes to acknowledge
that the Black problem is one that he will never fully comprehend. Blacks
cease to be the symbols of abstract concepts and become painfully real.
His articles and speeches are interspersed with anecdotes of his experi
ences illustrating various manifestations of racism in the U.S.: the dis
criminatory practices of the airlines, the segregation in the courtroom,
the unequal treatment of Blacks and Whites by the Justice system, the
persecution of the Blacks and the Black Panther Party by the Authori
ties, the fear in which the Blacks live. Genet uses personal anecdotes as
actual proofs of the brutal domination and injustice of White society. He
seems haunted by certain episodes, emotionally charged and rich in
visual imagery, which become the leitmotifs of his speeches and articles.
One of the most terrifying is the link between trees and Blacks, which is
often mentioned in his articles on the Black Panthers, and is described
extensively in Un captif amoureux·. Genet is due to give one of his
speeches in support of the Panthers and against racism at Stony Brook,
when he turns to David Hilliard (Chief of Staff for the Movement) and
asks him whether he is coming. David replies: "There are still too many
trees," a reply which gives rise to this comment:

Durant le voyage en auto cette phrase: "Il y a encore trop d'arbres" ne cessait d'aller et de
venir dans ma pensée. Ainsi, encore maintenant, pour un Noir d'à peine trente ans un arbre
ce n'est pas ce qu'il est pour un Blanc, une tête de feuillage, d'oiseaux, de nids, de coeurs
gravés et de noms entrelacés: c'était un gibet. La vue d'un arbre ramenant une terreur pas
très ancienne séchait la bouche, rendait presque inutiles les cordes vocales: enfourchant la
poutre maîtresse, un Blanc tenait la corde ou la boucle était déjà faite, c'est d'abord ce que
voyait le nègre qu'on allait lyncher, et ce qui nous sépare des Noirs aujourd'hui c'est moins
la couleur de la peau ou la forme des cheveux, que ce psychisme parcouru de hantises que
nous ne connaîtrons jamais, sauf quand un Noir, sur un mode à la fois humoristique et
secret prononce une phrase qui nous paraît énigmatique. (C4 69)

Genet becomes obsessed with the image of the tree as a symbol of the
hatred of the white man for the Black, to the point that he writes, in "Les

VOL. XXXV, No. 1 63

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Créateur

Frères de Soledad": "je me demande si tout homme bianc de ce pays,

quand il plante un arbre, ne voit pas à ses branches des Nègres pendus"
{ED 69). Aside from the different affects—fear, hatred and persecution
—that the image of the tree conjures, what is interesting is that it is used
as proof of the insurmountable difference between Blacks and Whites. In
"Pour George Jackson," we find again the same comment: "La vie
mentale des Noirs est sillonnée de fantasmes qui ne sont pas les nôtres"
{ED 84). His experience with the Black Panthers has taught him to
understand the Black problem in its specificity. When it comes to the
mental images that haunt us, a Black man is never the same as a White
man. The tree episode is also crucial in that it reveals to Genet the com
plexity of the linguistic sign: it is the point at which physical reality, the
historical referent and the symbolic intersect. The image of the tree
allows Genet to see how the symbolic is anchored in the world of experi
ence (it is because trees were used for lynching that Blacks perceive them
with fear). Hence, a tree is both a physical objet and a phantasmatic
entity. The affect derived from the object can differ radically depending
on the historical experience of the group to which the perceiving subject
belongs: for the White man, it is an object of pleasure, a symbol of love
and rebirth, to the Black, it is an object of fear, a symbol of hatred and
death.

Un captif amoureux begins with a meditation on the impossibility of

reducing reality to words, which one should not dismiss solely as a ges
ture towards current theories of representation.2 When viewing the con
figuration of characters he has formed on the white page, Genet ponders:
"la réalité est-elle cette totalité de signes noirs?" (CA 12), for Genet
never ceases to be amazed at the impossible task that man has taken upon
himself: to recreate reality by means of words. Plagued by a sense of un
reality, which he fears will contaminate the Panther's project, he con
cludes: "et quand j'ai observé que les Noirs étaient les caractères sur la
feuille blanche de l'Amérique, ce fut une image trop vite advenue, la
réalité étant surtout dans ce que je ne saurais jamais précisément, là ou se
joue le drame amoureux entre deux Américains de couleur différente"
(C/4 12). Language cannot reproduce life, and neither metaphors nor
graphic signs can account for what is truly taking place. Moreover, even
if language were capable of recreating reality, even if recording history
were at all possible, the essential elements would remain beyond Genet's
reach: the American experience is "a love drama" that can only be
played out and understood by the two antagonists involved, White and

64 Spring 1995

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Child-Olmsted

Black Americans. Written après coup, this passage, which is found on

the second page of Captif, although it refers to a description that appears
almost 300 pages later, constitutes a mise en abîme: Genet looks over our
shoulder and reflects on the signs that we, the readers, are observing. The
passage to which Genet alludes reads as follows:

Les Noirs en Amérique sont les signes qui écrivent l'histoire; sur la page blanche, ils sont
l'encre qui lui donne un sens. Qu'ils disparaissent, les Etats-Unis pour moi ne seront plus
qu'eux seuls et non le combat dramatique qui devient de plus en plus ardent. (CA 290)

The development of this metaphor in Captif is particularly rich in

that it links three very important elements with which Genet is struggling:
writing, in its graphic aspect as signs on the white page, and in its pur
pose as an attempt to preserve reality in written form; history, in this par
ticular instance, the attempt to record the evolution of American society
as exemplified by the struggle between Blacks and Whites; and violence,
which, for Genet, is the means by which both writing and history are
created. Let us consider these elements.
We have already noted Genet's ambiguous relationship to writing,
which can in part be explained by his ambivalent and oscillating positions
with respect to language in general. Genet is a nomad not only in his life
style, but also in the intellectual sphere. In Captif, his last work, we see
him shift from a more traditional use of the written word to a semio
logical approach depending on the mood or the subject. He seems to
have abandoned the sartrian position of The Blacks in favor of the sym
bolic and graphically reductive approach described by Borges in El
A le ph.
Most of the descriptions of Black Americans in Captif were written
ten years after those of L'Ennemi déclaré. Hence, whereas in the articles
written in the Seventies Genet views the Black Panther as a dynamic
force that constitutes a real threat to a regime he considers fascist and
oppressive, his descriptions of the Black Panthers in Captif, which he
started writing in 1983, occur after the movement was disbanded and
reflect a tactical shift. In the early articles, Genet adopts a menacing tone
and stresses the elements of violence and danger. The Whites are afraid
of the Blacks and with good reason, says Genet: the Blacks are angry;
they are willing to risk their lives and be killed, and they are also ready to
kill. In reality, although many Black leaders served lengthy sentences for
very minor offenses, others were acknowledged rapists and murderers,
so that the element of danger and fear was not inconsequential.3 Yet, in

Vol. XXXV, No. 1 65

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Créateur

the later descriptions made in the eighties, Genet tends to de-realize the
movement, to view it in a cocteauesque vein, as a violent, theatrical and
perhaps even empty parade, a sort of bluff that, against all odds, suc
ceeded in its purpose. Genet's strategy is to describe the Panthers from a
semiological point of view, to consider them as visual images to be de
ciphered. "Les Panthères Noires attaquaient d'abord la vue," writes
Genet in Captif (291). The connotation of the visual images is intentional
and obvious: the Panthers are full of anger and their body language—
leather jackets, protruding guns, electric hair, tightly molded pants,
violent colors—are signs of an aggressive defiance designed to inspire
fright.

Le Black Panther Party n'était pas un organisme isolé, mais une des pointes des révolu
tionnaires. S'il se distinguait en Amérique blanche, c'est par son épiderme noir, ses cheveux
crêpelés, et, malgré une sorte d'uniforme exigeant la veste de cuir noir, une très extrava
gante mais élégante façon de se vêtir: coiffés de casquettes taillées dans des tissus multi
colores et posées, mais à peine posées sur leur chevelure à ressorts, moustaches et quel
quefois barbes négligées, les jambes prises dans des pantalons de velours ou de satin bleus,
roses, dorés, coupés de façon à mettre sous les yeux du plus myope une virilité lourde. A
l'image du début montrant le peuple noir comme une écriture j'en ajoute une autre: coulée
charbonneuse avec au milieu d'elle, défait de sa gangue et déjà lumineux: le Parti. (CA
291)

In charting the path taken by Genet in his writings on the Blacks, we see
that he first starts off by viewing the Blacks from a moral, political and
aesthetic point of view in the play and in the early Panther writings, then,
in a final phase in Captif, he views them from a mainly plastic angle—
presenting them first in a three-dimensional scale as he describes their
posture, hair and accoutrements, then reducing them still further to a
two-dimensional scale whereby their physical presence is captured sym
bolically by black letters on a white page. This radical displacement from
the intellectual to the material and symbolic plane is tenuously achieved
by means of a common element—blackness—that characterizes both ink
and skin. Paradoxically, Genet's graphical reduction allows him to col
lapse the different planes so that the signs on the page retain a heavy
intellectual charge. The physical appearance of the signs—Genet's letters
join, separate, aggressively point upwards—form linear ondulations that
symbolically evoke the march of the Blacks through time. In the passages
where Genet compares American society to the black letters on the white
page, he speaks of the confrontation between Blacks and Whites both as
a "combat amoureux," "a love fight" and as a "combat dramatique,"

66 Spring 1995

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Child-Olmsted

"a dramatic fight." Love and hatred are indistinguishable in this strug
gle.4 Like two linguistic signs that derive their value from their opposi
tion to each other, Blacks and Whites are locked in a combat that is also
an embrace; and in the same way that meaning is created through con
trast and opposition, so American history is shaped by the confrontation
between Blacks and Whites.5
Like Fanon, Genet viewed violence as a positive, creative and cleans
ing force. He considered that the violence of the Black Panthers was per
fectly justified as a measure to counteract the brutality and injustice of
white society. In his early articles on the Black Panthers, Genet credits
their aggressiveness and violence with instilling in the Blacks a new feel
ing of power, self-worth and confidence. Yet, already in 1975, during his
interview with Hubert Fichte, we see that his viewpoint subtly begins to
change and that he presents the Panther movement less as a dangerous
and political social movement than as a movement powerful in its effect
on the psyche. Genet discerningly points out that the main weapon of the
Blacks was not of the order of the military arsenal but "de l'ordre affec
tif et émotionel" (ED 151). He tells us that the Black revolution was
achieved by means of poetry, that is, "une façon nouvelle de sentir le
monde et de l'exprimer," the ability to feel the world in a different way
and to express it (152). Yet he disclaims any belief in the effectiveness of
"poetic revolutions," which he clearly differentiates from social and
political revolutions: "Ce qu'on appelle révolutions poétiques ou artis
tiques ne sont pas exactement des révolutions. Je ne crois pas qu'elles
changent l'ordre du monde" (152). At the time of the Fichte interview,
he still seems to adhere to the standard definition of the term revolution
which requires that change in the power structure or in the values of a
community be achieved through violence and violent events: "Je me
demande si le concept révolutionnaire peut être séparé du concept de vio
lence" (149). Since his early involvement with the Panthers, Genet views
with derision the notion of the pen-in-hand, arm-chair revolutionary,
who performs symbolic gestures; he is suspicious that language and writ
ing can change the world: "It is better to perform real actions, of appar
ently small scope, than theatrical and futile manifestations" (May Day
Speech 16). The implication in the interview with Fichte is that the Black
Panther movement belongs to the symbolic order, and as such, their
effect on us is "uncontrollable," the Panthers affect us in a way that
escapes direct and rational communication.6 The emphasis on poetry,
rather than violence, is more pronounced in Captif, where we find that

Vol. XXXV, No. 1 67

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 L'Esprit Créateur

Genet tends to define the movement more by defiant heroics and hi

onics than by real action: "leur mouvement, plus révolte politique e
jouée que volonté d'un changement radical, était un rêve flottant su
l'activité des Blancs" (CA 206). Genet sometimes fears that his influe
has brought them outside the realm of reality, and has given them
dream-like quality: "En acceptant d'aller à l'intérieur des Panthères,
apportant ma fonction de rêveur à l'intérieur du rêve, n'étais-je pas,
de plus, un élément déréalisateur des Mouvements?" (ÇA 206). Yet, i
spite of his doubts and uncertainties, Genet sees in the Panthers a sh
lived but powerful force that swept through American society from 1966
to 1971, a force that should not be underestimated since it had lastin
repercussions. In Captif, he makes it clear that the Blacks revolutioni
American society:

Rien ne sera plus comme avant. Jusqu'en 1793 le roi = roi, après le 21 janvier, le roi
guillotiné, princesse de Lamballe = tête au bout d'une pique, souveraineté = tyrannie,
de suite les signes, les mots, tout un dictionnaire changeant.
D'abord comportement apparemment cinglé, le mouvement des Panthères allait deven
lieu commun, même à des Blancs. Peuple = noble, and Black = beautiful. (CA 292)

For all its outer trappings and artificiality, the movement was not, as
Genet sometimes claims, a superficial and theatrical revolt ("une rév
politique et jouée"). Rather, if one is to believe Genet's own definitio
this revolt reached the status of a revolution: "La révolte prend ce n
quand elle dure et se structure, quand, cessant d'être une négation
poétique, elle se veut affirmation politique" (C4 142). Genet acknowl
edges the profound impact that the movement had on American society.
This impact is all the more surprising since, as Genet points out, the
Blacks had no land, no history, very few weapons, their main source of
power being "la parade." Y et through the unconscious images they com
municated, they managed to change their image, to change the con
science and beliefs of American society. Against all odds, they created a
revolution; not a violent revolution, but one characterized by an altera
tion in myths, values and social structure. If poetry is the ability to see
and feel things in a new way, to redefine terms so that "People = noble,
and Black = beautiful," then Genet is undoubtedly right in conceding
that "Les Panthères ont vaincu grâce à la poésie" (C4 119).

Loyola College in Maryland

68 Spring 1995

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms
 Child-Olmsted

Notes

1. Reference will be made to the following works of Jean Genet: Les Nègres in Œuvres
complètes, V (Paris: Gallimard, 1979), indicated in the text by the abbreviation [TV];
May Day Speech, description by Allen Ginsberg (San Francisco: City Lights, 1970); Un
captif amoureux (Paris: Gallimard, 1986) [C4]; L'Ennemi déclaré (Paris: Gallimard,
1991) [ED].
2. Genet's involvement with the Tel Quel group in the Seventies can explain his increasing
preoccupation with the nature and limitation of the linguistic sign.
3. In his essays published under the title of Soul on Ice (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1968),
Eldridge Cleaver, one of the founders of the Black Panther Movement, tells how, hav
ing been raised in a society which admitted only the white race's standard of beauty, his
attraction to white women—which society forbade him to have—led him to become a
rapist. "Rape," he writes, "was an insurrectionary act" that allowed him to defy and
take revenge from a society that humiliated and defiled black women (16-17).
4. The ambiguity of the love-hate relationship is explicit in "Pour George Jackson,"
where Genet writes: "tout jeune Noir américain qui écrit, se cherche et s'éprouve, et
quelquefois, au centre de lui-même, en son propre coeur, rencontre un blanc qu'il doit
anéantir" (ED 69).
5. The concept that Blacks and Whites are contrasting signs that give each other value is
expressed very poetically in The Blacks, in the passage where Félicité and the Queen
confront each other and indulge in fantasies of each other's extermination:
Félicité: Si vous êtes la lumière et que nous soyons l'ombre, tant qu'il y aura la nuit où
vient sombrer le jour.
La Reine: Je vais vous exterminer.

Félicité (ironique): Sotte, que vous seriez plate, sans cette ombre qui vous donne tant de
relief. (TV 142)
6. Genet's distinction between rational and uncontrollable communication comes close to
Barthes' opposition between denotation and connotation. In the Fichte interview, he
distinguishes between the two:
HF.—Vous dites que les Panthères faisaient une révolution poétique?
G.—Oh bien! avant de vous dire ça, je voudrais qu'on se mette d'accord si c'est
possible. Il semble qu'il y ait au moins deux sortes de communication: une communica
tion rationnelle, réfléchie. Est-ce que ce briquet est noir?
H.F.—Oui.
G.—Oui. Et puis, il y a alors une communication qui est moins certaine, pou
évidente, je vais vous demander si vous êtes d'accord, le vers de Baudelaire: "Ch
bleus, pavillon de ténèbres tendues", est-ce que vous trouvez que c'est beau?
H. F.—Oui.
G.—Et nous communiquons. Bon, il y a donc au moins deux sortes de communica
tion, un mode qui est reconnaissable. contrôlable, et puis un mode incontrôlable.
L'action des Panthers relevait de la communication incontrôlable. (ED 151)

Vol. XXXV, No. l 69

This content downloaded from 129.199.59.249 on Mon, 23 Sep 2019 23:01:24 UTC
All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms