Publisher about the book
In 1970, Genet promised Yasser Arafat a testimony about the Palestinian struggle, but the book The Prisoner in Love (1986), which is the fruit of this promise and was almost fifteen years in the making, is anything but an orthodox ideologically defined report.
The work does indeed describe his period of residence among Palestinian fighters and refugees, as well as his collaboration with the Black Panthers, but Genet maintains complete authorial freedom in these memories of his activist period. Right up until the last page, Genet questions what his position was within the Palestinian struggle, how he can act as its witness, and to what extent testimony is even possible.
Genet, who remained faithful to a personal, multifaceted vision of truth, rather than some heroic, revolutionary, collective rhetoric, conceived of writing as betrayal, a lie, and thus concluded this book, and thus his entire work, with a reflection on the position of the witness, on the notion of truth and transparency. The Prisoner in Love can therefore be read as his literary testament, a work that, through its own completion, annihilates itself.