Original subtitles

"I remind you that I have neither father nor mother,

that I was raised by the state,

that I knew very young that I wasn't French,

that I didn't belong to a village.

After that, I could only find myself amongst those colored and oppressed,

amongst the oppressed risen up against the whites.

I am perhaps a black who is colored white or pink, but a black.

I don't know my family."

with the voice of Robert Kramer

Jean always lived in hotel rooms.

This is the hotel room in Paris of the Rubens hotel, where he stayed many times,

but especially the last few months before his death.

We met in 1974, in Paris, at the time when I was a student,

and then destiny wanted me to marry and move to Morocco.

He also had a friend in Tanger, Morocco.

Palestine and Morocco brought us together.

In 1982, at the beginning of June, the Israeli army decided on the operation

"Peace in Galilee" and besieged the capital of Beirut

for three months and General Sharon bombed the city for three months

with all sorts of bombs.

Jean and I were at Rabat at that time and we watched on television

the terrible images of the bombing.

More than a million civilians were besieged in the capital.

At the end of the third month, when they hadn't managed to break the Lebanese and

Palestinian Resistance, the Palestinian fighters evacuated the city to save it,

and normally the war should have stopped.

I decided to go to Beirut, my home town where my mother still lives.

Without hesitating, Jean said to me: "I am coming with you."

The siege was lifted at the beginning of September.

The Palestinian fighters,

in line with the accord agreed with the USA, England and France, started

to evacuate Beirut.

At the end of August, the Palestinian

fighters left for Tunisia by boat.

My mother lives in a big building by the sea.

The morning after our arrival we went to drink coffee on the balcony

which overlooks the sea and from where you can see the whole bay of Beirut.

Three military ships were leaving port and heading out to sea.

Jean asked: "What is it?" I didn't know.

I went to get the binoculars.

It was the multinational forces which were leaving.

I shall never forget Jean saying:

"It's a bad sign. Why are they leaving before the agreed date?"

They were supposed to stay another month

to assure the protection of the Palestinian refugee camps.

The next day there was an explosion at the headquarters of the Phalangist Party,

allied with the Israelis. There were many deaths, amongst which Béchir Gemayel,

head of the Phalangist militia and new President of the Lebanese Republic.

The city was in a state of shock. The day after, around five in the morning,

I saw the man delivering the news papers.

He screamed: "The Israelis are coming! The Israelis are coming!"

I rushed down the stairs and from the entrance I saw the tanks

and young Israeli soldiers with their backpacks, transmitters and aerials.

I went back up very quickly. Jean was overexcited.

He wanted to see everything from up close.

He took the binoculars and looked down. He saw everything.

The Israelis were scattering through the city,

surrounding the Palestinian camps which were south of the city.

That night we saw the sky bright with huge rockets lighting up

the south of the town, where the Palestinian camps were.

We didn't understand what was happening.

Especially because we didn't hear cannons or machine-guns.

Total calm. No electricity, no cars in the streets.

It was terrifying, almost surrealist.

Friday evening someone rang downstairs.

Someone shouted: "Come down quickly, it's very important!"

It was a journalist friend

who introduced me to a Norwegian nurse who'd come from the Chatila camp.

"She has terrible things to say. There is a massacre in the camp."

She told us that for three days they had been receiving people

with very strange wounds, knife wounds, ax wounds.

Scarcely treated they left like madmen to look for the rest of the family.

The same day with Jean we tried to approach the Chatila camp.

We were turned away by the Israelis.

The morning after, we finally managed to enter the camp.

Jean from one side, I from the other.

We agreed to meet again at home.

When I got home, four hours later, Jean was there, his face covered in blisters,

totally burned by the sun.

He was in a state of shock and I was sure that he was going to die that night.

We spoke a little and he said:

"I have to be alone."

After three or four days he told me that he wanted to leave Beirut.

I told him: "if you have documents on you, give them to me and

I'll get them out in my diplomatic bag."

He answered that if what he had written had any value, it would be kept

elsewhere than on paper.

Then I understood that during the days he had shut himself away, he had written.

Here is Mohammed, my son,

and over there four others, buried one on top of the other.

She says that her son is buried there.

All of them are our children. They were all in the camp.

They are all dead. It is the will of God. What can one do?

It is our destiny. This is what happens when you don't have a homeland.

At least if they had died in our country I would have been relieved.

This is what happens when you don't have a homeland.

If it were in our country, if they had died on our native soil,

I would be happy, but like this in a place of exile

If they are going to move us from here, move the refugees from here;

will I leave my children here?

I will not leave them here. I will take their bones with me.

I will fill some sacks with their bones and take them wherever

they will throw us. I won't leave them here.

If I return to Palestine, to our country, I will take their bones with me.

I will not leave them here, wherever I will go; I will take them with me.

The massacre took place in the evening at sunset.

Someone came to tell us that they were killing people in the camp.

We didn't believe them. A woman came saying that they had fired at her.

Her hand was bleeding. We didn't believe her either.

They fired at us. It was like an illumination.

Flares every two, three minutes.

It was like broad daylight in the camp. Me and my children, we ran away.

Everyone started to flee.

In the morning people found out that there had been a massacre.

The next day people wanted to go to the camp

to get their belongings. One woman was caught

in her home and slaughtered.

They killed the people, they slaughtered them. They covered them with earth.

There is not a crime they didn't commit.

They killed all these people.

The others came and started to cry.

We smelled the odors of the dead and the water was oozing from the bodies.

We started to put them aside.

They put them in a cemetery and they covered them with earth.

Those that were dead, those that were not dead yet, those that were only wounded.

And nobody said anything, nobody asked what happened.

They wanted to cut me into pieces with an ax.

When the fedayeen came, they fled.

They came to slaughter me.

They wanted to cut me with an ax.

They laid me down on the bed and they wanted to cut me up.

I trembled with fear like that.

What else can I say?

The life of a Palestinian is bitter. Our life is not good.

What's more: they beg, the Palestinians.

Our situation is bitter, bad.

Look how we are settled. Where dogs wouldn't want to be.

This is it, the life of a Palestinian. It's misery.

They are dispossessed. They beg.

They have left their beautiful country. Our good land.

We left everything. We have come to settle here,

in houses which are tombs.

Dogs wouldn't put themselves here.

Look at our life, it's bitter.

This is the life of a Palestinian.

They have abandoned everything; their homes in Palestine,

their horses, their wells and their valuables, and they have settled here.

- Who's there? - Mounia.

Hello.

After the massacre we returned to our homes. It was Thursday.

We were sleeping. Everybody had returned to his home.

Then we heard the sound of bulldozers and shooting.

We were scared. We thought it was the Israelis.

We didn't know. We were scared.

The following morning we heard voices from our neighbor's home.

We went to see what the noises outside were.

We saw some armed men in military uniforms.

They were surprised to see us still at home.

"How can you still be here? Get out right away!"

We were scared. We woke our younger brothers and sisters

and went to the door and opened it.

They entered with weapons and they pointed their rifles at us.

Somebody said: "Go on, shoot them!"

On their uniform pocket it was written "Lebanese Forces".

I had my little sister in my arms. I was standing there with her.

Then she was hit in the head.

Suddenly I felt her brain dripping on me. And I let her fall from my arms.

I threw myself on the ground.

My little sister dragged herself towards my mother and called out: "Mama, Mama!"

Then it was over, she was dead.

Two of my little brothers ran away to the toilets.

We pretended to be dead. The men left.

We were sure that they would not return.

I shook my brothers and sisters to see who was still alive and who was dead.

I found that my mother was still alive.

As well as one of my sisters who is now paralyzed.

Of course I always think of my family. I will never forget them.

I wish that my father were still alive.

My children are now the same age as my brothers and sisters

at the time of their deaths. My little sister who I carried in my arms,

who I nursed. They were my brothers and sisters.

I love them, I will always love them.

Imagine my sister, who I carried in my arms

and whose brain dripped on my hand. What you feel in such a situation.

She had just been filmed in What's the name of that

"The Arab Dream". They used her picture.

I said to my children: "That's your aunt - my little sister."

Look, the filth, the obscenity.

Look, they are pissing in the cemetery.

If we want to come for a visit to the cemetery we cannot.

What is there to visit? There's nothing.

If we want to visit, if we want to pray for the dead, we can't.

There isn't even an entrance. You can see with your own eyes what is happening.

What we ask, is that the State at least protect the cemetery

and that they surround it with a hedge, so that it would be a symbol

for the martyrs, for the children, for the women and for the elderly.

This is what we ask for.

So the people can see that there is a cemetery.

To honor the spilled blood of our martyrs and our children, this is what we ask for

The Israelis were in this building and we were in the camp.

It was night. They fired a shower of flares.

You could almost see an ant walking on the ground.

And we, we hid here and there.

We slept, but how could you sleep? We were hidden underground.

The shock of the Chatila massacre released in Genet,

probably for the first time in twenty years, the desire to write.

The mourning for Chatila lasted practically an entire year and a half.

Around April 1984 Jean, who spent several months in my house while sick,

came and held out to me a packet of flight tickets which had everything:

Beirut, Amman, Cairo, Rabat. And he said to me:

"I have decided to write a book on the Palestinians.

You are going to help me to go to these countries and find my fedayeen friends."

In this hotel room, which he moves into six months before his death,

he starts writing in an almost frenetic way. I came to see him nearly every day.

I satin front of him. I stayed there silently for hours.

I needed to regain that intimacy that we had shared during our mourning.

He was writing all day long.

His throat cancer made him suffer so much that he was forced

"to squeeze" his air in order to bear the pain.

But he didn't want to take a sedative.

His pleasure in writing, his necessity to write,

the writing, which came with such force, was stronger than pain,

stronger than death.

He always loved the Mozart Requiem very much.

He listened to it often with his tape next to him.

I thought after having read the book, how much this book was his own Requiem,

and like Mozart he didn't even have time to finish it

because he died while

he was correcting the proofs.

PRISONER OF LOVE

"I cannot date the beginning of this book.

After Chatila?

The writing began around October 1983.

And I became a stranger to France.

The page that before was white

is now overrun from top to bottom with tiny black marks.

Is reality the sum of these black marks?

Was the Palestinian Revolution written on nothingness,

an artifice upon nothingness?

And is the white page, is every tiny space of white paper

between two words more real than the black marks?

Allow me.

I understand you, but I don't speak Arab very well.

Yes, yes you speak well.

My name is Mounia.

My father and my mother

are Algerian. I live in France.

We grew watermelons, tomatoes, some olives, some grapes, and some figs.

What did you make with the olives?

We made olive oil.

The water of Palestine, it's better than a medicine that you drink.

My God, I hope that we will return.

If God wants, we will go back to Palestine, we want our land.

We don't want to stay here. We want to go to Palestine.

People end up in the hospitals at Amman

because of that water where they put the pigs.

Yes, yes, Pigs

He was here in 1971.

You saw him?

No. We didn't see him.

This is Jean Genet.

The air force didn't see us, because of the trees.

It's a personal refuge. My brother, my comrade is armed;

in case something happens, he will protect me.

If one of the enemy comes You put this here and you do

And the other, the enemy

"if so many things are there to be seen, only seen,

no word will ever describe them."

This is my favorite phrase in the book.

"If so many things are there to be seen, only seen,

no word will ever describe them."

To shelter all the images of language and to use them,

for they are in the desert, where you must go to look for them.

To shelter all the images of language and to use them,

for they are in the desert, where you must go to look for them.

To shelter all the images of language and to use them,

for they are in the desert, where you must go to look for them.

To shelter all the images of language and to use them,

for they are in the desert, where you must go to look for them.

The hotel, has it changed much?

No, not much.

Where do you come from?

From Palestine.

How does it make you feel to be at Irbid now, because of the film?

There is no trace any more.

There is no trace of the past any more.

So?

It's stupid

Good morning.

My name is Mounia.

I am looking for Hamza.

I know that he lived here in 1971.

Yes, we know him. He used to live here.

And today?

Today no. Now he works in Germany.

Hamza has already been here often and undisturbed.

Do you know the French writer Jean Genet?

He was a friend of Hamza.

When? In 1970?

Yes, in 1970. Do you know him?

Me, not personally.

He knows Hamza's brother.

Where does he live?

He lives up there, in the east section.

Concerning Hamza, like I already told you, during the events of 1970

he was arrested because of those regrettable events

that happened in Jordan. He was arrested the 27th of March 1970.

I am one of those who were arrested with him.

And through a Royal pardon in 1973 they freed Hamzi and the rest of the prisoners

By a public reprieve. And then everybody lived his life normally.

- Welcome, how are you? - Hello.

This lady is looking for Hamza.

Come in.

My brother Hamzi lived here in Irbid. In 1970 he left for Germany

and stayed there to work.

He married a German woman named Alpha.

He had a child with her, called Adnan.

They were together around five years, then she died.

Then he married my cousin, the daughter of my paternal uncle from Syria.

And now he has grandchildren.

Two boys and two girls. He lives in Germany and is very happy.

He is retired and receives a pension.

And he lives in Germany.

This is his picture. If you want to look at it. It's in Germany.

When was it taken?

That one 1980, I think.

Do you recall Genet?

I recall in 1969-70, he came to my mother's house in the Irbid camp.

Our brother brought him and he said: "This is a writer."

So he lived at my mother's house.

She cooked for him. And she served him coffee.

He was slightly bald and very nice. His clothes were very simple.

He was very nice. He was looking for the truth.

He detested injustice. He was very good.

The mother, is she here?

She is dead, may God protect her.

In 1990.

Jean Genet often spoke about her.

Yes, it's true, for one felt that he loved her very much.

And she had much tenderness for him, too.

After we discovered what he had written, truly

he had proven that he had been loyal.

Loyal toward Hamzi and Hamzi's mother.

Loyal in his writings on the Palestinian cause.

So, we are proud of righteous people, like Jean Genet.

We are proud of him and we wish him the mercy of God.

And this, this is the will of God.

Genet or no Genet,

everyone has a role to play in his life which has an end.

I hope in our turn, we will be just, loyal and faithful like him.

In the end we are friends of a cause, which is dear to us.

It's a homeland, dear and very precious

that we claim.

We serve the homeland with our blood and our souls. Thank you for your visit.

It was here.

Concerning my mother, truthfully, she was blessed with good health,

thank God.

She had a big heart, a tender heart, which forgives and understands.

She loved us and we loved her very much, too.

And this is the tomb of the mother, who is my mother and the mother of Hamzi.

And this is the date of her death.

And, my dear, we all go.

Life is a beginning and an end.

Thanks to God.

Truly, she raised us and she was devoted.

And praise God we hope that all mothers have this devotion

and this loyalty.

We were happy, even though

we were orphans. We were happy with our mother.

Translated by Anne-Marie Hateley and Francesca Bartellini

"Prisoner of Love" was published by

Wesleyan University Press, New England, USA, translated by Barbara Bray