216
KATE MILLETT
Unable to "bear the weight of the world's condemnation," he has
shared its disdain. Exorcising the myth which has bewitched them,
the black lovers must first repudiate the white fallacy that the female
is an aesthetic object and that beauty itself is white. Until this lie goes,
Village cannot love Virtue, Charley's despised prostitute, who of
all
the blacks, is "the only one who experiences shame to the bitter end."
The signal of the play's victory is his final acceptance of her.
Alone of our contemporary writers Genet has taken thought of
women as an oppressed group and revolutionary force, and chosen
to identify with them. His own peculiar history, his analysis of ex–
propriated peoples, has inevitably led him to empathize with what is
scorned, relative and subjugated. Each of his last plays incorporate
the sexual into political situations: in
The Balcony
it is power and
sex, in
The Blacks,
race and sex, in
The Screens,
sexual rank and the
colonial mentality. Lawrence, Miller and Mailer identify woman as a
minority force to be put down and are concerned with a social order
in which the female would be perfectly controlled or subordinate.
Genet, however, has integrated her into a vision of drastic social up–
heaval where her ancient subordination can produce explosive force.
And in fact, in
The Screens,
it
is
the women who are the revolution.
It is little wonder
The Screens
incited a storm both in France
and in Algeria. Presented in government-subsidized theater in a su–
perb production by Jean-Louis Barrault's company,
The Screens,
as
Philip Thody remarks, satirizes the French army as a body of
"incompetent and attitudinizing [latent] homosexuals, and the one
hundred and thirty years of French presence in Algeria as a to–
tally ludicrous experience." Broad, and often vulgar farce from start
to finish, the play erupted into a riot when Genet's legionnaires
patriotically farted "French air" in sober tribute over their lieutenant's
corpse. In Algeria,
The Screens
is
equally unpopular, for it accuses
the revolution of becoming the very pattern of its colonial predecessor,
leaving the masses, Said and the women, as wretched as before. The
last scenes are a duel between the prophetic matriarchs, grand in
their poetic rage and their vision of an ongoing revolution, and the
pale and automated males of the new order, carbon copies of their
French enemy, bursting with narcissism and military discipline,
la
glorie
and the organized slaughter called valor.
Obviously influenced by Fanon (probably via Sartre) Genet
is
