[In the following essay, Warner compares the characters in Les Nègres with black writers who sought to celebrate their ethnicity.]

It is clear as one reads Les Nègres, published in English as The Blacks, that Jean Genêt has dealt extensively with the problem of black consciousness as it relates to the search for black identity as well as to the psychological expunging by blacks the world over of the imposition of usually Euro-centered values and the attendant problems posed by the unquestioned acceptance of the latter. Genêt's characters in this play set out, at one level, to do precisely what many black writers have done, namely to celebrate their blackness through a spiritual purging of the soul. These black writers were serious, or at least claimed to be, in the presentation and expression of the problem of being black, whereas Genêt, on the surface to start with, was not; neither were his characters, and this by their own admission. Nevertheless, in their ritual-like goings-on, the latter, and through them their creator, come remarkably close in tone, as this article proposes to show, to the actual black writers, militant or otherwise, in their approach to the many problems of black consciousness, black identity, cultural assertion, and the like.

A brief look at Genêt's other plays should suffice to explain why the portrayal of blacks would be of interest to him. For the most part, his theater is peopled with characters on the lower fringe of society, the so-called underdogs and outcasts: criminals, prostitutes, maids, pimps, et al. Consequently, given the position of inferiority occupied by so many blacks in so many societies, it must surely have seemed a most natural group to present on stage, since blacks would fall neatly in line with his established trend, though one is of course free to question Genêt's sincerity, not to mention his authenticity, in his treatment of any one of these groups.

But Genêt, it must be borne in mind, is part of the French nouveau théâtre, the “new theater” whose proponents constantly claim that their treatment of issues is the exact opposite of that usually found in the “traditional” theater. In fact, it might be truer to say that they did not really “treat” issues at all, though, to be sure, the plays were not entirely devoid of ideas. One is therefore led to wonder, quite justifiably, to what extent one can take seriously any of the topics dealt with by those who write under this banner. There must always be an understandable element of doubt in one's too-eager acceptance and subsequent analysis of their works, for, according to Richard Coe in what amounts to a sort of blanket description of a significant portion of this nouveau théâtre, “if there is one type of drama which, more than any other, is inappropriate for working out themes as complex as that of the theory of reciprocal functions, it is surely any drama … where the aim is precisely to diminish the significance of rational language.”¹ Still, these avant-garde dramatists do replace what they set out to destroy with something, as Eugène Ionesco was to find out in his play L'Impromptu de l'Alma:

BART (holoméus) I:
Vous vous prenez done au sérieux, Ionesco?
IONESCO:
Si je me prends au sérieux? Non … si … c'est-à-dire non …
BART. III:
Vous devenez académique à votre tour!
BART. I:
Car ne pas être docteur, c'est encore être docteur!
BART. II:
Vous détestez qu'on vous donne des leçons et même vous voulez nous en donner une …
BART. I:
Vous êtes tombé dans votre propre piège.
IONESCO:
Ah … ça, c'est ennuyeux.(2)
[BART. I:
You're taking yourself seriously, Ionesco?
IONESCO:
Taking myself seriously? No … yes … I mean no …
BART. III:
You too are becoming academic!
BART. I:
For saying you're not being a doctor is still being a doctor!
BART. II:
You hate people giving you lessons and you yourself want to give us one …
BART. I:
You've fallen into your own trap.
IONESCO:
Ah … that's annoying.]

The paradox is evident. Anti-dogma soon turns into its own brand of dogma, and in the end, plays that set out not to have any really discernible theses or ideas indeed end up having all the same, albeit in their own right.

As if to emphasize the apparently nonserious nature of Les Nègres, Genêt labelled it a clownerie, a clown show, a clever device no doubt, since the playwright could always claim afterwards with a fair degree of justification that nothing in the play is ever meant to be taken seriously. After all, who ever really feels sorry for the clown when he unsuspectingly trips over some dangerous-looking obstacle? The contention here, however, is that despite this label, the play does in fact deal with issues that are crucial and relevant to black people, for not only does it highlight areas of fundamental concern to blacks, it does so at times with the same techniques and language used by the black literary spokesmen themselves. The light antics of the clown, therefore, do not always totally obscure the serious nature behind the painted expression.

It would appear that Genêt, having written the play (or even prior to writing it), felt compelled to justify or to explain his choice of subject to his audience, though it is not certain whether this explanation is intended to be communicated to the actual spectators in the theater, the way, for example, the initial stage directions of the long-running La Huchette production of Ionesco's La Cantatrice chauve in Paris are read by a voice offstage, thereby emphasizing their importance in setting the correct tone and atmosphere. However, in the printed version of Genêt's play, one reads two interesting pieces of information at the beginning:

Un soir un comédien me demanda d'écrire une pièce qui serait jouée par des noirs. Mais, qu'est-ce que c'est donc un noir? Et d'abord, c'est de quelle couleur?³

[One evening an actor asked me to write a play for an all-black cast. But what exactly is a black? First of all, what's his color?]

If we are to believe Genêt—and one must not be blind to the fact that writers are notoriously wiser after the fact—the play had its genesis in the author's desire to fill a void, there being in fact very few plays at that time on the French stage for an entire black cast. The two questions posed by Genêt seem to indicate that he clearly perceived his role as more than just creating a play that could have black actors, one that, if need be, could also have Indians or Chinese actors, depending on the milieu in which the play is staged. Genêt made blacks a truly integral part and fundamental ingredient of his work. Whereas it will not always be considered odd to see, for example, an entire Shakespearean play in black face, even if a few adjustments are needed in the script, Les Nègres in any other but black face is virtually impossible, the very title making sure of this. Genêt's rhetorical questions, then, are of great importance and strike at the heart of the black problem. They may have seemed like typical questioning on the part of the avant-garde dramatist but, in fact, for blacks, represent a crucial matter of identity and black consciousness later worked out in countless ramifications in the play.

The second bit of information that colors our interpretation or assessment of the play comes by way of what could be termed a preface:

Cette pièce, je le répète, écrite par un Blanc, est destinée à un public de Blancs. Mais si, par improbable, elle était jouée devant un public de Noirs, il faudrait qu'à chaque représentation un Blanc fût invité—mâle ou femelle. L'organisateur du Spectacle ira le recevoir solennellement, le fera habiller d'un costume de cérémonie et le conduira à sa place, de préférence au centre de la première rangée des fauteuils d'orchestre. On jouera pour lui. Sur ce Blanc symbolique un projecteur sera dirigé durant tout le spectacle.

Et si aueun Blanc n'acceptait cette représentation? Qu'on distribue au public noir à l'entrée de la salle des masques de Blancs. Et si les Noirs refusent les masques qu'on utilise un mannequin.

(p. 13)

[This play, written, I repeat, by a white man, is intended for a white audience, but if, which is unlikely, it is ever performed before a black audience, then a white person, male or female, should be invited every evening. The organizer of the show should welcome him formally, dress him in ceremonial costume and lead him to his seat, preferably in the front row of the orchestra. The actors will play for him. A spotlight should be focused upon this symbolic white throughout the performance.

But what if no white person accepted? Then let white masks be distributed to the black spectators as they enter the theater. And if the blacks refuse the masks, then let a dummy be used.]

(p. 4)

Genêt starts off quite innocently, indicating what he saw as his target audience, but soon shifts to his “clownerie,” which one can be sure no self-respecting director bothers to follow. Clowning aside, however, it does emerge that the presence of at least one white person, even in symbolic form, is essential to the performance of the play, leading one to speculate on Genêt's real reason for writing this. Are we here dealing with an exclusive interpretation of the black problem as seen by whites alone? If so, how will the whites know to what extent their view is authentic, to what extent they are perpetuating the very stereotypes they seek to abolish? Further, are we to assume that the blacks among themselves are wasting time protesting if the effect of such protest is not witnessed and felt by at least one white person? Is it that black militancy is only effective in relation to the reaction it provokes among the whites? Genêt's prefatory remarks, although very much in keeping with the atmosphere of the “clownerie” and absurdity that informs the entire play that follows, do invite reflection on the true center of emphasis in the question of black/white confrontation.

The black militancy with which Genêt would most probably have been familiar was that of the francophone négritude writers, whose cause was so admirably espoused by Jean-Paul Sartre in Orphée noir, his long introduction to Léopold Senghor's anthology of black poems from the Caribbean, Africa, and the Malagasy Republic. There is no recorded evidence to support this conjecture, and Genêt's interest may in fact have stemmed from an entirely different source within the black diaspora, but the similarities in approach by Genêt and the black francophone writers is striking. This probability is rendered plausible when one remembers that Sartre subsequently wrote a comprehensive study on Genêt; it seems more than likely that at some stage the black problem and its many facets would have surfaced between the two writers. However, even prior to the intellectual attention paid to that one area of black protest, Genêt had manifested his sympathy for blacks. His 1942 novel, Notre Dame des fleurs (Our Lady of the Flowers), written while he was in prison, had already shown them as “scapegoats of les salauds—the dominant white bourgeoisie” and “bearing the sacred stigma of all expiatory victims.”⁴ Despite this, the sympathy was not with the black as black, thus opposed to white, but rather with the black as one of the many underprivileged. As Richard Coe puts it: “… the barrier is not so much between Blacks and Whites, as between Establishment and outcasts; and among the latter, Blacks and Whites constitute an almost homogenous community.”⁵ It therefore seems only natural and logical that once the blacks themselves had begun putting their feelings and opinions more and more into print, any experiment by Genêt in the realm of blackness or black consciousness would assimilate and echo the very cries of the blacks and their white supporters such as Sartre, and if it turns out (though this does seem unlikely) that Genêt's excursion into the world of black consciousness was not inspired in any way by his knowledge of the black francophone writers, or indeed of any others, then his achievement stands out as all the more remarkable.

Of course, as a white writer, Genêt was by no means unique in his overall espousal of the black cause, in his wanting to be the one to present the black case to others of his race. Sartre's Orphée noir could itself fit Genêt's own description of his play: “written … by a white man” and “intended for a white audience,” the “you” of Sartre's opening words in the essay:

Qu'est-ce donc que vous espériez, quand vous ôtiez le bâillon qui fermait ces bouches noires? Qu'elles allaient entonner vos louanges? Ces têtes que nos pères avaient courbées jusqu'à terre par la force, pensiez-vous, quand elles se relèveraient, lire l'adoration dans leurs yeux?⁶

[When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down to the very ground?]

In fact, Sartre actually said as much in the body of his work: “En un mot, je m'adresse ici aux blancs” [In a word, I am talking now to white men], and proceeded to explain to these white readers why the blacks had perforce to take the stand they were taking in their poetry:

… je voudrais leur expliquer ce que les noirs savent déjà; pourquoi c'est nécessairement à travers une expérience poétique que le noir, dans sa situation présente, doit d'abord prendre conscience de lui-même et inversement, pourquoi la poésie noire de langue française est, de nos jours, la seule grande poésie révolutionnaire

(pp. xi-xii)

[… I should like to explain to them what black men already know: why it is necessarily through a poetic experience that the black man, in his present condition, must first become conscious of himself; and, inversely, why black poetry in the French language is, in our time, the only great revolutionary poetry.]

(p. 8)

Sartre's aim, therefore, was to serve as a buffer between the two opposing camps, an objective obviously desired by Genêt as well in Les Nègres, and there are even echoes of Sartre's conclusions in some of Genêt's characters, as can be seen from Archibald's advice to his colleagues: “faites donc de la poésie, puisque c'est le seul domaine qu'il nous soit permis d'exploiter” (p. 38) [make poetry, since that's the only domain in which we're allowed to operate (p. 26)]. It is not at all unlikely that this stance could have stemmed from the conclusion on the nature of poetry for the blacks made by Sartre, whose main thrust in writing Orphée noir was to show the white readers, accustomed as they were to seeing things only from their own perspective, that the blacks could not only write but in fact had every reason and every right to do so, since they had something positive to offer. Their rallying point was their “négritude,” which Sartre termed the “être-dans-le-monde” [being-in-the-world] of the black man. Indeed, Sartre was so eloquent in his analysis of this movement that even today, as Léon Damas himself was to point out in the 1970s, scholars still go back to Orphée noir in discussion and analysis of the négritude movement. This, of course, does not mean that Sartre's views are unchallenged—he is still taken to task for calling négritude “anti-racist racism”—but at least the eminent philosopher gave much intellectual weight and support to the movement. However, whereas Sartre examined the problems confronting blacks in a logical, coldly analytical, and philosophical framework, all the while maintaining his distance and his identity as a white writer, Genêt delved into the innermost recesses of the black psyche and portrayed, with a fidelity worthy of the most authentic and militant of black writers, the many manifestations of black pride, black stereotype, black complexes, and black frustration in the face of the white world, and even looked at whites the way they were seen by blacks.

Admittedly, Les Nègres is not what one could consider the “typical” committed play. “Its structure,” comments Richard Coe, “is that of total theatre—that is, of a theatre employing all media which can contribute to the dramatic impact of the spectacle: it uses music, dance, rhythm and ritual; it contrasts masks and faces, illusion and reality; it employs different levels, exploiting a multiplicity of stage dimensions.”⁷ Consequently, spectators would look in vain for the allegorical type of situation, akin, say, to Aimé Césaire's in La Tragédie du roi Christophe, from which they would deduce what Genêt was attacking, what stance he was adopting. The play is nothing short of a black “happening,” a swift-moving collage of just about everything blacks like, detest, do or are blamed for. On reflection, however, spectators realize, once the spectacle is over, that there was after all something of a “plot”—a group of blacks come together to perform a “clown show” centered on the ritual murder and entombing of a white woman, all of which, witnessed by some of the said blacks disguised, grotesquely, as whites, turns out to be a camouflage for the “real” action offstage, namely the execution of a traitor to the cause. Once this one supposed reality of the play is revealed, the clown show, which seemed about to end when the disguised blacks removed their masks, continues to the bitter end—but by then they have already been through the bewildering experience of the “happening.”

For all their clowning, verbal and otherwise, the blacks in Les Nègres never lose sight of the fact that they are first and foremost black people in a white-dominated world. They are aware, as are the followers of the négritude movement, or any other similar one, that one way they can rehabilitate their pride is through the proper use of color symbols and imagery and, as a result, set about working out a complex pattern of acceptance and rejection. This symbolism of color is so important that even the whites seek comfort in it, only one cannot forget that Genêt's whites are merely pseudo-whites and are in fact played by blacks, who therefore think that whites in such a situation would react in a particular way. Of course, to complicate the issue even further, Genêt's blacks, as blacks or as blacks-playing-whites, are all the product of a white mind anyway (a problem familiar to any author creating a character, one might add), and one is never sure when one color will fade into the other or whether if this happens it is deliberate or unconscious.

The Missionary, for instance, proudly states, to the tacit agreement of white believers and the bemused rejection of the black ones, that God is white, a belief used over the centuries to keep God-fearing blacks from seeking to reach too far up the ladder of equality: “Depuis deux mille ans, Dieu est blanc, il mange sur une nappe blanche, il essuie sa bouche blanche avec une serviette blanche, il pique la viande blanche avec une fourchette blanche” (p. 35). [For two thousand years God has been white. He eats on a white tablecloth. He wipes his white mouth with a white napkin. He picks at white meat with a white fork. (p. 24)] The blacks realize that their eventual mental liberation cannot be achieved until they are able to reject and revise color symbols such as used by the whites. Thus, Félicité, toward the end of the play, states that “tout change. Ce qui est doux, bon, aimable et tendre sera noir. Le lait sera noir, le sucre, le riz, le ciel, les colombes, l'espérance, seront noirs …” (p. 155) [everything is changing. Whatever is gentle and kind and good and tender will be black. Milk will be black, sugar, rice, the sky, doves, hope, will be black … (p. 106)]. Now, this bit of exuberance fits neatly into Genêt's clownerie, it being argued that no one would be so imbued with black consciousness as to claim with any degree of seriousness that milk, or the sky, or hope will be black. However, such a listing, in a similar context of exuberance, had already been seen in a black poet who was certainly not writing a “clown show,” for Léon Damas had written in his Black Label:

Jamais le Blanc ne sera nègre
car la beauté est nègre
et nègre la sagesse
car l'endurance est nègre
et nègre le courage
car le patience est nègre
car le rire est nègre
car la joie est nègre
car la paix est nègre
car la vie est nègre(8)
[The White man will never be black
for beauty is black
and so is wisdom
for endurance is black
and so is courage
for patience is black
for laughter is black
for joy is black
for peace is black
for life is black]

Critic Bridget Jones refers to Damas' lines, deemed extreme and nonsensical by some, as “an explosion of black power and joy,”⁹ a description that fits the Genêt situation to the letter, an outpouring of black pride via the accumulation of images that deliberately set out to shock and disorient the reader/spectator, and perfectly in keeping with the one of the avant-garde theater to say the least. The contention, then, is that for all the strangeness of Genêt's text to some eyes and ears, there were similar cases from writers whose cause was far from being termed a “clown show.”

Throughout the play, the blacks and the whites provide a series of counterpoints to the racial stereotype that has been used to justify the alleged superiority of the white over the black. At one point, the white court (blacks in white masks) is addressed, in terms that are blatantly the result of reverse stereotyping, as a “race blafarde et inodore … privée d'odeurs animales” (p. 32) [pale and odorless race … without animal odors (p. 20)], an obvious retort to the apparently widely held but inaccurate view that blacks are essentially foul-smelling, a view fostered by many eminent thinkers whom one would have thought beyond this sort of irrational prejudgement. One sees Léopold Senghor constantly responding to such writers as he fires off rejection after rejection of this vicious stereotyping and even goes to the point of turning some of these preconceived attitudes to the benefit of the blacks. Consequently, he is seen to maintain that healthy body odor is not to be despised, and is in fact one of the things that the poet misses on the “bald sidewalks of Manhattan” during his sojourn in New York, where he is all the more dépaysé since he is surrounded by “des jambes et des seins sans sueur ni odeur¹⁰ [legs and breasts without sweat or smell]. This is close to the approach adopted by Genêt's blacks in their ritual of self-assertion through color.

It is clear that the blacks in the play derive utmost pleasure from emphasizing precisely those ideas or views that society has held against them, not unlike Genêt himself consciously deciding to become a thief for having been deemed one by society. In fact, both blacks and whites use these stereotypes rather conveniently. Genêt's whites are familiar with the all-blacks-look-alike syndrome: “Les Blancs, c'est bien connu, distinguent difficilement un nègre d'un nègre” (p. 81) [As everyone knows, the Whites can hardly distinguish one Negro from another (p. 53)], making use of it in a way that calls to mind Aimé Césaire's in his Cahier d'un retour au pays natal:

les nègres-sont-tous-les-mêmes, je-vous-le-dis
les-vices-tous-les-vices, c'est-moi-qui-vous-le-dis
l'odeur-du-nègre, ça-fait-pousser-la-canne(11)
[blacks-are-all-the-same, I-tell-you
vices-all-vices, I-tell-you
the-black-man's-smell, it-makes-cane-grow]

where the Martiniquan poet uses the very words of the whites to shame them and to spur on the blacks. Both Césaire and Genêt refuse to gloss over the potentially unpleasant, rendering it almost humorous and thereby taking full therapeutic effect from it.

That Genêt fully exploits the conventional antiblack stereotype is further seen in his having one of the women, Neige, doubt the true reason for the murdering of the white woman by the blacks, the very woman whose ceremonial disposal constitutes the major portion of the ritual of the play:

Si j'étais sûre que Village eût descendu cette femme afin de devenir avec plus d'éclat un nègre balafré, puant, lippu, camus, mangeur, bouffeur, bâfreur de Blancs et de toutes les couleurs, … lècheur de pieds blancs, feignant, malade, dégoulinant d'huile et de sueur, flasque et soumis. …

(p. 42)

[If I were sure that Village bumped the woman off in order to heighten the fact that he's a scarred, smelly, thick-lipped, snub-nosed Negro, an eater and guzzler of Whites and all other colors, … a licker of white boots, a good-for-nothing, sick, oozing oil and sweat, limp and submissive. …]

(p. 27)

Genêt, therefore, like Sartre, sees the retaliation of the blacks as a significant existential act, even though there is some doubt in the mind of the female about the genuine nature of this act. Naturally, being white, Genêt would be well placed to know all the preconceived concepts and ideas used to describe blacks and also naturally rejected by the militant black writers, but where he does strike a familiar note is in the deliberate use of the stereotype as a weapon, an “arme miraculeuse” according to Césaire, against the very persons who perpetrated it in the first place, a procedure well known to Genêt himself and one that Césaire and Damas exploited to the fullest.

The reason for this deliberate retention of stereotype in the play was to place as much distance as possible between the blacks and the whites, both the pseudo ones that Genêt puts on stage and the real ones he claims must be in the audience if only in symbolic form, and more especially between the black man and the white woman killed as part of the ritual celebration of blackness. The doubt expressed about the genuine nature of the killing is no more evident than in an examination of the hatred that is so necessary for the success of the whole ritual. There is the fear expressed by Neige that this hatred was tinged with desire and love: “Dans votre haine pour elle, il entrait un peu de désir, donc d'amour” (p. 28). [There was a touch of desire in your hatred of her, which means a touch of love (p. 17).] “Je sais qu'il l'aimait” [I know he loved her], concludes Neige, thereby evoking a problem that Frantz Fanon dealt with at some length in his Peau noire, masques blancs (Black Skin, White Masks) and one that has seen bitter controversy throughout the history of black/white relations. Deep in his heart, according to Fanon, the black man desires to possess the white woman and so obtain equality with the white man: “En m'aimant, elle prouve que je suis digne d'un amour blanc. On m'aime comme un Blanc. Je suis un Blanc.”¹² [By loving me, she proves that I am worthy of white love. I am loved like a white man. I am a white man.] If Fanon is correct in his assessment—and even if he is not, popular opinion among whites and, alas, also among blacks certainly makes it appear so—then this would account for the fact that Neige thinks of Village as showing that “innate” yearning even as he murders the white woman in symbolic and ritual fashion. Indeed, the crux of the problem in the relationship between himself and Vertu is the fact that he cannot bring himself to accept her as a black woman, representing Africa, with all that this connotes: “Je ne sais pas si vous êtes belle, mais vous êtes l'Afrique, ô Nuit monumentale, et je vous hais” (p. 54). [I know not whether you are beautiful, but you are Africa, oh monumental Night, and I hate you (p. 37).] Eventually, one of the play's triumphs is that the black man, having experienced his ceremonial soul-purging throughout the length of the ritual happening, is able to relate to the black woman, to all appearances without the latent desire for white possession, thus seemingly overcoming any hatred or fear that might have existed hitherto:

VILLAGE:
Pour toi, je pourrais tout inventer: des fruits, des paroles plus fraîches, une brouette à deux roues, des oranges sans pépins, un lit a trois places, une aiguille qui ne pique pas, mais des gestes d'amour, c'est, plus difficile … enfin, si tu y tiens …
VERTU:
Je t'aiderai. Ce qui est sûr, au moins, c'est que tu ne pourras pas enrouler tes doigts dans mes longs cheveux blonds. …

(p. 180)

[VILLAGE:
For you I could invent anything: fruits, brighter words, a two-wheeled wheelbarrow, cherries without pits, a bed for three, a needle that doesn't prick. But gestures of love, that's harder … still, if you really want me to …
VIRTUE:
I'll help you. At least, there's one sure thing: you won't be able to wind your fingers in my long golden hair. …]

(p. 128)

By far the most significant aspect of Les Nègres, as far as Genêt's flirtation with négritude and black consciousness is concerned, is the positive assertion of blackness in its several forms. Indeed, the entire play revolves around this assertion, giving it a cohesion that somewhat belies its avant-garde nature. It is here that the French playwright is closest to the black writers who sought to have fellow blacks rid themselves of the discomfort and shame of being black and admit it to themselves in the first place. Thus, from the very beginning, Genêt's blacks proceed with a black-is-beautiful ritual, never missing an opportunity to emphasize their blackness and being chided if they appear not to do so. Archibald, who keeps the action moving along, half master of ceremonies, half director, advises Neige: “Vous vouliez être plus belle, il reste du cirage” (p. 25) [You wanted to be more attractive—there's some blacking left (p. 15)], an external, and decidedly absurd, manifestation but necessary to reenforce the internal one needed for black liberation on the whole, for, as Archibald later reminds the blacks, it is their blackness, and nothing else, that they must profess:

Je vous ordonne d'être noir jusque dans vos veines et d'y charrier du sang noir. Que l'Afrique y circule. Que les Nègres se nègrent.

(p. 76)

[I order you to be black to your very veins. Pump black blood through them. Let Africa circulate in them. Let Negroes negrify themselves.]

[p. 52)

It is this same black blood that will, according to Senghor, put some equilibrium in the world, that will oil the Western world's rusty joints:

New York! je dis New York, laisse affluer le sang noir dans ton sang

Qu'il dérouille tes articulations d'acier, comme une huile de vie.¹³

[New York! I say New York, let black blood flow in your blood

That it may remove the rust from your steel joints, like an oil of life.]

Repeatedly, then, one finds echoes of the négritude writers in Genet's blacks. Césaire's famous line from the Cahier—“Ma négritude n'est pas une taie d'eau morte sur l'oeil mort de la terre”¹⁴ [My négritude is not a speck of dead water on the dead eye of the earth]—is parodied in Village's “Notre couleur n'est pas une tache de vinasse qui déchire un visage” (p. 63) [Our color isn't a wine stain that blotches a face (p. 43)]. Diouf's “Je voudrais exalter ma couleur” (p. 51) [I'd like to glorify my color (p. 32)] appears in concept if not in the same words in a fair number of the black writers, both those who identified with the négritude banner and those who did not. One can therefore understand why Genêt would have wanted to insist on the fact that the play was actually written by a white man. Having decided to write a play for an all-black cast, he wrote one that would not only have black faces but also delve deeply into the heart of the problems confronting a group of people who had to rid themselves thereof in order to be able to lead a normal existence.

If, as we saw at the beginning, the play must be performed before at least one white person and if, as Genêt also told us, it is all a “clownerie,” what significance is there in the play for blacks? Are we to ask, along with Ionesco's Madame Martin in La Cantatrice chauve: “Quelle est la morale?” [What is the moral?] Is the reply going to be the same as Le Pompier's to Madame Martin: “C'est à vous de la trouver” [It's up to you to find it]?¹⁵ It will of course be argued that there is no need for any “significance” or “meaning” since this is after all part of the Theater of the Absurd. However, one can no longer refuse to say what a dramatist of the Absurd “meant” simply because he claimed that what he was doing was devoid of any meaning. One could perhaps not analyse every word of every line, but grosso modo some “meaning” must definitely be deduced, some attitude detected. With regard to Les Nègres, it must be conceded that most white audiences probably care precious little about négritude or whatever form the black consciousness takes and as a result see the whole ritual as nothing more than just that. Paradoxically, here again Genêt is close to those blacks who saw in négritude and some of the forms of black consciousness nothing more than glorified romanticizing about being black. This is further compounded by the fact that, within the play, all this celebration of blackness is only a divertissement in the true sense of the word, a diversionary tactic to keep the audience entertained while a black traitor is murdered, thus providing the only “real” core of the play, the play-outside-the-play so to speak. So the whole play is one big put-on. Or is it? The Présence Africaine reviewer, probably but not necessarily black, writing in a journal that plugs itself as being a cultural review for the black world, wrote of it:

Je ne crois pas que cette pièce puisse apporter aux Africains une aide quelconque pour la lutte qu'ils mènent depuis si longtemps afin d'imposer à ceux qui ne veulent pas les leur reconnaître la dignité humaine et la dignité sociale.¹⁶

[I don't think this play can be of any help to the Africans in their long struggle to impose on those who refuse to recognize their right to such their human and social dignity.]

This is an obvious condemnation of that aspect of the play that could be considered “commitment,” since the reviewer writes of the play not being of any “help” and thus raises the eternal question of the usefulness of literature. Is the play useful to blacks? If not, should it be? If indeed it is, why the overt clowning? Genêt himself has an answer. The spectacle has been made so clownish and full of ritual in order to render it bearable to a white audience:

Ce soir nous jouerons pour vous. Mais, afin que dans vos fauteuils vous demeuriez à votre aise en face du drame qui déjà se déroule ici, afin que vous soyez assurés qu'un tel drame ne risque pas de pénétrer dans vos vies précieuses, nous aurons encore la politesse, apprise parmi vous, de rendre la communication impossible.

(pp. 20-23)

[This evening we shall perform for you. But, in order that you may remain comfortably settled in your seats in the presence of the drama that is already unfolding here, in order that you be assured that there is no danger of such a drama's worming its way into your precious lives, we shall even have the decency—a decency learned from you—to make communication impossible.]

(p. 12)

A further explanation is supplied by Archibald: “Le temps n'est pas encore venu de présenter des spectacles sur de nobles données” (p. 179). [The time has not yet come for presenting dramas about noble matters (p. 126).] Hence, says Martin Esslin, “the play takes the form of a ritual ceremony rather than being a direct discussion of the colour problem or colonialism. In ritual, meaning is expressed by the repetition of symbolic actions. The participants have a sense of awe, of mysterious participation rather than of conceptual communication. The difference is merely that here the audience sees a grotesque parody of a ritual, in which the bitterness that is to be communicated emerges from clowning and derision.”¹⁷ It is in this “mysterious participation” that there appears to reside the maximum effect of the play—by white audiences as Genêt shows them how the black mind works and by black ones who, for the most part, already know.

But the ultimate approach to the play has to be based on Genêt's concept and presentation of reality, for, what indeed is reality in this play? Nothing, one could maintain, is real; not the blacks, not the whites. How can one base a firm judgment on so shaky and unstable a foundation? The goings-on make spectacular theater, but what is the spectator supposed to learn from it all? We are here back to my earlier comments on the “new theater” and its rejection of “meaning” in the traditional sense. There must, however, be some direction in the actions that fill the time and space void between the opening and closing of the curtain, for, clown show that it is, it is still theater. It is surely not by accident that Genêt dealt so closely with concepts that are at the quick of the black problem. His perception of that encountered by blacks—the substance with which he fills the void—as well as the psychological therapy needed to deal with it is very keen for a writer who, though not being one, set out to answer the question: “Qu'est-ce que c'est donc un noir?”

Notes

1. Richard N. Coe, The Vision of Jean Genet (New York: Grove Press, 1968), p. 284.

2. Eugène Ionesco, Théâtre II (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), p. 58. My translation.

3. Jean Genêt, Les Nègres (Décines: L'Arbalète, 1958), p. 8. All subsequent quotations in French are from this edition. The translation is from The Blacks (New York: Grove Press, 1960), p. 3. Subsequent translations are from this edition.

4. Coe, p. 288.

5. Ibid.

6. Jean-Paul Sartre, Orphée noir, in Léopold Senghor, ed., Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1948), p. ix. Translation by John MacCombie in C. W. E. Bigsby, ed., The Black American Writer, II (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1971), 5.

7. Coe, p. 284.

8. Léon Damas, Black Label (Paris: Gallimard, 1956), p. 52. My translation.

9. Bridget Jones, “Léon Damas,” in King and Ogungbesan, eds., A Celebration of Black and African Writing (Nigeria: A.B.U.P. & O.U.P., 1975), p. 71.

10. Léopold Senghor, Poèmes (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1967), p. 116. My translation; my emphasis.

11. Aimé Césaire, Cahier d'un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1956), p. 58. My translation.

12. Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, Masques blancs (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1952), p. 71. My translation.

13. Senghor, Poèmes, p. 117. My translation.

14. Césaire, Cahier, p. 71. My translation.

15. Ionesco, Théâtre I (Paris: Gallimard, 1954), p. 43. My translation.

16. Présence Africaine, 30 (February/March 1960), 119. My translation.

17. Martin Esslin, The Theatre of the Absurd (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1968), p. 220.