Read By: Isabella Hammad

The 92nd Street Y, New York · Sep 6, 2020 · 7m

Isabella Hammad on her selection: Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet’s strange, recursive, resistant chronicle of the time he spent in the early 1970s with the Palestinian fedayeen in the refugee camps in Jordan. Edward Said called it “a seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden.” Throughout the book Genet meditates on the Black Panthers, whom he had visited in March 1970, just a few months prior to joining the Palestinians. In each context he describes feeling like a “dreamer inside a dream"; in each context he felt at home. He considers…