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Isabella Hammad on her selection:

Prisoner of Love is Jean Genet\\u2019s 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 \\u201ca seismographic reading, drawing and exposing the fault lines that a largely normal surface had hidden.\\u201d 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 \\u201cdreamer inside a dream"; in each context he felt at home. He considers the similarities of the movements--both peoples are deprived of territory from which to launch their revolutions, and therefore rely on spectacle to assert themselves. But spectacle is transitory, and sometimes shades into illusion. Spectacle, says Genet, is\\u202f \\u201cthe product of despair.\\u201d

Prisoner of Love at Bookshop.org

Music: "Shift of Currents" by Blue Dot Sessions // CC BY-NC 2.0