ABSTRACT
The Revue d'études palestiniennes published ‘Four Hours in Shatila’ in January 1983. This text marked a turning point in Genet's writing and could be approached as a prelude to his last, posthumously published Prisoner of Love, an anticipation of the author's excerpts of late style. As Genet himself affirmed in an interview with Layla Shahid Barrada and Rudiger Wischenbart, recorded on the occasion of a demonstration concerning Sabra and Shatila in Vienna, December 1983:
In my books, and when I was in prison, I was the master of my imagination. I was the master of the element in which I was working. Because it was solely my dream. But now, I am not the master of what I have seen, I am obliged to say: I saw men tied up, bound, I saw a woman with her fingers cut off. I am obliged to bend myself to a real world. But always with the old words, with words that are mine. 1
