THE MARTYRDOM of gay artists has become something of a cliché. Oscar Wilde, if not the first, is perhaps the most famous. But since then were Yukio Mishima, Reinaldo Arenas, and Pier Paolo Pasolini. To this list we could also add the name of the poet Jean Sénac, who’s widely believed to have been the victim of a 1973 Algerian government assassination. It is a name that’s not found even in the most authoritative studies of gay literary history. Even in France—where, if he’s remembered at all, it is as a major voice of the Algerian Revolution—his work as an advocate of gay liberation has gone generally unrecognized. However, in 2003 a film version of his life, Le Soleil Assassiné [The Assassinated Sun], was released in France that explored the relationship between his sexuality and his politics.
Yet in some ways this lack of recognition is not surprising, for Sénac was from the very beginning an outcast. Born in 1926 in Béni-Saf, Algeria, he was the illegitimate son of Jeanne Comma, who was of Spanish origin. Having never known anything about his father, whom his mother implied had raped her, he took the name of Edmond Sénac, a Frenchman who married and soon divorced his mother. Thus his name was borrowed, as was his nationality. Throughout his entire life he called himself an Algerian. However, whether as a child growing up in “L’Algérie française,” France’s most important colony, or as a young man with ties to the FLN (Front de libération national), which fought to overthrow France’s colonial rule, or as an adult living in an Algeria that did not grant citizenship to pieds-noirs (the term used to designate French settlers), he always grappled with being seen as an outsider because of his European descent. Despite his early and wholehearted alignment on the side of those fighting for Algerian independence, he was often accused both during and after the War of having had no business participating in the struggle of this population that was predominantly Arab and Muslim. And just as he was an outsider to the Algerian majority because of his European origins, he was an outcast to the French because he supported the FLN. And he became an outsider to both because he was unashamedly gay.
Sénac’s poetry owed much to his literary models from the past, notably García Lorca, Walt Whitman, and Paul Verlaine. But he also drew inspiration from contemporary poetry with authors like Allen Ginsberg and Bob Kaufman—the poet for whom the term Beatnik was coined—and indeed the entire Beat movement with its anti-authoritarian, improvised, multi-ethnic poetics. But undoubtedly the two greatest influences on his work came early in his career in the figures of René Char and Albert Camus. Char, who distanced himself from his early ties with the Surrealists and joined the Resistance, exerted a major influence on Sénac’s poetry when they first met. Algerian-born Camus, on the other hand—whose early life closely mirrors Sénac’s, with his lack of a father figure, his Spanish family origins, financial hardships, and health problems—became more than a mentor. He used his connections to find a young Jean Sénac publishing opportunities and work during his first visits to France.
When Sénac first met him in 1950, Camus was the intellectual most closely identified with justice for the oppressed Algerians. But as the conflict between France and Algeria grew more violent and bloody, Camus’s refusal to take a position on the war became, for Sénac, irreconcilable with the older author’s long-established apologies for the sometimes violent struggle of the “Just.” When Camus, at the time of his acceptance of his 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature, made a speech to students in Stockholm saying: “I believe in justice, but I will defend my mother before defending justice”—a statement that seemed to put the rights of colonists above those of the colonized—Sénac retorted: “Camus has been my father. Having to choose between my father and justice, I have chosen justice.”1 He soon broke off his relationship with his former mentor, who would die in a car accident in January 1960.
The 1950’s marked the beginning of a period in which Sénac became increasingly active politically. He formed ties with Algerian nationalist circles both in Algiers and in Paris, and he published his first works, such as “Matinale de mon peuple” (“My People’s Early Rising”), in which he publicly evoked the nascent nationalist hopes of his homeland. This time also coincided with a period of sexual liberation for the young man, who until then had struggled with his homosexuality. It was during this time that he met the sixteen-year-old Jacques Miel, in Paris, whom Sénac would later adopt as his son and who would become his literary executor.
At the time of Algerian independence in 1962, Sénac, who had spent the period of the war in self-imposed exile in France, returned to Algeria, where he soon allied himself with Ahmed Ben Bella’s military-backed government. Sénac briefly served as an advisor to the government’s Minister of Education. More importantly, he co-founded, along with novelist Mouloud Mammeri, the Union of Algerian Writers (Union des écrivains algériens), of which he became the general-secretary in 1963.
Sénac also began what would be an almost ten-year run as the host of a program on Algeria’s state radio, RTA, initially entitled Le Poète dans la cité (The poet in the City) and later called Poésie sur tous les fronts (Poetry on All Fronts), which featured contemporary poetry from all over the world, with a special emphasis on emerging authors of the Third World.
In the last seven years of his life, the government—which, after a coup d’état, was now under the control of Houari Boumedienne—increasingly distanced itself from Sénac by stripping him of his official functions with the Union of Algerian Writers and with RTA. In the words of one critic, Sénac was “at once at a complete loss and perfectly lucid; he had lost everything but his orgasm, and proceeded to vent his rage.”2
This was arguably the time of Sénac’s most powerful literary production, during which he wrote—and sometimes was able to publish—a series of poetry collections in which he fused the theme of revolutionary fervor with that of physical desire and emotional loss. In this period, with collections such as Avant-Corps (Fore-Body, written in 1966 and 1967), Le Mythe du sperme-Mediterannéan (The myth of Mediterranean Semen, written in 1967), and A-Corpoème (written in 1968), he “came out” in his poems by unequivocally declaring his love for other men. In the poetry of his final seven years he violated the taboos of his childhood and adopted an unambiguous and provocative stance against the prudishness of Algeria’s socialist dictatorship and the intolerance of fundamentalist Islam, by celebrating homosexuality in poems in which he clearly linked the body and literature, to the point of calling his collection “corpoems.”
In a rare interview with journalist Jean-Pierre Peroncel-Hugoz, Sénac discussed the deliberate linkage of his twin ideals of political and sexual liberation: “Fore-body is important for me because if in my wartime poems I confronted the oppressor, in these corpoems I face down alienation by, among other things, admitting my homosexuality for the first time, in a way that is neither ostentatious nor smug. This is not essential; it is simply one component of my being that, like my socialist convictions, deserves respect.”3 By combining the themes of love and revolution, Sénac seemed to be anticipating the tide that would culminate in the student movement of 1968, where the social revolution that was being called for was inseparable from the sexual revolution that would unleash society’s constricted desires.
Sénac’s body was found on August 30, 1973, stabbed to death in the cave-like apartment in Algiers to which his existence had been reduced since 1966. The official reports are quite ambiguous. First they reported that he was killed from a fall suffered during an argument with a young delinquent, Mohamed Breidj. Next they claimed that Breidj was attempting to rob Sénac—even though Sénac had been depending for years on gifts from his friends for food and even hot baths. In any event, Breidj was soon released. For most observers, it was a politically motivated murder intended to get rid of this scandalous, openly gay writer who had a large, youthful following, a figure who had become a thorn in the side of the authoritarian regime in power and of religious fundamentalists.
The Myth of Mediterranean Semen is Sénac’s shortest book, consisting of sixteen poems, but it comes at the crucial moment in his life, when his disillusionment with the Algerian government and his loss of official status freed him to give expression to his deepest feelings about being a revolutionary, a poet, and a gay man. All the various forces at play in his life bear down on this handful of poems. They do not show the full range of his poetic powers; they are too agonized to express his quietly intense lyricism or his sympathies with the Arab culture around him. But they forcefully show why Jean Sénac is a poet who demands more attention and a figure whose cultural importance should not be overlooked. To continue to ignore his work is to give the oppressive, homophobic forces their victory and to deny ourselves the benefit of one more unmistakable voice that has given itself to the cause of freedom for everyone.
Notes
1. Cited in Sénac’s Pour une terre possible: Poèmes et autres textes inédits. Marsa, 1999.
2. Hamid Nacer-Khodja, from his Postface in Sénac’s Oeuvres poétiques. Actes-Sud, 1999.
3. Jean-Pierre Peroncel-Hugoz, Assassinat d’un poète. Editions du Quai, 1983.
Katia Sainson, assoc. professor of French at Towson, is the author of the first English translation of Jules Michelet’s The Sea (forthcoming).
David Bergman is the poetry editor of this journal.
