Four Hours in Shatila
Jean Genet, French writer and playwright
Genet's eyewitness account of the aftermath of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre — four hours among the dead, written without flinching.
In September 1982, Jean Genet was in Beirut. On 19 September — the day after the Sabra and Shatila massacre ended — he entered the Shatila camp and spent four hours among the bodies and the survivors. The essay he wrote, “Four Hours in Shatila” (Quatre heures à Chatila), appeared in La Revue d’études palestiniennes in early 1983 and in English in the Journal of Palestine Studies (Vol. 12, No. 3, Spring 1983).
Genet had spent two years living among Palestinian fedayeen in Jordan at the start of the 1970s, and the Shatila essay — unsparing, lyrical, and without consolation — became the final chapter of his last book, Un captif amoureux (1986; Prisoner of Love). It remains among the most searing pieces of eyewitness testimony to the massacre, in which Lebanese Phalangist militiamen, in an area under Israeli military control, killed hundreds — by some estimates thousands — of Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.
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