The Agra Publications simultaneously release two books featuring significant texts by Jean Genet, previously unknown in Greece: "What Remains of a Rembrandt Torn into Small Normal Squares and Thrown into the Toilet along with the Strange Word ...," as well as "The Child Criminal." But what do you yourself rely on for your moral standards? Therefore, tolerate a poet, who is also an enemy, addressing you as a poet and as an enemy.

“RADIODIFFUSION FRANÇAISE had invited me to one of its shows, which it called 'Carte blanche.' I accepted the invitation to speak about juvenile delinquency. My text, which was initially accepted, was later rejected. Rather than any feeling of pride, I feel a sense of shame. It was my intention for the criminal's voice to be heard. His glorious song, not his moans. A futile anxiety to appear sincere prevents me from doing so, an anxiety to appear sincere, not so much through the accurate depiction of events, but by not betraying a certain roughness of tone, which is the only one capable of conveying my emotion, my truth, the feelings and truths of my friends.”

“The newspapers seemed to be surprised from the start that a theater was placed at the service of a burglar and a homosexual. It is therefore impossible for me to speak into a national microphone. I reiterate that I feel shame. However, I had spent a long time in the night, on the edge of day, and now I retreat into the darkness from which I make so many efforts to detach myself.” Today, after being assigned, as a consequence of what I do not know whose disastrous mistake, to a poet who was once theirs to speak into this microphone, I want to repeat the affection I feel for these merciless kids. I have no illusions. I speak into the void and the darkness; nevertheless, I want, even if it's just for me to hear it, to curse the abusers.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION ZAN ZENE (1910-1986), an illegitimate child of a prostitute and a worker, grew up under the care of his foster parents in a provincial town in France. A good student at school and prudent but shy, he displays his first homosexual feelings during his school years, committing his first theft at the age of ten. He thereby lays the foundations of his personal mythology and expresses his deep anti-sociality and now stable irregularity. He gradually runs away from his foster family, from the school where he learns the art of printing, from the juvenile detention center where he is incarcerated, where his homosexuality and worship of masculinity and its violent and dominating expressions crystallize.

He enlists in the Foreign Legion and serves in North Africa and the Middle East. He is enchanted by the passions of their peoples and their generous masculinity. He returns to Paris where he lives through small thefts, among other things books, and goes in and out of prisons. There he becomes a writer. His early novels are censored as pornographic and are circulated illegally. "Our Lady of the Flowers" (Notre-Dame-des-Fleurs, 1943) tells the story of the transvestite Divin and her friend, the world of the night in Montmartre. In "The Miracle of the Rose" (Le Miracle de la rose, 1946), he speaks about his years of incarceration in reformatories and prisons until he is sixteen. In "Querelle of Brest" (Querelle de Brest, 1947 - made into a film by R. W. Fassbinder in 1982), the story unfolds among the characters of a brothel in the foggy seaside landscape of the port of Brest. Following this are "Funerals" (Pompes funèbres, 1948) and "The Diary of a Thief" (Le Journal du voleur, 1949), which Sartre noted is not a simple autobiography but "a sacred cosmogony." Jean Cocteau was the first to discover Genet’s works, followed by Sartre, and subsequently, he became the favorite child of French intellectualism.

He wrote plays: "The Maids" (which has been translated as "The Servants") – 1947, "The Balcony" - 1956, "The Blacks" - 1958, "The Screens" - 1961, etc., poetry ("The Condemned to Death" - 1942, etc.), published many articles, directed a film, the black-and-white "A Song of Love" (Un chant d'amour, 1950). His influence extends to all forms of art, cinema, literature, photography, dance, music. His political stance towards life and society was channeled through his support for the Black Panthers and the Palestinian Movement. He continued his unpredictable and adventurous life until his death in 1986 in Paris.