Rabih Alameddine

Rabih Alameddine (born 1959) is a Lebanese-American painter and writer.

Quotes

 * If you sit with your memories, you might as well become a plant.
 * On the dilemma faced by his protagonist in The Angel of History in “Rabih Alameddine: 'I think we lose something once we get accepted'” in The Guardian (2016 Oct 9)


 * God tells us men fucking men is a terrible thing, but a father offering his two daughters, vestal virgins no less, to a horde of horny buggers is heroic. Now that's straight. … God destroys the faggots with fire and brimstone. He turns a disobedient wife into salt. But he asks us to idolize drunks who sleep with their daughters or offer them to a horny, unruly mob.
 * On the biblical narrative of Lot and his family confronting the inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah, cited by Wail S. Hassan in Immigrant Narratives: Orientalism and Cultural Translation in Arab American and Arab British Literature (2011), Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-979206-1, page 207.


 * One of the things that was obvious to me after I started getting upset about so many things was, I wasn’t upset at the world, I was upset at myself,” he said. “Somewhere along the line, 1996, all my friends died, and I decided that to be able to survive, I must put everything aside. And I did. That was the date, by the way, that I started writing my first book….All of a sudden, I’m a writer. I have a career, I have a life. I wasn’t thinking, I wasn’t remembering. Jacob begins the book by getting upset at these young gay men for forgetting queer history, but it’s him, it’s me, that allowed people to forget, because I forgot.
 * On feeling that he was complicit in forgetting the AIDS crisis in “Rabih Alameddine: 'I think we lose something once we get accepted'” in The Guardian (2016 Oct 9)


 * I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
 * On the unpredictability of how a written work will be received in “Rabih Alameddine: 'Right now in the west, Arabs are the other'” in The Guardian (2015 Jan 9)


 * I don't sit down to write something politically or to challenge stereotypes. Being who I am, almost everything I do will be political, almost everything I do will be a challenge to those stereotypes…
 * On challenging stereotypes in “Researcher Nadia Barhoum interviews Rabih Alameddine” (Othering and Belonging Institute at UC Berkeley)

Quotes about Rabih Alameddine

 * For years, I have been heralding the work of Rabih Alameddine, a Lebanese-American writer. His prose is gorgeous, his approach irreverent, and the ideas in his stories are sometimes comical or fantastical, but always deadly serious — very relevant to understanding the complex history behind multiple holy wars today. In Italy and Spain, his books are best sellers. He has full-page profiles in major newspapers, has garnered prizes, is a darling of literary festivals and has won acclaim from international writers. In the U.S., he’s hardly known. Why is there a geographic divide in literary appreciation?
 * Amy Tan interview (2013)