I jokingly say if there was one great thing about, you know, the Lebanese Civil War was that it forced me to read.
— Rabih Alameddine
A phoenix, Beirut seems to always pull itself out its ashes, reinvents itself, has been conquered numerous times in its 7,000-year history, yet it survives by both becoming whatever its conquerors wished it to be and retaining its idiosyncratic persona.
There are over 1 million refugees in Lebanon, a country of 4 million people. How do we solve that? I have no idea. What's going on, I really don't know.
I get upset about what is taken as great literature and what is cute and exotic.
We seem, particularly over here in the West and in America in particular, to have forgotten that we are, in large measures, the story we tell ourselves about ourselves.
I can easily hold two opposing beliefs at the same time without any problem, which I find - well, mind-expanding, really.
In school in Lebanon, we were not allowed to speak Arabic during breaks - it had to be French or English.
'Harat' is actually - it's a Lebanese dialect word. It comes from 'the mapmaker,' somebody who makes a map. And it basically means somebody who tells fibs or exaggerate tales a little bit.
In Lebanon, there are completely different opinions and values in one country in terms of religion, modernity, tradition, East and West - which allows for a kind of intellectual development not available anywhere else.
I read Shakespeare when I was 14 because it's what we were taught.
