Rabih alameddine biography of martin
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Taking Away the Distorting Lenses
When it comes to enemies of art, some dastardly and unbearable villains can kill a writer cold. Assassins—both successful and would-be—the likes of which we’ve seen this past week in Chautauqua, spring to mind. For every Salman Rushdie who miraculously survives, though, many have not—like Anna Politkovskaya, who dared to write truthfully about life in contemporary Russia; or Walter Rodney, the Marxist historian of Africa killed by a car bomb in Georgetown, Guyana; or Ghassan Kanafani, the Palestinian writer murdered 50 years ago this summer in Beirut by agents of Mossad. One thinks of the dozens of Mexican journalists killed doing their work in a narco-state.
It should not be incumbent on a writer to give their life, but that is sometimes the bargain. This risk speaks to how dangerous it can be to interrogate the sacred, to ask questions, to poke fun. Power structures everywhere would prefer us to deal with preconceived emotions, even when it
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The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine
New York. Atlantic Monthly Press. 2016. 294 pages.
Jacob has issues. He was born a bastard in Beirut, the son of a bourgeois Lebanese teenager and a Yemeni housekeeper. He spends much of his youth in a brothel in Cairo, graduating from there to a Catholic boarding school where he loses his virginity to a nun. When he emigrates to the United States, his status as a dark-skinned Arab doesn’t make assimilation any easier. And as a young gay man living in San Francisco at the very moment when the AIDS epidemic descends upon that city, he may well feel that he has not been dealt a fair hand in the existential game he is called upon to play.
As if he were not marginal enough already, Jacob is also a poet, “a poet with the soul of a priest” more precisely; but in the present time of this novel (early twenty-first century), he finds that he can no longer write poetry effectively. He turns to fiction instead, and some of his stories appear
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Why I Write: My Book Came Out and ingenting Happened
When inom wrote my first book, I thought I knew. I wanted to change literature, or at least change the world. inom thought all the books about AIDS were ingenting like what I was living through. People with AIDS were dying so pleasantly in literature. My novel was intended to blow up how we were perceived. My seething, righteous rage would infect readers, flow in every vein, and men, women, and genderqueers would rise to demand justice. The revolution would ignite. Not only would my novel knock capitalism to its knees, but the ex who had dumped me would regret his decision and spontaneously combust, and all the kids in kindergarten who hadn’t invited me to their birthday parties would realize the errors of their ways.
Oh, and dock would line up outside my door begging for a chance to date me, with a Greek chorus urging them on, of course.
OK, maybe the Greek chorus was a bit much, but what can inom say, inom was young.
Do I have to tell