Is life less thrilling if your neighbors are rational, if they donโt bomb your power stations whenever they feel you need to be admonished? Is it less rousing if they donโt rattle your windows and nerves with indiscriminate sonic booms just because they can?
Rabih AlameddineFor someone like me and my generation, you had to speak French to be sophisticated, you had to be lighter-skinned.
Rabih AlameddineMe? I was lost for long time. I didnโt make any friends for few years. You can say I made friends with two trees, two big trees in the middle of the school [โฆ]. I spent all my free time up in those trees. Everyone called me Tree Boy for the longest time. [โฆ]. I preferred trees to people. After that I preferred pigeons, but it was trees first.
Rabih AlameddineYou look at the Koran or the Bible, they all tell the same stories. You see them as the stories of the Middle East. The stories reflect who these people were in the Middle East, and this is where Western culture came from. All our literature is basically influenced by these great myths. So I'm fascinated by it. You could almost say I'm obsessed with it. But if you're asking about the effect of religion on my life - almost everything I do is opposed to the practice of religion.
Rabih Alameddine