Replay: Rabih Alameddine shares Five Things He's Learned about Being Grumpy
Check out the first five minutes of his recent class.
“I suggest that for many of us, the reason we might not be able to understand how someone who is not like us feels or thinks is not necessarily a failure of empathy, but one of imagination.”
– Rabih Alameddine, Five Things I’ve Learned about Being Grumpy
Rabih Alameddine is the celebrated author of The Wrong End of the Telescope, his celebrated novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. He’s also the author of the novels Koolaids, and I, the Divine, The Hakawati, An Unnecessary Woman, The Angel of History, as well as the story collection, The Perv. Here’s the first five minutes of his recent 90-minute class in which Rabih shares the Five Things He’s Learned about the elasticity of identity and imagination.
Five Things I’ve Learned about Being Grumpy isn’t so much about being grumpy as it is about celebrating yourself free of external definitions and internal restrictions. Rabih reflects on his multiple identities – as an Arab, an immigrant, a gay writer, and more, and he specifically explores his own sense of the power and limitations of identity in shaping one's perspective as a writer and as an individual.
If you’re interested in growth, change, and the role that we each have in determining our own outcomes, this class is for you.
Though the focus seems to be on Rabih’s lifelong commitment to being grumpy, the class itself makes us quite happy. It’s a great way to think more about the fluidity of identity and the necessity of empathy.
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