The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine

My seething, righteous rage would infect readers, flow in every vein, and men, women, and genderqueers would rise to demand justice. My novel was intended to blow up how we were perceived. People with AIDS were dying so pleasantly in literature. I thought all the books about AIDS were nothing like what I was living through. I wanted to change literature, or at least change the world. So you know at one point he does say, 'all those who say no, follow me.' And I'm saying no, and so is Jacob - no, we will not forget.When I wrote my first book, I thought I knew. He was the rebel, and we have lots of revolutions. He refused to become part of the dominant culture. Whereas, like I said, we live in a time where primarily we are encouraged to forget, and that, in the book, is Death's domain. Satan says at one point, 'let me lead for a change.' Because he's the angel of memory. One can't exist without the other, so what they do is this dance. Basically, it's the whole tension between memory and forgetting. It's a negotiation, or as they come to explain, it's a dance that they do. On the appearance of Satan and Death in the book

And then worse, at the height of it, which is what I tend to do, I became an emotional support volunteer at Shanti, so I was - it's not just that I had my friends, I had what was called clients, and everybody was dying. I never had a lover who died, or I never really took care of a primary person.

By 1992, we'd probably lost half the team. I was one of two or three people who started a gay soccer team in 1982. On living through the epidemic in San Francisco The anger, I couldn't place it, and it would be at any sort of reminder that we're forgetting. And it's funny, because things were going well in my writing and so on. It's interesting that when I started writing the novel I was angry at nothing specific, really. And this is why the novel is titled The Angel of History, which is, you know, a Walter Benjamin piece about the fact that none of us look back and look at the devastation that we've caused. It's both lovely and horrifying that we live in a culture that encourages us to forget, to keep forgetting and moving on, keep forgetting and moving on.

The Angel of History by Rabih Alameddine