RIC J: Al-Lat, you are visiting Earth after how long?

AL: I wasn’t really gone, you know? Just because you can’t see me doesn’t mean I’m not here … Do you see the wind? No ? It does exist. I am like the wind. Absent and present. Invisible and visible. Past and present. Eternal.

RIC J: Are you Aphrodite? Are you Kali? Are you Minerva?

AL: You look like a mortal, woman. You give three names to an entity that has a thousand. I am the one who is, whom a thousand will name in a thousand different ways, and a thousand others with a thousand new names. I am the immensity, the great whole, the infinite.

RIC J: Herodotus wrote about you in Histories. Who else wrote about you?

AL: Nobokov named me Lolita, Proust called me Albertine, and Flaubert Madame Bovary. How many more? I have more names than if I had lived a thousand lives …

RIC J: You are part of the infamous Satanic verses. Do you not know God?

AL: God ? It’s my son. I had Him with the Devil.

RIC J: What is your favourite colour of lipstick?

AL: Bright red like the blood that flows from your vagina every month.

RIC J: What is the best recipe with dates?

AL: Minced raw meat (choose yourself the animal you want to eat), cumin seeds, red pepper, soybean oil. Shakes. Leave to stand Fifteen minutes. To eat with a glass of red wine (Croze-Hermitage, if you can). Only there will you know and understand what eating means.

RIC J: Your views on Donald Trump.

AL: That lustful old thing? He’s already brain dead. His cortex must have sunk in a golf hole.

RIC J: Your consort lion was destroyed in Palmyra. Did you feel bad about it?

AL: For one of my lions that you will destroy, ten thousand will come to devour your corpse. I fear nothing, I expect nothing. I exist, whatever the cost.

RIC J: If someone is depressed, what is the best cocktail to cheer them up?

AL: A third of sex, a third of sex, a third of sex.

RIC J: Your favourite spot to be kissed.

AL: The tip of my breasts when I’m cold.

RIC J: Your favourite jazz composition.

AL: Take Five (Dave Brubeck version, 1959)

RIC J: Someone once offered an apple to Athena in her abandoned temple. But where can an apple be offered to you? All your temples are destroyed.

AL: Come to the ruins of my temples, give me an apple, any fruit, spill a cup of tea, lay a flower, whatever. You have to revive me. I am weak, but not dead. I, the great goddess, live from the offerings made to me. Revive me, and I’ll give you some of my eternity. A few hours of my eternity. Maybe more ?

RIC J: In the memory of a Sufi patient, please define life in two words.

AL: Never ending.