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I Will Tell This Story the Way I Choose
- University of Wisconsin Press
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201 Shaun Levin It’s a puz zle to me, con sid er ing where I come from, how I got to be where I am now, here in Lon don, liv ing as a writer, get ting books pub lished, know ing all sorts of poets and au thors, some in real life, some through let ters, some—admit it!— through Face book, all of us rec og niz able to each other, even if just through pic tures. Some times I think: What takes a shy, bul lied (but will ful) white boy from a small port town on the tip of Af rica and flings him across the con ti nent, to the Le vant, then later across Eu rope, thwacked like some dod gem car along the up and down sides of a tri an gle, pro pelled by the ca price of his tory and a mo men tum gained by cen tu ries of po groms and wick ed ness, to land up writ ing on a damp is land among the off spring and sur vi vors of the twisted and vi cious En glish? And then to make a ca reer out of writ ing about the homo sex u als, to be a queer Jew im mi grant small-town writer-in-exile sus tained, on the whole, by a com mu nity of dead writ ers, none of whom, as far as I know— and I know—cared about En gland or its Lit er a ture. What am I doing here? Re wind. I was brought up in a part of the world re mote enough for the Eu ro peans to feel they were free to raid its land and de base its peo ple. I Will Tell This Story the Way I Choose Shaun Levin 202 To a large ex tent these prac tices con tinue in some form or an other in South Af rica, al though today the coun try is still re mote enough for the Eu ro peans to feel un trou bled about ne glect ing it. My peo ple came to Af rica at the end of the nine teenth cen tury, pen ni less, ig nor ant of the land they’d been en ticed into. We’d es caped from Lith u a nia, vic tims of an age-old ha tred that is, in most parts of the world, still fresh and vi brant today. Some times the only way to deal with in jus tice is to get out. My strong est mem ory of grow ing up in the har bor town of Port Eliz a beth is a de sire to leave. Per haps that is a com mon de sire among queer peo ple—among all writ ers!—es pe cially those of us who have grown up in the small towns of the world. By the time I was fif teen, my fam ily was pack ing its bags and get ting ready to leave for the Prom ised Land, a place in which we ar rived not ex actly pen ni less (no white per son leaves South Af rica pen ni less) but defi nitely ig nor ant. We moved to a town in Is rael called Ash ke lon, a town even smaller than the one I was born in. This was my chance to re in vent my self, to hide in side a new lan guage. The coun tries that have made me are wicked places. Im mo ral and dam aged. But maybe the world is like that. And writ ing—art in gen eral—is the anti dote. I don’t re mem ber how I dis cov ered Jack Ke rouac. It might have been through the couple I baby sat for while I was still in high school, just be fore I went into the army. I think they had a copy of Ginsberg’s Howl on the book shelf in their bed room, maybe even on the same shelf as Sen sual Mas sage for Cou ples, which I leafed through and mas tur bated to while their new born baby slept. My first copy of Kerouac’s On the Road is the 1957 Sig net edi tion; it’s here on my shelf in Lon don. I bought it from Steimatsky’s book shop on Di zeng off Street in Tel...