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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...

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