By Giorgio Di Marzo
“Life is still a great voyage for me, rich with miracles and surprises. I’m walking better now, but I can traverse the universe without taking a single step. There are 747s in my mind, just waiting to take flight. I have my suitcase ready, packed with precious memories and a few slivers of wisdom and experience, and I’m still pretty much always up for an adventure”.
These are the words concluding the book AIDSAFARI by Adam Levin, a book that, as the title suggests, deals with a trip, a safari, but a unique, perilous and in some way an enlightening one. A safari inside himself together with a wicked and twisted travel mate who will accompany the author forever: AIDS. Adam is a new Ulysses that a day finds himself facing the most difficult challenge of his life, that is the voyage of his soul and inside his soul. It will lead him to a world unknown to the most and that, mainly, the most do not want to know: the world of pain and suffering but at the same time the world of hope and of day-by-day fight, the world of joy and of the recovered parents’ love, the world of happiness that just the little things can bring.
As every great voyager knows, it does not matter where one leaves from and heads to but the routes one travels: and Adam has travelled a long way in the world of AIDS, with the help of some companions – his dear parents, his best friends – who have decided to accompany him through this journey, mates who have never left him alone helping him, after two long years, to maybe see the end of this inner safari. Now he has re-born and can start living a new life, better than the previous one, though with the never-ending companionship of Mr AIDS who is now, willy-nilly, Adam’s best friend.
In fact, strange as it might seem, AIDS has changed Adam’s life by opening his eyes so that he has finally acknowledged what really counts in one’s life. Indeed Adam finds himself writing as follows: “In that process, I guess, I had learnt to change some of the lifestyle patterns that were leading me to a quick spiritual and emotional death. I was no longer ruled by my hungers or desires. My demons had retreated to a safe distance. God, I’ll probably kick the bucket for saying this, but fuck it, in some twisted way, it was as though AIDS had saved my life”.
His lust for life has made the rest and here is our Adam-Ulysses facing another safari, maybe the most difficult: to make the world understand that poverty is the true illness that has to be cured; to make the rich understand that the world cannot be changed by giving alms to the developing countries that this way will never develop; to make everybody understand that if South Africa – Adam is South African – is the country with, in percentage, the highest number of people affected by AIDS, with an elevated incidence of children and women, this is mainly due to poverty and ignorance; to make all understand that we can not fight AIDS by pretending it does not exist and then we do not need to be concerned about it, but by considering it for what it is: a pandemia to cure, not a business from which the pharmaceutical companies can get richer and richer.
AIDSAFARI is a very pleasant book to be read all in one breathe, magisterially written and exhilarating in some pages. For more information please visit www.aidsafari.com.
Copyright 2006 GIORGIOSTUDIO – All rights reserved |
