I don’t think I ever quite felt I was Elvis, that I and name were one. It was always a little alienating, that name, never fully overlapping, ever so lightly suspended off my body. I could hear it called out and it wouldn’t quite resonate inside me. No, I’d register it from the outside, so to speak, having to connect it intellectually to the contents behind the eyes. This is perhaps why I felt no compunction about toying with it, and in my late teens I was sometimes Eluis di Bego, mangling the last name of my birth, peeling off its edges. I wanted something shorter, less difficult than my real (is a name ever really “real?”) name. And what about it—Avdibegovic? The etymology of those eleven letters (just like Shakespeare, I once counted, blissfully) tells us three things: Muslim aristocracy of Slavic origins. How?
more from Elvis Bego at Threepenny Review here.