Danny Ramadan came to Canada as a refugee 10 years ago. Though the identity he assumed after this event is what gives its name to his new book, Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir, becoming a refugee is but a small part of Ramadan’s story.
I first encountered Ramadan through his piece “Speak my Tongue” which appeared in the 2021 essay collection Tongues: On Longing and Belonging through Language. His essay was so striking that I became immediately fascinated with his voice. Reading his memoir was a reminder of the indelible impression his essay left on me.
Danny Ramadan was born in Damascus, Syria, and he dedicates most of his narrative to the memories of his childhood and youth there and later, Egypt, where he moved to work as a young rising author and journalist. The care with which Ramadan builds the world of his childhood shows his profound love for Damascus, its hundreds of years old houses—such as the one where he grew up, and its people—from his real family to his chosen family later on.
Ramadan is the author of two novels and a children’s book series in English. Before arriving in Vancouver in September 2014, he was already a published author of two collections of short stories in Arabic. The first, he published it when he was only 20 years old. Reading his work, you understand why. He has the incredible gift of setting up and building stories with such deft skill that the narratives feel pulled along by the force of life itself, such is the immediacy and richness of his prose.
We learn many things about Ramadan, such as his difficult relationship with his parents, and what it felt like to grow up with a parent suffering from debilitating mental health issues. However, the most beautiful sections of the book are dedicated to describing the LGBTQ+ communities he belonged to while living in Syria and Egypt. Due to the way Syria criminalizes LGBTQ+ individuals, community members must find each other in discreet, subtle ways and live in the shadow of the dangers that being part of the community brings to them.
These scenes show repeatedly how, since his young age, Ramadan has been a unifier of people, a force that attracts energy and people to him everywhere he goes. One of those places was his apartment in Damascus, which slowly became a gathering space for the city’s LGBTQ+ community members. He describes, with infinite warmth and love, the parties he would organize at his safe home, where they would spend hours smoking and drinking, watching movies, and listening to music.
The memoir is also poignant in showing the strange complexity of being born in a country you love but that does not love you back. This is the Syria and the youth of his memories, which he narrates without bitterness or regret. And while he does share terribly painful and traumatic events, this Damascus is a place of love, of intellectual and literary discovery, and the birthplace of his writer’s voice. I’m not a member of the LGBTQ+ community but I understand how you can love a city— its sounds and fragrance, the colour of its sky, the smiles of your friends and neighbours— but still remember how hostile that place is to you and your beliefs, how you can love and fear a place at the same time.
One of the things I most loved about Crooked Teeth is how Danny Ramadan often calls attention to the act of writing and the choices he is making as the author of the story. I appreciate this not only because I love thinking about form—the conscious choices artists made in how they present their message—but because Ramadan uses the technique to remind the reader he is in control of the narrative, of what he is choosing to tell the reader or leave out, lest you forget this a real person’s story and not the preconceived image of the Syrian refugee readers may have in their minds.
Ramadan was a journalist working in an English-language newspaper in Cairo when the pro-democracy protests that would lead to the resignation of then Egypt’s President, Hosni Mubarak, started. It was January 2011 and Ramadan found himself, in his role as journalist, at the centre of the massive demonstrations. It’s extraordinary to read about his first-person accounts of the rapidly moving events and the dangerous and risky situations Ramadan found himself in. For his safety, he returned to Syria a few weeks after the start of the protests.
Being a front row witness to your country’s political disintegration is traumatic enough. Ramadan, as a queer man who started to advocate for more freedoms for the LGBTQ+ community during his own country’s popular uprisings against President Bashar Assad, faced increasingly serious risks. The start of Syria’s own Arab Spring, which later became a long, devastating civil war, was also the beginning of Danny Ramadan’s new chapter as a refugee. Working as a journalist for an English-language Syrian magazine, he was once again the witness of historical events—the type we don’t feel will impact us directly, but to which we are just like a small leaf carried away by the force of an unstoppable river.
In 2012, Ramadan, who by then had established his vibrant safe home in Damascus, was detained and imprisoned for six weeks while returning to the city from a trip. Danny Ramadan’s power as a writer—both in the emotional impact of his story, and in the agency he has to be the author of the narrative of his life—is revealed through these chapters. I admired how as a writer, he found a compassionate, sophisticated balance between intimacy and generosity, and the preservation of the private self. I don’t think he did this to spare the reader the horrific truths of what he suffered in that prison cell, but to reject the idea of turning his trauma into a spectacle for Western readers who only see refugees through the lens of their suffering.
Danny Ramadan is not only a master storyteller; he’s a master at seeing people, making them feel safe and valued, and creating a home for them. Not long after landing and settling in Canada, he continued his work as an activist in the LGBTQ+ community, this time, in Vancouver. Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir is a detailed, exquisitely vivid, sensual and beautiful memoir about family, love, war and the joy of being queer—I deeply cherish his voice.
Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir was published on May 28, 2024 by Penguin Random House.
Visit Danny Ramadan’s website.
The Things We Love 