Crooked Teeth, Twisted Expectations

Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
Danny Ramadan
Penguin Random House Canada (May, 2024)
$26.95

Danny Ramadan’s Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir is not afraid to twist expectations. 

In his 2024 release — nominated for the Governor General’s Literary Award for nonfiction — Ramadan greets his readers with a request: “I want you to challenge yourself, to broaden your horizons, to find your blind spots and colour them with my words.” As it turns out, Ramadan’s story as a queer refugee fleeing an unstable Middle East is nearly impossible to share with a Canadian audience without turning Western expectations on their head. 

From the outset, readers are immersed in a vibrant Syria, one which Ramadan reframes with each anecdote. This Syria is bustling with young professionals, writers, and queer safe houses; sprawling skies and beautifully imperfect homes, passed down through generations; VHS pornography and movie theatre cruising. Ramadan explains that Syria was historically accepting of homosexuality and a source of ancient, queer poetry. It was only after Britain colonized the country and implemented the Criminal Law Amendment Act in 1885 — an updated version of King Henry VIII’s Buggery Act — that homosexual behaviours became punishable, and attitudes began to shift. “Let’s try to complicate this narrative a bit,” Ramadan writes, a direct acknowledgement to his readers that the Syria many of them think they know has been painted with hasty — and misguided — brushstrokes.

Ramadan’s narrative is interwoven with a profound search for belonging. As a queer man in a country that doesn’t like him, Ramadan is met with countless betrayals from those he trusts with his heart. Much of the book chronicles Ramadan’s relationship with his chosen family of transgender, non-binary, and queer friends, who frequently meet to explore their sexuality and shed heteronormative expectations. The matriarch of this group, a trans woman named Sama, introduces Ramadan to an intricate, queer family tree in her “humble apartment on the third floor of a building with mouldy walls.” Although Ramadan has written about forbidden love before (his 2022 novel The Foghorn Echoes won him a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction), this authentic, lived account of the queer community in Syria (and later Cairo and Beirut) is profound, bursting with passionate scenes of love, tenderness, and raw sexuality. 

But, in challenging assumptions, Ramadan also exposes difficult truths. For every striking example of beauty and sexual exploration in Damascus, Beirut, and Cairo, there are harsh contrasts of war, oppression, and uprising. Just as Ramadan experiences freedom and radical acceptance in his queer circles, there is an air of sadness lingering beneath — all the joy of his sexual liberty is experienced behind closed doors or in secluded villas. In the end, it’s Ramadan’s queerness and his home country’s broken government that forces him to flee Syria for Lebanon, then Lebanon for Canada.

A duality of pain and elation permeates each thread of Ramadan’s narrative. His arrival in Canada isn’t all sweet — although Ramadan is clearly thankful to live an authentic, queer life in Vancouver, where he’s lived since arriving in Canada, he details both the personal and systematic challenges of being a refugee, yet again complicating the narrative. 

In Canada, The Private Sponsorship of Refugees program gives citizens and permanent residents an opportunity to sponsor and support refugees as they come to Canada. Although seemingly benevolent in nature, this system leaves Ramadan completely vulnerable to the exploitation of his refugee sponsor, who manipulates, isolates, and emotionally abuses him. During his last months in Beirut, Ramadan’s refugee sponsorship circle scolds him for posting images of himself enjoying his final moments in Lebanon — he wasn’t portraying the disenfranchised refugee they expected him to be. 

Ramadan is not a cynic, though. By bearing his wounds, he attempts to reveal what’s necessary to build a better future in Canada and Syria. It’s also by holding back his deepest traumas — namely from his six-week stay in Syrian prison — that Ramadan challenges readers’ expectations for a second time in his memoir. He won’t relive his worst trauma, because it’s too painful. As readers, we’re forced to consider why we expect writers to bare their deepest wounds for our entertainment. 

Ramadan’s refusals to act in line with people’s expectations of him — as a writer, a refugee, a Syrian, and a gay man — are what make his memoir so compelling. Yet, his writing has its shortcomings too. Despite imploring readers to dissolve preconceived notions of refugees, Syrians, and queer people, Ramadan seems to hold assumptions of his readers too — namely white ones — in the opening chapter. But, this fault is overcome by his innate ability to reach deep and prompt true reflection.

As global unrest and climate change continue to displace millions around the globe, and far-right political movements creep into the mainstream, Ramadan’s Crooked Teeth reminds us to reexamine what we believe to be true about the people and nations around us, and ultimately, reconsider the expectations we place on them.