Danny Ramadan is an auto-buy author for me. He is a queer Syrian refugee who lives in Vancouver who has raised over $300,000 for Rainbow Refugee, the non-profit I volunteer for. I read his two novels, The Clothesline Swing and The Foghorn Echoes and had the absolute privilege to interview him for an online fundraiser. When he announced his recently-released memoir Crooked Teeth, I knew I had to buy three copies so that I could strong arm my book club into reading it sooner than library holds would allow. Fellow book clubber Anne told me that she was going to the Vancouver Public Library to hear him speak, so of course I joined her!
Danny speaks as eloquently as he writes, and I am crossing all my fingers that the camera I saw recorded the event so that I can rewatch it. He has such poignant things to say about the nuances of being a refugee who resents being seen as a statistic and struggles to appreciate a safe home alongside the grief of losing his formative home. Actually, that reminds me of one of the most beautiful things he said during the Q&A, when an audience member asked him how he conceives of the idea of home. “I don’t think home is a monogamous concept,” he said. Leaving one home to move somewhere else doesn’t make the first place your ex-home that is no longer part of your story. He said that he has many homes that he loves differently and deeply, and that fulfilled different needs of his. That resonated with me a lot.
He also read from the beginning of his book, where he had a painfully awkward encounter with a white woman on a plane (foreshadowing his soon-to-arrive awkward encounter with another white woman – me!). He shared a copy of his book with her, and she burst into tears reading the first chapter, after bending the spine all the way backwards. He was left comforting her as she said how terrible it must have been to grow up in Damascus as a gay kid, minimizing the complexity of his life, especially since that first chapter is actually full of sweet moments of a city he loves.
Anyway, Anne and I laughed afterward about how unfortunate it was that the person we could most relate to from his talk was the terribly behaved privileged white woman. This anecdote was the only thing I could think of when we approached his table afterwards to get our books signed. “We were just laughing about how we relate to the white woman on the plane,” I said, holding out my book. He smiled awkwardly. CONTEXT, TRICIA. I replayed exactly what I had said, which sounded like I thought SHE was the hero of that story he shared and how we are also fragile white women who want to make his life story into a simplistic narrative at his own emotional expense. I stared at this man who I admire, unsure how to fix this without seeming even weirder and more inappropriate, when Anne swept in.
Anne is the coolest person I know. She has pure cat energy, aloof and self-confident. “I lived in Ottawa for a while, so your satisfaction in knowing she would suffer through cold winters was very appropriate,” she said. He laughed genuinely. She held out her book, and he said, “Oh, it’s wet!” Anne grimaced coolly and said, “Even more evidence of my awfulness. I put it in my bag with my water bottle. That’s worse than cracking a spine.” AND HE CRACKED UP. Face red with laughter, he signed her book and handed it back with a smile. I mumbled a “kthxbai” and left, also red faced.
When I told Rachel this story, she laughed at me, as is appropriate. Then she generously suggested that I had actually set Anne up perfectly to look really cool. That was definitely my planned intention.
Anyway, take my advice, awkward white woman notwithstanding: read something Danny Ramadan has written!
It Is Trish 