This novel asks us to confront the darkest parts of ourselves — and to forgive
Danny Ramadan's The Foghorn Echoes asks what it means to truly hold ourselves accountable
Shelfies is a column by writer Alicia Elliott that looks at arts and culture through the prism of the books on her shelf.
In a pivotal scene in Danny Ramadan's latest novel The Foghorn Echoes, Syrian refugee Hussam sleeps uneasily next to his older white boyfriend Ray in their expensive Vancouver apartment.
Then a strange sound bellows through the night. Hussam wakes up screaming, terrified. It's a foghorn, Ray explains: "'It's a signal, to warn ships of hazards like coastlines or other boats when they can't see in the fog.'"
Stay away, the foghorn cautions. You might not see it now, but if you get too close, you will be destroyed.
This titular metaphor opens up how we see the two protagonists — Hussam and Wassim — in the novel. Guilt, shame, fear and trauma have turned them from humans into foghorns, enacting behaviour that screams at other people to keep their distance or be doomed.
It's a metaphor that can be extended further to encapsulate all self-destructive patterns, asking: what diseased places have these impulses come from, and what must be done to heal those places and stop those patterns? Can we confront our mistakes without vanquishing in varying forms of self-harm forever?
What does it truly mean to hold ourselves accountable — and to forgive?
***
As young men in Syria, Hussam and Wassim are best friends and secret lovers who continuously come together and fall apart amidst a series of personal tragedies. The first and perhaps most formative involved the boys' first kiss, atop of a precarious bird cage on the roof of Wassim's family home. Just as their lips touched, Hussam's father came up to get them for dinner — and saw what they were doing. A series of impulsive decisions ends with Hussam's father accidentally falling to his death in the Damascus streets below.
From here, the narrative jumps ahead to each man's life as an adult, with their past mistakes and continued relationship slowly being revealed as the novel unfolds.
Hussam has managed to get to Canada after romancing Ray — a wealthy, well-connected man who helped pull strings to get Hussam there as a sponsored refugee — on Facebook. He finally has the sort of life he could only dream of … with two important, increasingly impossible caveats: he must be Ray's silent, agreeable arm candy, and he must not discuss the trauma of his past, which is too much of a bummer for his boyfriend and his new friends to hear about.
Wassim, on the other hand, has thrown away his formerly charmed life as a well-off husband and father and is now living as a vagrant in an abandoned home in Syria. Forced into his marriage by his father, he didn't want to hurt his wife and child, but the lie he was living as a straight family man weighed heavily on him; eventually, he felt it would be better for them if he fled.
Though their lives are now very different, Hussam and Wassim's shared tragedies are like a tether that holds them to one another. They may not know it, but they are both struggling with similar trauma responses as they punish themselves for mistakes they cannot fully face.
Hussam is trying to erase himself and his past by losing himself in the queer nightlife of Vancouver. He cannot let go of the devastating decisions he had to make to get here, which are "rooted in [his] skin like birthmarks." Still, he desperately tries to ignore them, using sex and drugs in an attempt to "evaporate out of my own body ... disintegrate ... disappear." This past he cannot shake is embodied by the spirit of his dead father, who figuratively and literally haunts him, following and judging him in his new life at the most inopportune moments.
"My father's ghost is back, glimmering in the corner," Hussam notices while in a club. "I've failed at erasing him. I'm cursed forever. I'm doomed for death. I avenged you, I whisper, but he won't go away."
Stay away, the foghorn cautions. You might not see it now, but if you get too close, you will be destroyed.
Naturally, his father's haunting only furthers Hussam's descent into self-destruction. He's forever convinced all it will take is "one more hit and he'll be gone." And yet, no matter how many hits he takes, his father, like his past, always comes back.
So the cycle continues. The foghorn echoes over and over, pushing all those who already care for him further out, and warning new people to stay away.
Wassim, meanwhile, refuses any help or friendship as he keeps himself in a state of perpetual hunger, isolation and homelessness. He hopes that staying away from anyone he's ever known will help him forget what he's done to his family.
"I had my secrets," he thinks as he wanders an abandoned home. "I screamed them down my own well, and I closed its lid." But that lid doesn't stay shut; shame leaks from beneath it, further poisoning his self-image. Wassim is so certain that he is a curse to all the people he's loved that when he runs into a childhood friend, he feels guilty for even letting the man hug him. "I shouldn't be touching this man," he scolds himself. "I don't want to stain him."
Though Wassim's deprivation seems directly opposed to Hussam's excess, it quickly becomes clear that both serve the same purpose. Both self-destructive impulses are a form of self-flagellation and a clear warning to others: do not come any closer or I will destroy you.
In another echo of Hussam's experiences with his father, Wassim sees a ghost, too. Kalia is the woman who lived and died in the house he has stumbled on and decided to squat in. She haunts the house, but proves to be friendly and kind. Eventually, she becomes the only one Wassim will let in.
Although in some ways her life and experiences mirror those of the wife Wassim left, he cannot possibly destroy her, because she's already dead. This makes her safe to confess his life to, something he realizes he desperately needs to do. He almost admits this to Kalia once, but quickly catches himself: "'Your presence allows me to tell — ' I hesitate. 'I think you like listening to my stories.'"
If we refuse to stop punishing ourselves for our mistakes, how can we call that anything but hate? And if we can't bear to look at ourselves fully and honestly, how can we ever truly call that love?
Despite this guardedness, throughout the course of the novel, Wassim and Hussam both end up finding unexpected new friends that not only allow them to be their broken, imperfect selves without judgment, but also encourage them to confess their sins. During Hussam's unburdening, we see exactly why the creation of this sort of safe space for recollection and reconsideration is so necessary for real change, insight and redemption.
It was a dark night, Hussam recalls to his friend. He and Wassim were being smuggled in a boat full of refugees across the sea when the battery for the boat died. They all sat in the dark, unsure what to do. Suddenly, a child started to sing the end credits song from Treasure Island. Soon, all the children were singing. "Those children were our foghorn," Hussam explains. "It was the Turkish Coast Guard who heard them and came looking for our boat in the dead of the night."
It is here we finally understand: foghorns are not just for keeping people away. They're also to draw people in when you need saving.
***
While both Hussam and Wassim were engaging in visibly self-destructive behaviour designed to push and keep people away, that behaviour was also clearly a desperate cry for help. Neither man knew how to find a path toward redemption alone. Neither even thought redemption was possible.
So many of us are likewise carrying shame — our own, and others'. We blame ourselves for things we are responsible for, and things we are not. Each fear, regret, disgrace, embarrassment and humiliation is like its own open wound bleeding beneath our skin. And as much as we try to ignore them — try to act like they don't exist or bother us for the sake of appearing "okay" — they are still there, sneakily influencing our thoughts, actions and reactions, flooding our brains when we try to fall asleep.
In other words, the very memories, thoughts, actions and patterns we don't want to address are acting like foghorns themselves: calling out from the smog of our everyday lives, demanding attention. We can choose to see them as warnings, directing us to keep away lest we face further ruin — or we can choose to see them as cries for help, directing us to the exact places we need to tend to and heal. We can choose, in essence, self-hate or self-love.
If we refuse to stop punishing ourselves for our mistakes, but also refuse to admit to those mistakes, ask those we hurt for forgiveness and make amends, how can we call that anything but hate? And if we can't bear to look at ourselves fully and honestly, can't bear to even attempt apologies, redemption and change, how can we ever truly call that love?
This, ultimately, is the beauty, originality and strength of Ramadan's tremendous second novel. The Foghorn Echoes dares to give us a love story where the most important, meaningful journeys are the ones that lead each protagonist to accept, forgive, change and love themselves, for themselves.
It's a necessary reminder: not all great love stories require romantic love between two people in order to be compelling, complex or worthwhile. After all, at the end of the day, we have no choice but to live with, or against, ourselves — to either drive away our own care and concern for our bodies, minds and wellbeing, or to gently and lovingly call it in closer, closer.
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