Danny Ramadan gets raw and real in his new memoir Crooked Teeth — read an excerpt now
Crooked Teeth will be released on May 28
While Danny Ramadan is known for his powerful fiction about queer Syrian-Canadian experiences, he's never written about it with such a personal lens — until now.
Crooked Teeth is his latest project, a memoir, that refutes the oversimplified refugee narrative and transports readers on an epic and often fraught journey from Damascus to Cairo, Beirut and Vancouver. Told with nuance and fearless intimacy, Crooked Teeth revisits parts of Ramadan's past he'd rather forget.
Ramadan is a Vancouver-based Syrian-Canadian author and advocate for LGBTQ+ rights. His debut novel The Clothesline Swing was longlisted for Canada Reads 2018 and his second novel The Foghorn Echoes won a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction.
"It's a glorious thing to write about one's mother," said Ramadan in an email about the excerpt below. "I was short of breath when I brought this scene to the page. I was slightly terrified that the chapter will give you an unpleasant idea of who my mother was. Yet, somehow hopeful that you'd see her for the complex human she was. I hope this balance comes across with love on the page."
Crooked Teeth will be out on May 28. Read an excerpt below.
My mother hid a small notebook in her closet under layers of clothes.
The notebook was lined with song lyrics she liked and drawings she'd done of herself and others. I leafed through it a few times over the years, noticing it filling up with her art. I imagine her in her free time, away from the many chores and tasks a daughter-in-law was required to do, sneaking back to her bedroom, sitting on the lush Persian carpet, and flipping through the notebook or drawing a new face on its pages.
She spoke French as fluently as her limited Syrian education allowed and played songs by Édith Piaf and Dalida on a small boombox in our bedroom. I saw the lyrics to the songs in her notebook. Her handwriting was precious, minding her accents on the French words. She sometimes sang along, guided by her notebook. Hushing her voice so as not to be heard by the other women in the house, she'd act out the emotions of the singers, rounding her eyebrows at the lovelorn crescendo. I'd sit on the bedroom floor across from her, watching her use a sharp pencil to draw her brothers' faces, or sometimes even my father's.
It was the only little secret she kept for herself; no other hands ever greased its pages but mine and hers.- Danny Ramadan
I still think about that notebook sometimes, the only soft memory I have of my mother. It was the only little secret she kept for herself; no other hands ever greased its pages but mine and hers. She brought it with her every time we moved house throughout my childhood. It sat on a shelf in her closet, the pages yellowing, their edges wrinkling, the pictures on them fading slowly. What had happened to it after my parents' divorce? Did my mother take it with her back to her parents' home? Did she keep it with her always? Maybe she retraced the faded linework with a crisp, sharpened pencil to keep the faces alive. Maybe she drew my face from memory.
When she got a day off from her many responsibilities in the home of her in-laws, my mother would visit her own mother's home. She'd wrap a hijab around her head lightly, fussing in front of the mirror to allow a lock of her hair to spill onto her forehead in a way that looked unintentional. My aunts and grandmother disapproved of her long skirts and blouses patterned with stripes and shapes and loud colours, preferring their own long black jackets and tightly wrapped white hijabs for short trips outside the house. Their outfits looked suffocating to me, especially on hot summer afternoons.
Some days my mother took me along on her weekly visit, and on others she left me under the watchful eyes of my grandmother and aunts. On one such occasion, I stood by the kitchen door looking on as the women gathered around the table to remove the caps of okra beans and skin tomatoes for dinner. My grandmother and aunts chit-chatted listlessly and gossiped about neighbours' marriages and pregnancies. Although my youngest aunt was just three or four years older than me, she assumed a womanly role at the kitchen table.
"Come, what are you doing there?" She summoned me over. "Are you bored?"
I nodded.
"Do you want to learn how to uncap okra?"
I nodded again.
She reached for a dull knife for me to use, but my grandmother was quick to gently slap her hand. "No, he is a boy," my grandmother said. "Boys don't cook."
No, he is a boy,' my grandmother said. 'Boys don't cook.- Danny Ramadan
"He could help in the kitchen," my aunt whined. "It'll take us hours to finish all this okra."
"Do you see any of your brothers helping in the kitchen?" The elder aunt gestured with the tip of her knife toward me. "Tomorrow he'll grow up and become a man like his father and uncles."
"If his father was here he'd take him to work with him," my grandmother added. "That's how you raise a good man." She turned to me. "Go play with your football outside."
I turned silently, then changed my mind and stood by the door. "I'm all alone," I said. "There's no one to play with."
"Maybe we will get him a male cousin to play with." My grandmother eyed her daughters.
"Well, his mother isn't bringing him a brother anytime soon," the elder aunt mumbled, eliciting sighs from the others. "Go play with him for a bit," she told the younger one. "Only for a bit, then come back to help us with the okra."
That night, when my mother returned home, I was already fast asleep in her bedroom, tired from the hours spent playing with my aunt and then following her around while she dusted. When she woke me I saw that she was in her outside clothes but that her hair was uncovered. Her green eyeshadow wrinkled as she frowned.
"I don't want you to tell your grandmother anything anymore." My mother held me by the ear and twisted the soft tissue between the knuckle of her index finger and the tip of her thumb. "Never ever speak a word of us to her ever again."
"I didn't say anything," I whispered.
She gazed at me for a moment and then let go, leaving me with a throbbing pain in my ear. I sat in the corner of my makeshift bed on the floor of her room and watched as she kneeled before her own bed and pulled a satchel out from under the mattress. She showed me the bag, the size of her palm, blue, tightened with a red ribbon. It smelled funny and looked as though it were full of stones.
"This is the doing of your grandmother," she told me. "She is cursing me every night. She wants me to die so that she can find a new wife for your father and a new mother for you."
She grabbed my ear again and squeezed it tighter. "Do you understand? Do you want me to die?" she hissed. "She is a witch."
Like all good children, I believed my mother- Danny Ramadan
Like all good children, I believed my mother. She taught me never to trim my nails at night and to flush the clippings down the toilet so that they couldn't be used in a magic spell. I watched her clean our combs after every shower so as not to leave our hair for a preying hand. I was so fearful that I trained myself never to sleep past five in the morning, just in case someone else was awake, reciting a magical incantation over me while I slumbered.
I still have trouble sleeping past five in the morning.
Excerpted from Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir by Danny Ramadan. Copyright © 2024 Danny Ramadan. Published by Viking Canada, an imprint of Penguin Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. Reproduced by arrangement with the Publisher. All rights reserved.
