Author, activist Danny Ramadan hopes his memoir will change you

Danny Ramadan arrived in Vancouver in September 2014, having left his home in Damascus, Syria, as a 30-year-old man in search of safety amid an escalating war in his home country.

Since then, he's got married, voted as a Canadian and helped raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for 2SLGBTQ+ refugees.

He's also become a respected author: his novels The Clothesline Swing and Foghorn Echoes have received accolades from the Lambda Literary Awards, the B.C. Yukon Book Awards and the City of Vancouver, and his children's book Salma the Syrian Chef has won multiple awards and spawned several sequels.

But Ramadan's latest work is a little different. Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir delves into his own life before and after his arrival in Canada, taking readers from his home in Damascus to his home in Vancouver. 

It asks questions of the reader and invites them to think more deeply and critically about the experiences he shares. 

"I'm hoping to write a memoir that will be impactful for you, that will change you internally and externally — not just about your idea about me as a human being, but also about how you approach refugees and queer refugees in general," he said. 

Ramadan spoke with CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher about the book and the challenges he faced sharing such personal stories.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

Why did you want to write a memoir?

My fiction has helped me deal with the traumatic experience of being a refugee and coming here to Canada and finding home here. It felt like my shield. In a way, my fiction allowed me to tell you a lot about the truth without revealing a lot about what is real. Now I have a very successful career — I have two successful books, I have a supportive agent and publisher and editor. I have the power to write this book exactly how I wanted to write it. 

What was it like to return to those early years in Damascus?

This is my treasure trove of all of the images from my childhood that I will never have access to ever again. My child at home doesn't exist anymore. Even if it did, I am not going to be able to visit it because I have spoken quite loudly about the Syrian regime, about the civil war in Syria. I don't think I'll ever be welcomed back to Damascus. So it feels like, in a way, those images are not just me trying to tell you about those places, but also me trying to protect them, to keep them for myself.

You were born Ahmad Ramadan. How did you come to the name Danny? 

I have this relationship between Ahmad and Danny because I identified as both of them for the longest time. During my 20s, whenever I was hanging out in queer spaces, people knew me as Danny. And whenever I was hanging out in straight spaces, in mainstream society, to protect my myself from the homophobia in those societies, people knew me as Ahmad. So I have created those two identities.