Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir by Danny Ramadan

Description

“Writing this memoir is a betrayal.” With those words, Danny Ramadan begins an intensely personal reckoning with a past he has long protected behind fiction.

Starting with his family’s humble beginnings in Damascus, Ramadan traces an extraordinary journey across borders and through the hidden worlds of queer life in the Middle East. He takes readers into Damascus’s underground network of queer safe homes, a clandestine party at a secluded villa in Cairo, and the Arab Spring uprisings that transformed the region.

His story also encompasses a reckless hoax that puts Syria’s LGBTQ+ community at risk, a traumatic six-week imprisonment, and the friendships, beaches, and sunsets of Beirut. Eventually, Ramadan arrives in Vancouver, only to discover that beginning a new life in a new country is more complicated than he imagined.

Crooked Teeth refuses the familiar, simplified refugee narrative. Alongside danger, displacement, and trauma are friendship, desire, laughter, love, and the hard-won comfort of building a life somewhere new.

Written with remarkable intimacy, Ramadan’s memoir is ultimately a story about memory, identity, exile, resilience, and the complicated ways people carry home with them. It is also a testament to the possibility of finding joy after surviving circumstances that once seemed impossible to escape.

Book Details

• Title: Crooked Teeth: A Queer Syrian Refugee Memoir
• Author: Danny Ramadan
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN: 159376829X
• Genre: Memoir
• Themes: LGBTQ+ identity, Syria, refugees, immigration, exile, queer history, Arab Spring, resilience, love, community