Ramadan honours resilience
THE CLOTHESLINE SWING
By Ahmad Danny Ramadan. Nightwood, 288 pp, softcover
Trauma is a difficult thing to 2
write about. “Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable,” Judith Lewis Herman notes in her seminal work Trauma and Recovery. “Atrocities, however, refuse to be buried.…folk wisdom is filled with ghosts who refuse to rest in their graves until their stories are told.”
Few contemporary Canlit authors tackle this theme with more breathtaking virtuosity than Ahmad Danny Ramadan, a Syrian refugee who was granted asylum in 2014. The Vancouver writer’s English-language debut, The Clothesline Swing, is a lesson in both artistic mastery and human resilience. And, unexpectedly: joy. The novel follows a gay Syrian couple who, in 2012, escape the
violence of both homophobia and civil war to build a new life in Vancouver’s West End. Almost four decades later, one is dying as the other tells him stories in an attempt to keep him alive. All the while, Death, a sinister spectre, plays cards in the kitchen.
Ramadan’s unique voice—fragmented, poetic, and rich with magic realism—lends the narrative the quality of a dream. “There are tremors around us; it’s like an unwritten piece of music,” runs the opening line of the first chapter. “That hidden melancholy is creating a routine for us. Every action we take in our lives is like a gentle touch on the strings of a violin.” His prose throughout is lush and lyrical, infused with a longing for home. The Damascus of days past comes alive on the page: the labyrinth of narrow avenues; the glimmering streetlamps; the rooftop gardens with blooming jasmine—all seen from a makeshift balcony swing, constructed from an old clothesline and a pillow.
There are many things to recommend this read, from its take on the gay experience in the Middle East, to the snapshots of Cairo, Istanbul, and Beirut, to the tenderness of the central love story.
But perhaps the most striking aspects of The Clothesline Swing are Ramadan’s determination to draw out the beauty in even the most dire of circumstances, and his faith in the power of stories to heal. As such, one of the most powerful lines of the novel is its first: the dedication. It reads: “To the children of Damascus, This is what I did with my heartache… What about yours?” > TARA HENLEY
BLOOD, SWEAT, AND FEAR By Eve Lazarus. Arsenal Pulp, 218 pp, softcover
Eve Lazarus (like John Belshaw, 2 Daniel Francis, and other writers) has brought a new seriousness to the study of Vancouver’s all-too-colourful past— especially its crime and politics, back in the days when the two were not always seen as separate endeavours. Following on her books Cold Case Vancouver and Sensational Vancouver, Lazarus focuses now on John F.C.B. Vance (1884–1964). He’s little remembered today but was a kind of hero in his time, one of the first individuals to bring cutting-edge science to the field of crime-scene investigation. The local papers liked to refer to him as a hometown Sherlock Holmes, but thinking of him as the real-life model for Insp. William Murdoch of the CBC series Murdoch Mysteries
is a much more apt comparison. He was a genuine scientist and the opposite of a showoff. “Vance may have been paid by the police department,” Lazarus writes, “but he worked for the evidence, whether that convicted the guilty or set the innocent free.”
He started out as a city health inspector, checking for impurities in the drinking water and the milk supply. Because he understood blood work he was brought in on several spectacular murders. One of the most notorious—one that ignited a new wave of anti-asian prejudice—concerned a West End matron, the wife of a CPR executive. Vance proved that she had been chopped up and incinerated by her “houseboy” Kong Yew Chung, a.k.a. Jack Kong. The killer was sentenced to life in prison but served only a few years before returning to China.
Moving chronologically from case to case, Lazarus shows how Vance kept adding to his knowledge of poisons, explosives, ballistics, and other fields. He became an expert in safecracking! Sometimes he even created new tools needed in his work. He was frequently asked to help in cases throughout the province and beyond. His life was often threatened—sometimes, he believed, by corrupt police officials themselves—and he was once splashed with acid. He was not only a modest, clever, and determined individual, but evidently a brave one as well. Lazarus has done quite a detective job herself in tracking down and piecing together his journals and papers. This is a fine Vancouver book indeed. > GEORGE FETHERLING Eve Lazarus will launch Blood, Sweat, and Fear at 7 p.m. on Thursday (June 8) at the Vancouver Police Museum (340 East Cordova Street).