Disarming novel has many facets
Though Vancouver-based Ahmad Danny Ramadan is a journalist and the author of two short-story collections in Arabic, his debut novel showcases a compelling instinct for theatre.
The set-up exhibits a fundamentally stage-friendly premise. On the West Coast in the near future, a figure, now and then called Hakawati (the Lebanese word for storyteller), addresses his restless and dying partner within the West End home they’ve long shared. Nearly 80, the speaker is of questionable sound mind and body: “Maybe, like my mother,” he offers, “I lost my mind at the age of 30 and this whole house — this whole life — is an elaborate vision of happiness I’m experiencing while drooling in a mental hospital bed.”
The narrator also regularly jokes, argues and plays cards with another figure — Death, complete with scythe, hooded black robe and that unquenched thirst for souls. This mischievous entity has the ability to conjure disturbing ghosts from the narrator’s past.
Storytelling consoles Hakawati’s fading partner. Crucially, the storyteller isn’t ready for Death to claim the man with whom he has experienced so much love and hardship. Taking his cue from Scheherazade, he opts to spin tale after tale.
Sensing the limits of his own life, moreover, he is “trying to forget the days of terror back in Syria without losing the memories of the love we built together.”
Since in his experience love is tied intimately with terror, the storyteller can’t look at or explain one without incorporating the other; nor can he forget one without forgetting the other.
Following the prologue, Hakawati crafts tales. Set in Damascus, Beirut, Cairo and Vancouver, and mixing together fragments of the fable-like and the autobiographical with the reliable and the fantastic, the stories conjure pain and sacrifice, where motes of joy and contentment dispersed in the wind.
Besides gunfire, beatings, incarcerations, car bombs, regime changes and increasing militarization as background actuality, Ramadan focuses Hakawati’s stories around family and his ordeal-like experiences as a gay man.
For example, there’s his comingout: “My father punched me in the face, breaking one of my teeth in half.” There’s Hakawati’s first love, as narrated by the man’s ghost: “My wife, who found my dead body hanging from the ceiling, refused to come to the funeral.” Conjoined to the lovely story of his mother’s swing is his mother’s fatal descent into schizophrenic delusions and his father’s increasing anger and distance.
Ramadan’s account can’t be lauded as entertaining or uplifting. That said, Hakawati’s recollections and his take on resettling in Canada is immersive and disarming. And as a glimpse of regions with deep-seated homophobia, the novel’s a bracing reminder of how many forms oppression can take.
The almost-biological imperative for the story’s gays and lesbians to carry on in the face of oppression is touching.
Friendships, drunken parties, nightclubbing, casual hookups and affairs are scattered throughout the tales, pleasing, but potent reminders of survival skills. Those manifestations of fraternal and erotic love might not stop a bullet or topple a government, but Ramadan’s inclusion of them provides buoyant glimmers that help offset a resoundingly sombre outlook.