Tareq Baconi

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.

In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother, Eva, would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, Rima, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life—still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.

After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past, and begins to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him: hushed whispers overheard, stories of his mother’s years as an activist in Beirut and her return to Palestine during a moment of calm.

Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.

This is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.

A Memoir

Fire in Every Direction

Marion

Beirut knew nothing of the restrictions that shackled our families in Amman. The city was unapologetic, with a voracious appetite for living that was rooted in its fragility. Nothing could be taken for granted, and one day did not naturally lead to the next. The city kept up a dizzying pursuit of hedonistic bliss while, in the background, the crucial matters that made life mundane, that ensured its continuity, fell to the wayside.

Our white city was settled in its predictability. A reserved and self-conscious younger sibling to Beirut's sophisticated and worldly older sister. This was a discrepancy our parents never failed to point out as they romanticised Beirut's openness against Amman's stuffiness, forgetting that the deathly spiral of the former had forced them to seek life in the latter.

Palestine thrives, unnamed, between our four walls: in our sensibility, our ache, our politics, our collective memories, our desires. It is in the accent of the people, the architecture of our homes and our gardens, in the smells of our kitchens and our bedtime stories. Walking throughout Palestine, I was haunted by the spectre of a past community and recalled lives I never lived, in a lost world that had been passed onto me through Tata's love.

What do I mean by this - holds the secrets to our world? Gaza is the abject of our time. A miserable stretch of land, overpopulated and dirty, drowning in its own shit and decrepit infra-structure, beaten and abused. In the Israeli collective psyche, Gaza is a dark place, full of terrorists, of angry hordes, a place where - in the words of a former minister of justice no less - Palestinian mothers give birth to snakes, not babies. In our popular imagination, Gaza is ugly, cut off from the world, demonised, pitied, misunderstood, disgusting, besieged. I could dismiss all this rhetoric - write here that the Gaza I visited burst with energy, that its cafes were full of young, inspiring peoples that its markets bustled, and its cars idled in traffic. But anything I write would sound desperate in the very act of articulation; such is the power of dominant narratives.

So, I will write only this: the power of the abject is revolu-tionary, and because of that, immense resources are Invested in ensuring it remains invisible or is otherwise rendered repulsive.

It is precisely Gaza's abjection that makes it the site of revolu-tion, a land teeming with life and love, a territory with the power to shake our world out of its stupor. I am not romanticis-ing the misery in Gaza - far from it. What I am trying to convey is that in the most abject of spaces, in the queerest of selves, beauty abounds. Gaza does not stand alone in this. What she taught me is that sights unseen, words unspoken, realities despised, contain our most essential truths, our most precious meaning. What power can be harnessed if our sites of abjection are embraced, brought out in the open, the sores of vilification healed. That is where our liberation lies.

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