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  3. Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir
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Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir

Tareq Baconi

7 Reviews

Rated 0

Middle East, Palestine, Memoirs, Gay & Lesbian studies

From the renowned Palestinian scholar, a memoir of political and queer awakening, of impossible love amidst generations of displacement, and what it means to return home.

'Moving and generous'
Isabella Hammad, author of Enter Ghost

'Fire in Every Direction is a marvel'
Omar El Akkad, author of One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

'Luminous, moving, and achingly beautiful'
Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King

'A deeply inspiring and absorbing read'
Mark Gevisser, author of The Pink Line

'Spending time with the real people in Fire in Every Direction is a delight'
Rabih Alameddine, author of An Unnecessary Woman

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humour 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 would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, 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, Tareq hopes to put aside his past. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him.

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.

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Praise for Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir

  • Tareq Baconi refuses to separate the story of sexual identity from the story of political commitment, and in so doing models a way to see our personal struggles as intertwined with our collective ones. Fire in Every Direction is a beautiful account of one man's confrontation with the histories, silences, and desires - both communal and private - that have made him who he is.

  • In stunning detail - both physical and emotional - Baconi traces a story of personal and communal alienation, longing, and liberation. Drawn here in beautiful, crushing clarity is an account of what systems of degradation, fear and theft can do to a person, a society, a world. That Baconi has managed to do all this in a memoir that still feels so firmly rooted in love is a marvel.

  • In a time when it can feel like language has been stripped of meaning and words have lost all power, Fire in Every Direction arrives as an affirmation and a refusal of silence . . . You do not read this book to repair your heart, you read this book to understand the fissures

  • In Fire in Every Direction, we not only see how the oppression of a people has affected one Palestinian family, but how oppression in all forms - colonialism, patriarchy, homophobia, to name a few - creates dishonesty and masks within all of us. Tareq Baconi offers us a love letter, a blueprint on how to craft a life that questions the present, dreaming a better future in the process

  • A powerful memoir of queer and Palestinian reckoning. Tareq Baconi creates "a gaze of our own" by bringing his open heart to a tough confrontation with histories both intimate and diasporic. An important contribution to our many literatures.

  • With passion, sincerity, and wit, Baconi writes about the world he grew up in, about a time and place long gone, revivified in these beautiful pages. Spending time with the real people in Fire in Every Direction is a delight. Read this book!

  • With eloquence, passion, and insight, Tareq Baconi weaves his personal story as a queer kid growing up in the refugee community in Jordan, into the larger narrative of his family's dislocation, and the Palestinian struggle. In so doing, he gives new meaning to the concept of liberation, personal and political. Fire in Every Direction is a primarily a love story: about how one learns to overcome loss - of a homeland, of a beloved - due to the interventions of authorities, be they parents or conquerors. It is a deeply inspiring and absorbing read, especially in these times.

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