“I had always placed my queer identity and my Palestinian identity in different buckets,” admits writer Tareq Baconi. This changed when he began writing his memoir, Fire in Every Direction, a first-person account of young Tareq, a Palestinian boy living in Jordan and gradually coming to terms with his sexuality.
“Through the writing of this book, and as I became more involved in Palestine organizing, I realized that this separation is obviously a false separation,” Baconi says. “Not only that, I began to understand that I came to Palestine through a queer lens, and specifically through my experience of identifying as queer in Jordan, sort of breaking apart or resisting these hegemonic structures that are placed on us.”
Fire in Every Direction is Baconi’s second book, and it is a surprising pivot. His first book, Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance, was a scholarly work rather than a personal and intimate reflection. The memoir positions coming out as gay and coming out as Palestinian as deeply connected journeys. Along the way, it also reframes and expands the “coming out” trope, the moment when an individual discloses their queer orientation. Queer coming of age stories often position the “coming out” as a triumphant finale, but Baconi’s book instead focuses on the long road ahead for a gay Arab man, showing that the Westernized coming out framing is not one-size-fits-all and requires recalibration, depending on the culture one belongs to.
Fire in Every Direction is a unique and timely book, published at a time when settler colonial violence in Palestine refuses to abate. “It’s heightened in this moment of genocide, when you understand actually that what’s happening in Gaza is because decolonization of the globe or pushing back against empire and colonialism in the West is unfinished business,” he says.
By embracing and embodying the intersections between queer and Palestinian identity, Baconi’s memoir offers a true path to decolonial and liberatory futures.
Further reading:
—Fire in Every Direction by Tareq Baconi: https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Fire-in-Every-Direction/Tareq-Baconi/9781668068564
—Hamas Contained:The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance by Tareq Baconi
https://www.sup.org/books/middle-east-studies/hamas-contained
