Fire from Shadows: Tareq Baconi’s Memoir

Now that the current US administration has taken us to a whole new dimension of global chaos—where even a nominal respect for treaties among sovereign nations is consigned to mass detention centers—why the hell should anybody bother to read one more personal memoir? OK, this one is by a queer Palestinian; that’s significant. But this guy is a young, established author. A scholar, in fact, who lives in relative safety in London—not in Palestine, where, queer or not, his life would be hourly extinguishable; or in the United States, where he’d need to worry about getting sucked up by ICE. So, why should anybody care that Tareq Baconi wrote an account of his gay life, called Fire in Every Direction, when the world itself is on fire?

Because it’s always a big deal when anybody, however privileged or oppressed, is able to speak their truth. That’s a hard thing to do. And when you are able to hear someone’s truth, that clears a small path for your own fire; it opens up a bit of freedom amid the chaos, maybe even hope for making change.

In the chaotic larger world, Tareq Baconi has been an impressive overachiever. His academic degrees include a Master of Philosophy from the University of Cambridge, and a Ph.D. from London’s King’s College, both in International Relations and Affairs. In 2018, he published Hamas Contained, an important contribution to the history of Palestinian resistance, and he’s currently president of the board of Al-Shabaka: The Palestinian Policy Network. But does it matter that a gay man is responsible for all this? Given the hatred, fear, and soul-shaping isolation that Tareq endured as a kid, in love with his best friend, it kind of does.

The memoir begins with the adult Tareq’s discovery of a trove of schoolboy letters from Ramzi, the friend who was once closer than a brother to Tareq. The letters reflect years of Ramzi’s loving, unguarded confidences about life and girls and school, oblivious to the possibility that he and Tareq could be anything other than two regular dudes who enjoy hanging out together. The letters also remind Tareq of his life as a child growing up in Jordan, the second of three sons of Palestinian refugees from Haifa.

“We lived in a stone house in al-Abdali,” Tareq remembers, “on the seam between East and West Amman, where my parents landed after fleeing the civil war in Lebanon.” Here, in Amman, foreigners are allowed to prosper, as long as they avoid getting political, especially about Palestine.

Tareq’s mother, Rima, is the inspiration for the book’s title, Fire in Every Direction. Rima was a formidable pro-Palestine activist at the American University of Beirut, until her final year in 1975, when, during Lebanon’s civil war,her activist comrade, Mona, was murdered along with her family in their refugee camp by right-wing Phalangists. Seeing that she would be next, Rima marries Fadi, a fellow student and beloved friend, and they leave for Amman, where she will  spend years learning to control her fiery rebellion. With them comes Rima’s mother, Eva, carrying her own memories of fleeing Haifa during the Nakba, decades before. The boy Tareq will grow up knowing these three quietly extraordinary people simply as Mama, Baba, and Tata.

Amman is much less volatile and interesting than Beirut, but it at least allows the Baconi family to get off to a conventional, almost middle-class start. Their Christianity entitles them to live in an actual house, outside nearby Palestinian refugee camps. Baba works hard, makes a good life for his family, who revere him. He frequently calls his sons around him to remind them that they are fighters: “I am raising tough men,” he declares, men who “protect what is right: one’s beliefs and the honor of one’s family.”

But, from the time he became conscious, Tareq knew that he was different. His being super-smart in school lifts some of the macho-fighter expectations, but only some. When he is maybe five, Tareq remembers going with his mother and older brother Laith to shop at the open-air market. Wait! Lo and behold, sparkling out in front of a shopkeeper’s stall, is a row of enchanting figurines—gorgeous dollies dressed in hoopskirts and beaded gowns and tiaras—Oh, the beauty!

Smitten, Tareq begs his mother for a doll—the orange and brown one! Although she and the shopkeeper try to distract him, Tareq’s whining eventually forces Mama to cave. The doll is his! Tareq cradles his “precious companion, her small plastic hand in mine, fretting that her outfit might be crushed by the crowd.” But on the way home, he notices his mother and brother looking at him in a way that would become “intimately familiar.” A gaze, “not unsettling enough to upset, but not so innocuous as to be forgotten, either.”

At school, these familiar looks grow menacing. Tareq begins to identify them as “darting shadows,” as his life becomes clotted by self-loathing called up by his classmates’ “mocking stares … eyes filled with disgust. … Kind eyes averted.” Soon, the darting shadows find him everywhere, escalating into terror. “You fucking faggot,” the school bully Mustapha sneers,

“You don’t know how to answer me? Let me show you. You hold your hand up like this” he says, as he puts one hand on his hip… and holds the other up so that his wrist flops over, “and you say, Yes, of course, whatever you say” … He says this in a high-pitched voice that makes my ears heat up and my temples throb so loudly I almost do not hear the shrieking laughter from the boys around me. Do they not know that I, too, find these gestures monstrous?

One of Tareq’s tormentors is Ramzi—who, one day, for some reason, simply laughs off Mustapha’s strutting bullshit, seeming to recognize Tareq as a smart, interesting kid, whom he might actually want to know. So begin years of a deepening friendship, in which Ramzi becomes an almost literal part of Tareq’s family. The boys talk about anything, everything—almost. Secretly, Tareq despises that part of himself that desires his beautiful friend. Finally, in their late teens, Tareq reveals his attraction to Ramzi, who, appalled, allows his family to end their friendship.

Sensing that the only way out of this agony is the truth, Tareq, in terror, reveals to his father that he is attracted to boys. But Baba laughs it off as a phase. At your age, he says, “You have hormones swimming all over your body. You get turned on by trees.” Eventually, his mother comes to accept Tareq’s queerness and, in an effort to get Baba to accept it, too, she slips a sedative into her husband’s coffee, just before Tareq declares, unequivocally, that this is not a phase. Baba answers, “I wish you had the decency to let me die not knowing you were like this.”

Since the truth in Amman only gets him so far, Tareq accepts an offer to pursue a degree in engineering and moves to London. Some of the darting shadows about his sexuality follow him here—but, surprisingly, they are also about Palestine. “I learn I had been living in another kind of shadow, another kind of silence,” Tareq writes. “Palestine was present all around us in Amman, but was she really seen? She was everywhere and nowhere all at once.”

During this time of the Second Intifada, of 9/11, and the Bush Administration’s subsequent “war on terror,” Tareq comes into a new political consciousness. He also notices that the Western world’s professional elite seem to view US-generated military destruction with a kind of disinterested professionalism. Shaken by preparations for war on Iraq, Tareq feels he must go home to Amman and, against his family’s advice, takes the last plane out. There, in midair, he finds himself on a “commuter route to a war zone,” amid a flight of reporters, employed by career-enhancing news outlets, eager to cover the obliteration that is about to happen. Anticipating the bombings that would demolish Baghdad, “a city that had only existed in my mind as one of the revered centers of Arab intellectual and cultural life,” Tareq shuts his eyes and thinks “of the millions of families, like mine … and I began praying to a God I hadn’t spoken to in years, appealing to him to have mercy on Iraqis that night.

Over the years, Tareq’s queerness plays a large part in his he studies of cultures and lives. Once, on a business trip to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, Tareq walks aimlessly through the city, past shops and cafes. He comes to the Ministry for the Propagation of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, an imposing white structure dedicated to social control. Tareq sits in the courtyard, where beheadings and lashings take place, watches ordinary people on their errands, and asks himself, “Who gets to walk on those streets, and who gets excised from them?” His coworkers, mostly Westerners, show up at some of the public trials, “feeding their orientalist fantasies of Eastern savagery,” but Tareq has not joined them. “[T]he site haunted me, not because of its barbarism, but because of how viscerally I understood it. It was the natural extension, the logical culmination, of the darting shadows.”

Nothing is more important than going to Palestine, where Tareq discovers resistance. He lives for two years in Ramallah with Aida, an older Palestinian woman, who becomes his de facto Tata—a “Tata of the revolution … one of our maternal giants.” They spend hours talking. “Her face would light up every time she talked about the First Intifada, how her daughters were out on the front line…” And he begins to write again to Ramzi, now only a specter in his memory. Realizing the importance of his queerness, Tareq tells his old friend “That I did, with time, grow up to be the fighter Baba had wanted me to be…”

Later, closer to literal home, Tareq is able to locate the house in Haifa where his Tata grew up. But he cannot bring himself to knock on the door, unable to bear the prospect of finding an Israeli family who “believes it has a right to be there, or worse, a kind family that acknowledges this past, and then offers us a drink in my home.

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Back in our chaotic, Trumped-up world, Tareq Baconi, during an interview for Democracy Now, told Nermeen Shaikh that writing this memoir “was either the stupidest or the bravest thing I’ve done.” The  liberation of Palestine, he continued, contains everything. “Obviously, it’s about dismantling Zionism, but it’s also dismantling the patriarchy and homophobia and other forms of social oppression.”

I only wish he’d thrown in capitalism, that profiteering, fetishizing engine that drives and shapes social oppressions. That one poignant omission of capitalism—also from his memoir—is the only thing that prevents me from bestowing upon Tareq Baconi the venerable title of Commie Fag. I also wish Tareq had mentioned queer Palestinian resistance—the organization al Qaws, for example—or pinkwashing, the odious Israeli practice that exalts Israel’s tolerance for LGBTIA+ people, while weaponizing alleged Palestinian homophobia as another excuse for genocide.

But I have no desire to call up more darting shadows with a political checklist. The truth is that, queer or not, our pain—our abjection—if dealt with honestly, can be a site of empowerment. Speaking of Gaza, geopolitically, and of us, geo-personally, Tareq Baconi writes that abjection is revolutionary:

It is precisely Gaza’s abjection that makes it the site of revolution… 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.

Take that, darting shadows.

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