Fire in Every Direction

'I am forever changed after reading this book'
Javier Zamora, author of Solito

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

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.

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. By reading this beautifully honest memoir, we can learn to shed what must be shed in order to regain an allegiance toward justice, toward freedom, toward a liberation for all. Baconi has shown me that revolutions begin in the self; I am forever changed after reading this book
In this moving and generous 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.

Tareq Baconi serves as the president of the board of Al-Shabaka, was the former senior analyst for Israel/Palestine and Economics of Conflict at the International Crisis Group, based in Ramallah, and is the author of Hamas Contained: The Rise and Pacification of Palestinian Resistance (Stanford University Press, 2018). His writing has appeared in the London Review of Books, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, among others, and he is a frequent commentator in regional and international media.

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