Fire in Every Direction: Tareq Baconi's memoir of queer awakening, impossible love, and the long road back home

“I realised I was, in fact, and despite all performance to the contrary, an Arab man who was scared and filled with foreboding, with a force I had not realised was within me.”

These are the words of Tareq Baconi, who, in his latest memoir Fire in Every Direction, released on 12 February in the UK, recalls a pivotal moment in his life on the eve of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, when the carefully constructed image he had spent years building for himself began to unravel.

In the memoir, Tareq describes the flight he took that day from London, where he was a student, to Amman, where his family lived.

Returning home just before American and British forces unleashed devastation on neighbouring Iraq, he was confronted by a part of himself he had long tried to suppress: his Arab identity. He realised that the violence inflicted on his people would always erase the distance he had tried to create between himself and his roots.

Chronicling three generations of a Palestinian family in exile, the memoir situates Tareq’s personal story within a wider historical context. It is also an account of his journey toward self-understanding as a queer man and a Palestinian Arab — identities he had been taught could not coexist.

Drawing on a history marked by repeated displacement and loss, Tareq weaves a narrative that is both tender and urgent, exploring love, grief, and the search for belonging in a world intent on withholding it.

At the same time, Fire in Every Direction offers a close examination of culture and identity. Expansive yet intensely intimate, it explores how a society can demand the erasure of parts of oneself to gain acceptance — and the shame that follows when those demands are internalised. Underlying this exploration is a personal story of first love, which runs throughout the memoir.

Through a series of vignettes, three stories of displacement unfold almost in tandem: Scenes from his life in Amman, London, and Ramallah are accompanied by snapshots of his parents’ life in Beirut and their sudden departure to Jordan in 1975, as well as his grandmother’s escape from Haifa in 1948 — both in the wake of massacres committed by bloodthirsty paramilitaries.

By placing his story in the context of his family at every turn, he is reminding us that we can’t know him without also knowing where he comes from. The story of this individual Palestinian is, through his family’s history and his evolving and passionate relationship with his origins, also the story of Palestine.

Through other eyes 

Whether drawing on memory or recounting family stories, Tareq writes in striking detail. His younger self, his parents, and his grandmother are imbued with richly textured inner lives.

With academic rigour and fluid prose, he breathes life into these histories, grounding them in both humanity and humour, while drawing a continuous thread from their lives to ours today.

While most of the memoir documents past events, Tareq occasionally steps outside the narrative, transporting the reader to the desk from which he wrote. These intermissions offer a welcome break from often devastating stories and invite readers into his process of creating a coherent narrative.

Glimpses of self-doubt appear in these passages. You get the sense that Tareq is holding these stories up to the light, examining them, not yet fully settled on a word or phrase. Whether intentional or not, this approach makes the memoir feel alive, with the reader participating in its creation.

“It had taken no time. I had become Arabia,” Tareq writes. 

Growing up in Amman, he describes years spent repressing his queerness, first subconsciously and later deliberately. When he moves to London for university, he attempts to shed his Arab identity, having experienced it since childhood as a compulsory denial of self.

As a child, he first discovers himself through the eyes of others. He recalls adults’ knowing shrugs when he insisted on buying a doll, or the confused look when he wore a flowy silk blouse to a family event. Vivid schoolyard scenes depict a battlefield where bullies recognised something in him that he could not name, something he believed invisible.

Breaking free from the past

In the first two decades of his life, Tareq repeatedly learns a painful lesson: the image he thinks he projects and the space he hopes to carve out for himself matter little when it comes to how others perceive him.

And, bubbling beneath the surface is always the self he feels compelled to suppress, impatiently demanding recognition. No matter how hard he prays for absolution, how diligently he studies, or how forcefully he criticises other Arabs, it asserts itself. To his friends, he remains 'Arabia'.

Before his move to London, Tareq’s life is taken over by an infatuation with his straight best friend and schoolyard saviour. Growing gradually throughout his formative years, this love — and the lives it touches — erupts when he is 17. In its destructive wake, the revelation shatters both the friendship and any semblance of stability or security he felt at home.

“In his wake was a blackness so complete that I failed to see his outstretched hand,” Tareq explains. 

The dissonance between his response and his friend’s is stark and painful. While the friend appears desperate to preserve the relationship, Tareq detaches with clinical precision, deeming its demise inevitable. The shame, accumulated over the years, distorts his reality and prevents reconciliation.

This first love haunts him throughout the memoir. Its shadow falls over every story he tells, from his academic journey back to Palestine (both intellectually and physically), to his work across continents, and the relationships he forms as he grows into himself and his queerness.

In the UK and Australia, Tareq describes moments when he begins to release this past relationship’s grip, gradually freeing himself from the shame it etched within his soul.

These passages, in which he begins to mend his relationship to his past, are deeply cathartic. By telling an unapologetically Palestinian and unflinchingly queer story, Tareq complicates the diasporic Palestinian narrative and breathes fresh life into it, painting a portrait of a dignified life — a life worth living.

Hani B is a Palestinian writer and nonprofit worker based in the United States