FIRE IN EVERY DIRECTION

A Palestinian author’s coming-of-age journey as an emerging queer individual.

Middle Eastern political analyst and activist Baconi gracefully recounts his childhood in Amman, Jordan, surrounded by his parents, who fled there to escape civil war in Lebanon, and older and younger brothers, Laith and Nadim. His grandparents were refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa, and together they formed a close-knit family united by love, honor, and tradition. The author fills his memoir with affectionate recollections of his upbringing in the family’s stone house, rich histories of his relatives, summers in Beirut, and his own journey into manhood and the awakening of his queer identity. It was his boyhood best-friendship with Ramzi that proved formative to his emerging identity as he struggled to discern “where envy ends and infatuation begins.” Inside the worn, yellow box Baconi writes fondly of, he has kept family diaries and correspondence from Ramzi—some merely scraps of paper with brief messages—as their relationship deepened into obsession and unrequited love. Though he achieved some semblance of freedom after sojourns in London and Australia and after efforts to relinquish his Arabic language and heritage for Western cultural norms, none of that quelled his belief that his queerness was the source of his “outsider” feelings no matter where he ventured. It would take many more years (and the Iraq War) for the author to truly discover the self-confidence and belonging he so desperately craved. Baconi eventually returns to quickly visit the northwestern Israeli homelands of his extended family, experiencing the deterioration from war and occupation, and to develop an appreciation for his own internal evolution. In prose that’s sincere and passionate, he weaves a tapestry of familial strife, burgeoning queerness, and enduring love amid joys of defying the former “impossibility” of his sexuality to find wholeness and home as an adult in order to “retrace my past, make sense of my present.”

A heartfelt reflection on family and freedom against the backdrop of a war-torn homeland.