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To go from writing an academic thesis about a terrorist organisation to writing a memoir about growing up Palestinian in Lebanon as a queer Christian is a fair leap. Author Tareq Baconi says the academic writing is important but “sometimes it’s stifling”.
“It was liberating and it was cathartic to do this work and to turn the gaze inwards,” he says down the line from London ahead of appearances at the Melbourne and Sydney writers’ festivals this month. He is excited to return to Australia, having spent a year in Sydney in 2004 as part of his university studies, to discuss his memoir Fire in Every Direction.
The book tells the story of two boys growing up in Jordan and is in partly based on the letters they sent each other over many years.
Baconi says that early on it was written as a letter addressed to this young lover, but as time went on, it expanded. “They’re Palestinian boys sitting in Jordan and you’re asking, why are they in Jordan? Who are their parents, who are their grandparents?
“Very quickly, it expands beyond that and becomes a book about my family history,” he says.
Born in Jordan, Baconi spends his time between New York and London; he is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books, and his award-winning British Film Institute short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, has screened in 30 festivals.
Silence is a recurring theme in the memoir, on many levels. “There was a part of me that thought, I wish I had these words when I was growing up. Growing up in the silences that surrounded me was oppressive, as I talk about in the book; it’s not just queerness, it’s also other silences, political or social.”
Baconi felt he had to “push back against those silences and to make space for certain narratives that would have helped me”.
“Especially in the region, there’s this idea of airing dirty laundry, you don’t talk about these things in public. These things are private and so there was a lot of that I had to contend with,” he says.
“Even personally, I’m quite a private person, so the idea that I would narrate this publicly but also publish it and stand behind it was difficult for me. I really resisted the idea that I was writing a memoir for a long time. I thought that I was writing the story of this love story between these two boys.”
Baconi says he also grappled with publishing the book at a time when Gaza was being razed. “It felt so navel-gazing to have a personal story come out when there’s such collective suffering ... I would have never imagined my book coming out in this kind of world, and so it was a very, very unsettling thing for me to contend with,” he says. “And I kept feeling that it was not just the publishing of the book, but everything around it. It was obscene that life was going on, the suffering that we could see on our phones.”
Even so, what is happening in Palestine isn’t a story that began on October 7, 2023, with Hamas’ attack on Israel, he says: “There are generations of oppression and racism.” The rise of the terrorist organisation is the focus of his first book, Hamas Contained: a history of Palestinian Resistance.
Like many displaced people, Baconi says he never quite feels like he belongs. London is home in some ways, also Beirut, Amman, New York and Cape Town. “I feel this constant sense of dislocation, that I’m not actually quite where I’m from or where I’m meant to be. It took me a long time to understand this feeling of constantly being unsettled, or feeling like you’re searching for something, that you’re never quite arriving to where you should be arriving. Having a queer identity helps me relate to that because it feels like queerness is similar to that. It is constantly existing outside of the norms, or outside sort of places of respectability. You’re sort of always in the margins. You’re always in liminal spaces.”
Due out in November, Baconi’s next book is called What Now: On Palestine, Freedom, and Our Global Future. From the micro-experiences of his personal life growing up that appear in his memoir, he will swap back to the overarching macro-view to tackle the million-dollar question of what is next for the land of his ancestors.
Tareq Baconi appears at Melbourne Writers Festival on Saturday, May 9 and Sydney Writers’ Festival on May 23 and 24.
The Age is a Melbourne Writers Festival partner.
