“Every generation in my family fled their homes,” notes Tareq Baconi in his memoir Fire in Every Direction. “What right do I have to speak of flight? I have survived no wars. My scars are invisible, my movement privileged ... It is the journey of gradual estrangement, of alienations that I am trying to convey. The feeling of not belonging ... The conviction that one must remain hidden to live.”
As Baconi’s writing makes clear, there are many ways to be exiled.
His family are Palestinian, his grandmother forced from her family home in Haifa in 1948 during what Palestinians call the Nakba, or “catastrophe”; then again from Beirut, with his parents, when war broke out there. The family settles in the Jordanian capital Amman, a city where so many from the region “anchor down and wait for calmer seas”.
But this is a place where “3eib” – or shame – controls people’s behaviour: it creates a “bitterness ... in those around me who are also cowed by our watchful societies; who barter the vastness of their dreams for the confines dictated by others; who limit their aspirations for fear of destabilising small and petty souls.”
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He is facing a very personal kind of exile. As a queer man in a society which does not accept this, he details his struggles and efforts at changing himself; the visit to a therapist who encourages him to reject his identity; his first effort at coming out to his parents, aged 17, and then another, this time with confidence.
His family are somewhat privileged in that they are Christian, which brings them preferential treatment in Lebanon and perhaps in Jordan. Visas do not seem to be an impossibility for them, as they are for so many others, and Baconi leaves as a teenager to study in the UK – where his parents had spent time before him – and Australia.
A process of reimagining who he is begins, growing “into the absences that had haunted my life”, learning what he appreciates about where he comes from; reckoning with the politics lying under it all; understanding how to accept and love himself.
“There are things to be said. I just need to learn how to say them,” he remembers telling university friends in London after the US invasion of Iraq. In this memoir – intensely intimate, sometimes upsetting and often moving – one feels that he has finally been able to do that.
Sally Hayden is an Irish Times journalist and author of My Fourth Time, We Drowned and This is Also a Love Story’ (June 2026)
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