Resisting Palestinian Erasure in an Age of Genocide

What makes for continuity in displacement? What makes a life within the disruptions of war? Memoirs and witness accounts that trace the interstices of geopolitical upheavals — meals  being served, relationships formed, weddings, births celebrated, and funerals mourned — suggest a particular trajectory of cultural practice magnified in times of precarity. Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction is a memoir that resists erasure and is shaped by the layered concerns of an upbringing that spans countries and historical moments. Born in Jordan to Christian Palestinians whose own parents fled Haifa and Jerusalem, and who themselves then fled Beirut during Lebanon’s civil war, Baconi’s formative influences probe major political events as they shape the imagination of a queer, bookish child.

Key to Baconi’s coming-of-age narrative is the centrality of memory itself. The book begins with a yellow box, described as “worn, its corners collapsing.” An apt metaphor for the past, this box is “crushed under the weight of travel — Amman, London, Sydney, Beirut, Ramallah.” But it is also a gift. High school friends gave it to Baconi upon his graduation, and it is home to old journals, photographs, correspondences (particularly from a friend called Ramzi), the diaries of Baconi’s maternal grandmother, Tata Eva, even an old packet of chewing gum, and “two cigarettes and a bullet.” 

A container, or as Baconi notes, an archive like Pandora’s box, is a portal and an organizing trope in the memoir. There is as much emotional chaos unleashed within its contents as there is evidence of what has preserved life — and love, family connections, and eros. Its contents attest to what remains precious in the vagaries of movement and dispossession. 

Fundamental to the work of retrieving and structuring the agency of the past is the act of writing itself, a return throughout the book to the yellow box that provides the crumbs meant to lead the seeker, like Hansel and Gretel, out of the forest. But for Baconi, like those children looking for lost crumbs, the journey through the archive becomes one of disappearing markers as much as newly visible ones. It is, in part, a process of putting back together the many shattered and shattering parts of what it means to be part of the Palestinian diaspora.

Still, it is not just that diaspora, as the gathering of multiple narratives suggests that any scattering, as the noun’s Greek root defines it, is one in which discoveries and reconfigurations of home and belonging are as much the product of chance and luck as they are the result of more predictable and conventional qualities of privilege and circumstance. “Neither exile nor home could ever offer shelter from heartbreak or the senseless violence of war,” writes Baconi. 

What, then, constitutes “shelter” and how is it built in the midst of near continuous change? For the young Baconi, it is built of a childhood immersed in books and a gradual and contested sense of sexual and emotional difference. It is built of family, of his father and brothers, but particularly the lineages of women from Baconi’s two grandmothers to Rima, Baconi’s mother, and his childhood friend Ramzi who he becomes physically attracted to and falls in love with. And, crucially, it is built of storytelling itself, of the shelter language creates and preserves within narrative. 

Baconi’s narrative is not chronologically sequential,. Memory, after all, eludes conventional hierarchies, abiding rather to the associative and subjective experiences that mark a life. 

The past’s immediacy is present everywhere in the memoir. Baconi’s mother, Rima, his Tatas. Perhaps most centrally, that immediacy of the past shrouds the figure of Ramzi, the childhood friend, the first male Baconi found himself attracted to. As Baconi presses forward through the book, no one fades away. Readers follow his recollections, moving between the formative figures of his life, and trail the continued presence of memory.

In this sense, memory is not so much recalled as relived and re-presenced. “Tata’s friend Jalileh had fortuitously become her neighbor in Beirut after the 1948 Nakba, and then again came to live a few minutes away after both relocated to Amman,” he writes. Elsewhere, he returns the reader to al-Abdali: “The Tatas in al-Abdali visited each other  daily, going to this one’s garden or that one’s balcony. They are in our house today … drinking Arabic coffee with cardamom and gossiping.” 

In an interview with the poet, novelist, and memoirist Hala Alyan, Mahogany L. Browne asks: “How does memoir change when the writer is carrying a collective history — including family, diaspora, occupation, inheritance — inside a singular voice. How does memoir change the I?” Alyan, a Palestinian American writer, answers: “I is always creating everything that comes with the I. The context of the I, the systems of the I, the ancestors of the I, what comes after the I.” 

Perhaps this polyvalence of voices is a central structuring feature of memoirs that come of upheaval. Such stories, both experienced in specific locations as much as read and passed down, are very literally made of shards, fragments of inheritance, and anecdotes that have survived and continue to construct and feed into the I.

I also think of Tarek El-Ariss’s Water on Fire, a Memoir of War, which chronicles war’s legacies and similarly probes the Lebanese civil war, although in this case, it is the focus of an upbringing in its midst. What the two memoirs have in common, besides shared cultural and geographical reference points — and the mention of “fire” in both titles — is an aesthetic of permeability, a porousness that relates to the ways each author invites in a spectrum of people: relatives, strangers, friends, and acquaintances, as much as geographies, that come to bear on their identities. Like Baconi, El-Ariss is bookish, and like Baconi, the world of books and their characters shaped his imagination.  El-Ariss writes, “Other voices came calling as well. They sent me messages in bottles, promising to rescue me from the island where I had barricaded myself with Zola, Duras, and Voltaire. They had come to take me to other shores where I would be free, completely free.” This wager, and necessity, of freedom presents itself in both books as an emotional and physical journey toward possibility — toward what might liberate both their singularity and queer sensibilities within the framework of traditional, patriarchal upbringings.

As El Ariss puts it, “Impossible departures and shattered bonds create a community of strangers who find each other along the way.” He will leave Beirut for Abidjan, where he will live with his brother’s young family, the city of West Africa’s “miracle” on the Cote d’Ivoire (or, Ivory Coast). 

Here as with Baconi, who also moves, as they both eventually journey westward — Baconi to London, and El-Ariss to New York — the quest is one that encompasses fragmented and disparate shards that add up to new constructions of themselves. As El-Ariss writes, “While most of the people I met at college were getting ready to benefit from Lebanon’s reconstruction industry, the weirdos who flocked to the she-devil were looking to stare down the abyss that was opening up within them.” Whether “weird” or “queer” both El-Ariss and Baconi assemble the fragments of dispossession into a kind of cosmopolitanism of belonging. 

During a panel at the 2026 Emirates Literature Festival — which included El-Ariss, the Iranian American poet Marjorie Lotfi, and the Gazan journalist Plestia Alaqad — the moderator asked how each would define belonging. El-Ariss noted an inherent “cruelty to the idea that one must choose a single place.” For him, for example, the presence of the sea evoked a sense of belonging wherever he encountered it.

There is ultimately no “return” to any place of origin as those places have either been fundamentally changed or lost, but rather in the phrase of the essayist Sarah Manguso, there is ongoingness; private geographies intersect with physical geographies and existing realities embody belonging as an assemblage. It is the word Hala Alyan chooses when asked what verb she would “most want to leave behind.” She begins by saying that she wants people to realize that “there’s a lot you can do with a fragment,” and I remember Baconi’s yellow box again, particularly the saved packet of gum, and the bullet. Alyan concludes with, “I think my verb would be … assembling… We do a lot of breaking apart and we do a lot of … assembling.” 

Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction, as with Tarek El-Ariss’ Water on Fire, is an assemblage of belongings, a poignant telling of a life that pushes back on multiple erasures.

Tareq Baconi’s Fire in Every Direction: A Memoir was published by Washington Square Books in November 2025 and will be released in paperback in December 2026. It is available for order here.