Join the Center for Palestine Studies for a conversation with Tareq Baconi and Camille Robcis about Baconi’s new memoir, Fire in Every Direction.

Both a love story and a coming-of-age tale that spans countries and continents, Fire in Every Direction balances humor and loss, nostalgia and hope, as it takes us from the Middle East to London, and from 1948 to the present. Tareq Baconi crafts a deeply intimate, unforgettable portrait of how a political consciousness—desire and resistance—is passed down through generations.

In 1948, Tareq’s grandmother, Eva, would flee Haifa as Zionist militias seized the city. In the late 1970s, she would flee Beirut with her daughter, Rima, as the country was in the throes of a civil war. In Amman, the family would eventually obtain the comfort of middle-class life—still, a young Tareq would feel trapped: by cultures of silence, by a sense of not belonging, by his own growing awareness that he is in love with his childhood best friend, Ramzi.

After relocating to London for college, Tareq hopes to put aside his past, and begins to work through an understanding of self as a queer man. Yet as the Iraq War radicalizes young people around the world towards anti-war protest, history comes back to him: hushed whispers overheard, stories of his mother’s years as an activist in Beirut and her return to Palestine during a moment of calm.

Living between the region and London, Tareq fits in neither and feels alienated from both. Queerness is policed back in Amman, just as his Palestinian-ness is abroad. These gradual estrangements escalate, forcing him to grapple with what it means to live in liminal spaces, and rethink the meaning of home. Eventually, tracing the journey of his family before him, Tareq returns to Palestine.

This is an account of finding oneself through histories of dispossession and reclaiming what has been silenced.

Tareq Baconi is a Palestinian writer, scholar, and activist. He is the grandson of refugees from Jerusalem and Haifa and grew up between Amman and Beirut. His work has appeared in, among others, The New York Times and TheBaffler, and he contributes essays to The New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. He has also written for film; his award-winning BFI short One Like Him, a queer love story set in Jordan, screened in over thirty festivals. He is the author of Hamas Contained: A History of Palestinian Resistance, which was shortlisted for the Palestine Book Award, and Fire in Every Direction.

Camille Robcis is Professor of French and History at Columbia University.  She specializes in Modern European History with an emphasis on gender and sexuality, France, and intellectual, cultural, and legal history.  She is the author of The Law of Kinship: Anthropology, Psychoanalysis, and the Family in France (2013) and of Disalienation: Politics, Philosophy, and Radical Psychiatry in Postwar France (2021).  Her new book titled The War on Gender will be coming out with Princeton University Press next year.  Read more.

Rashid Khalidi will deliver the Fall 2025 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture titled “This is Not War.”
More details to come.

Advance registration is mandatory for this event, and each person must have their own registration and email address. Registration doesn't guarantee a seat, and we suggest you arrive early to guarantee your spot.

Rashid Khalidi is the Edward Said Professor Emeritus of Modern Arab Studies at Columbia University. He received a BA from Yale University in 1970 and a DPhil from Oxford University in 1974, and has taught at the Lebanese University, the American University of Beirut, and the University of Chicago. He was President of the Middle East Studies Association, and was co-editor of the Journal of Palestine Studies. He served as an advisor to the Palestinian delegation to the Madrid and Washington Arab-Israeli peace negotiations from October 1991 until June 1993.

Lisa Anderson (moderator) is the Special Lecturer and James T. Shotwell Professor Emerita of International Relations at the Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Dr. Anderson served as Provost and then President of the American University in Cairo between 2008 and 2016. She is Dean Emerita of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia, where she led the school from 1997-2007. She was on the faculty of Columbia since 1986; she also taught at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School and in the Government and Social Studies departments at Harvard University. She is a trustee of the Aga Khan University and member emerita of the Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch; she also served as President of the Middle East Studies Association and as Chair of the Board of the Social Science Research Council.

The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture is given in honor of the public intellectual and literary critic, Edward W. Said, who taught in the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia from 1963 until 2003. University Professor Said was perhaps best known for his books Orientalism, published in 1978, and Culture and Imperialism, published in 1993, both of which made major contributions to the field of cultural and postcolonial studies. The Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture, organized by the Society of Fellows and Heyman Center for the Humanities, pays tribute to University Professor Said by bringing to Columbia speakers who embody his beliefs and the legacy of his work.