VENUE
Faculty House, Columbia University
411 West 116th Street, Wien Gate
Directions

Join us for a presentation by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Mosab Abu Toha, followed by a conversation between Abu Toha and prize-winning writer and translator, Yasmine Seale. Introductory remarks by Nadia Abu El-Haj, the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Anthropology and Co-Director of the Center for Palestine Studies. 

Coat check will be available for coats and bags; Light refreshments will be served.

Book signing to follow. Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear (2022) and Forest of Noise (2024) by Abu Toha will be available for purchase.

This event is open to CUID holders.
Registration is Required.

SPEAKER

DISCUSSANT

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS

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.