Tareq Baconi’s Search for Liberation

And yet Baconi does not allow himself the pat comparison of likening his move to London—that is, his escape after coming out and realizing that he will not be able to become who he wants to be, should he stay—to forced migration. Mapping the twists and turns of his self-analysis, he writes: “It is easy for me to claim flight as my rite of passage, a completion of our lineage, joining millions of others in making homes for themselves in strange lands. But Ramzi’s eyes rest on me as I type these words, his admonishment burns into my back, calling on me to confront the hypocrisies, the lies we tell ourselves.” With time, the memory of Ramzi has grown into a fact-checker who refuses to let Baconi wallow in self-pity. Ramzi is “correct,” Baconi reflects: “What right do I have to speak of flight? I have survived no wars. My scars are invisible, my movement privileged.” Once a source of rejection, Ramzi now functions as the measure of Baconi’s analytic rigor, as the faculties he uses to make sense of the world in his political writing and scholarship are aimed at himself in this book. Baconi finally settles on the word “estrangement” to describe the alienation he was experiencing as a teen.

It is the journey of gradual estrangement, of alienation, that I am trying to convey. The feeling of not belonging that came to permeate my days. The conviction that one must remain hidden to live. Masked, covered. The inner bifurcation, the double consciousness. The exile of the authentic self.

Though many might read this young gay’s man leaving for London as an act of self-preservation, Baconi likens his pursuit of personal liberty and independence to addiction: “What I am thinking of is closer to the flight from reality that members of addiction groups invoke: the compulsion to exit one’s truth by creating an alternate one. The succumbing to the allure of a new beginning that becomes irresistible, almost existential, with time, making escape inevitable.” The metaphor is a strange one: It could be read as belittling his own experience; or perhaps, alternatively, as putting his experience into perspective, refusing to allow his individual pain to upstage his people’s. It also captures the urgency of the need to get away.

Despite pulling away from the comparison between his family’s exile from their homeland and his own estrangement from his sexuality, Baconi circles back to this comparison, coming to see both in terms of the human quest for “a dignified life.” “That is my individual flight,” he goes on, “my walking away from that deathly disquiet that was sucking the life out of me. Not exile, then, but estrangement into a world that I hoped would provide a dignified life, one worth living.” His is a story of self-determination, as an individual and a people. The two are inextricably intertwined in the memoir, a radical move in the context of a war in which LGBTQ rights are often used as a cudgel to vilify Palestinian culture.