"Seven decades after Tareq Baconi's grandmother fled in terror from the port city of Haifa, carrying a Bible, a crucifix and a week's worth of clothes, he followed her directions to the family home a few blocks from the sea. The building was still standing, almost as she had left it in 1948, instantly familiar from childhood stories. Standing beside his husband, Baconi could not bring himself to ring the bell,"
"to find out who was living in the rooms that held Eva's childhood memories. I want to imagine it empty, loyal, waiting for our return. I want it to exist outside of time, as if everything stopped that April, he writes in his memoir. Simply finding the house was the physical connection he sought between her past and his inheritance of memories. I have finally bent time, held her history in my present."
Seventy years after his grandmother fled Haifa, Tareq Baconi locates the family home near the sea, sensing continuity with her memories. He resists disturbing current occupants and imagines the house frozen in April 1948. The family’s trajectory from Haifa to Beirut to Amman reflects generational flight, dispossession, and life as refugees in Jordan. Baconi’s personal journey continues to London, where his first love unfolds alongside the inheritance of memory. The story intertwines intimate queer love with political displacement, conveying the struggle to recognize and reconcile Palestinian identity with queer identity amid personal and political repression.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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