"FADEL: So in your book, you start with unpacking a yellow box full of letters from a childhood friend named Ramzi. Who was he to you? BACONI: Well, Ramzi was the first boy that I fell in love with, and we were each other's - in some ways, I mean, it's funny to say that because we were neighbors but also pen pals because we used to write each other letters the whole time that we knew each other."
"BACONI: Well, I mean, the mask was also something that protected me in the sense that I was afraid of what it would mean to acknowledge these feelings, and the mask would help me pretend that everything was as it should be. And that was sort of increasingly unsustainable until I teased the mask off a bit and tried to write to him about my feelings, and the reaction was swift and brutal, and that was the last time we spoke."
A grandmother flees Palestine as a child on a fisherman's boat. A family is uprooted from Lebanon after a massacre of refugees. A boy grows up in Amman, Jordan, inside a culture of silence and the Arabic concept of ayb (shame). A childhood friendship becomes first love, sustained through letters, then ends after a confession provokes a swift, brutal reaction. The experience of wearing a mask protected the individual but became increasingly unsustainable. Three generations of displacement are traced, showing how queer identity intertwines with familial trauma and how political consciousness forms from personal and collective histories.
Read at www.npr.org
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