Diary of a Brazilian immigrant in Portugal
When deciding to move to another country, a friend wrote: “May Portugal bring you what you are looking for, even if you still don’t know what it is. When faced with the end of the search, he will know how to recognize it”.
I remembered this because my landing on Portuguese soil completes four years, coincidentally, in the same week that December 18th, International Migrants Day, is celebrated. That’s how nostalgia, common at the end of the year, visited me to reflect on what this experience has been, as seductive as it is terrifying.
Today I recognize that I underestimated her.
Having lived in several cities in Brazil, where I came from, I thought it would be just one more change among many others. A complete mistake. Giving up our homeland has something that rips a piece out of the chest that is inherent in the formation of one’s own identity. It is the collapse of social codes that constituted, until then, the way they learned to speak, think, act, feel and this happens in such an overwhelming way that it is difficult to deal with the void.
It’s getting in touch with the “I” in its most primitive state, with what’s left over when you have nothing or nobody else. It’s seeing in the mirror an image devoid of any vanity because it was the first thing to be left out of the suitcase, with the risk of paying for excess baggage.
We arrived here with the resignation of someone who wants to climb a ladder, but first needs to let life throw you twenty steps back. Challenging the ego is a profound exercise that everyone should be encouraged to do at some point, in or out of their home country.
“Get out of your comfort zone”, preach thousands of gurus on the internet.
Little do they know that, in the case of an immigrant, this phrase can mean crying in the fetal position, feeling pain so intense that it seems that you can touch it. Absences suffocate. Sleep goes and we stay. Even so, early in the morning we pushed our tired bodies up the slope for another grueling day at work.
It is for these and other reasons that the daily disrespect, almost always implicit, but no less cruel for that reason, revolts me.
I lost count of how many times they told me to speak in Portuguese, not “Brazilian”, or they broke down their smiles when they heard my accent. How many infamous jokes, independent mistreatment and attempts at silencing when they discovered that my body also encompassed – look at this – a brain. It is not about victimization, but about facing a global plague head on that is gaining ground with the rise of hate speech and is dangerous because it lives between the lines, in unpretentious conversations, in a careless look (intentionally or not) about the reality that surrounds us .
Today, I want to salute all those who took the chair at family lunches and embarked on this journey into the unknown. I, who only know how to be in writing, send a sincere hug from here knowing that it is not easy to build the nest again and learn to live in another foundation of being-being.
All this word maneuver is to say that going back to what we already had is not even possible. We are not the same. Neither does our land.
Accepting the transience of a moving story is recognizing in itself an even greater force than nostalgia.
More than surviving, I talk about living.
Amidst the intermittent fears, insecurities, children, smells, flavors, colors and loves that help weave memories and build, little by little, this beautiful part of the world where we choose to stay.
🇧🇷 Born in the Brazilian Amazon, Maíra Streit has a long life for her 36 years. By transgressing my own borders, I found in journalism a territory for freedom. She cultivates a thirst for selling the world through the eyes of the other and has a special interest in everything that happens on the margins of narratives. She immerses herself in human rights coverage whenever she can because she knows that sometimes you have to break to stay whole.