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Moving to an ancestral homeland did not resolve either woman's identity. Instead, it exposed how much identity depends on where, and among whom, it is being claimed.
In Brazil, Bercito explains, someone may be understood as Lebanese because that ancestry distinguishes them within Brazilian society. In Lebanon, the markers change.
“Suddenly a Brazilian accent, certain habits, or even imperfect Arabic can become markers of being an outsider,” he says.
Naima encountered that almost immediately.
She dances samba and capoeira as well as Oriental dance and performs music from both countries. But when she first arrived, some Lebanese dance school owners saw the Brazilian part first.
“In the beginning, dance school owners would tell me, ‘Ah, but you are ajnabi, you are a foreigner. Dance samba,’” she says, pitching her voice upwards and waving a hand.
“Shway, shway,” she says, little by little. “People like my dance. They start to invite me to teach, to get me the big stages … and I got respected as a dancer, [a] Lebanese dancer. Not only Brazilian.”
But acceptance did not require choosing one identity over the other. Naima still performs Brazilian music, samba and capoeira alongside Oriental dance.
Natalie's two identities meet most clearly in the classroom.
At the Guimaraes Rosa Institute, she teaches Portuguese, often to children with Brazilian roots growing up in Lebanon. Some hold Brazilian nationality but speak little Portuguese, their parents now trying to preserve the very culture that migration has placed at a distance.
There is an irony Natalie recognises. She spends her working life helping children in Lebanon learn Portuguese, while wishing her own Arabic were stronger.
“I can communicate in Arabic, but I'm not fluent, so I have a lot of mistakes, so with my friends and people that … know English and French, usually I speak a different language, because it's just faster, you know, but … I wish I could be fluent.”
In Lebanon, she says, people tend to regard her as Brazilian. In Brazil, her Lebanese heritage becomes more conspicuous.
“I belong to both; I feel deeply connected to both cultures,” she says. “When I'm in Brazil, I miss Lebanon, and when I'm in Lebanon, I miss Brazil.”
To Bercito, such shifts reveal less about whether one identity is more “authentic” than another than about the nature of identity itself.
“Identities are not stable,” he says. “They are constantly being negotiated in relation to other people and places.”
How many Brazilians have made a similar move is difficult to know. Brazil's foreign ministry estimates that about 20,000 Brazilian citizens currently live in Lebanon, but the figure does not distinguish those of Lebanese ancestry from other Brazilians. Lebanon, meanwhile, has not conducted a population census since 1932.
Numbers tell only part of the story. Generations of migration have created pockets of Lebanon where Brazil is woven into everyday life.
In parts of the Bekaa Valley, decades of movement between the two countries have left communities where Portuguese is still spoken. About a two-hour drive from Beirut, in Sultan Yacoub, a village near the Syrian border shaped by generations of migration to Brazil, Portuguese surfaces in supermarkets and pharmacies.
Inside one baqala, two old friends catch up. One spent years in Brazil and Venezuela; the other's father was born in Brazil before returning to Lebanon. As they speak in Arabic, the two repeatedly slip into Portuguese, only to catch themselves and switch back again.
'I have to come back to Lebanon'
Choosing Lebanon also meant living through years in which the country seemed to move from one crisis to the next. From 2019, financial collapse wiped out savings and sent the currency plunging; protests convulsed the country; electricity shortages and failing public services became part of everyday life.
Then, on August 4, 2020, Beirut exploded.
Natalie was at home teaching a student when the blast tore through the city. The building shook. Windows and doors shattered. Friends were injured; people she knew were killed.
Naima was teaching dance closer to the port. Glass ripped into her body, tearing muscle from her right arm and nearly severing a finger on her left hand. Her hearing was damaged. She drifted in and out of consciousness on the way to hospital.
“I lost too much blood,” she says. Her phone had disappeared in the blast. For about seven hours, her family did not know what had happened to her.
The explosion killed more than 200 people and injured thousands. Neither woman had imagined that the Lebanon they had fought so hard to make home might become somewhere they needed to flee.
That same day, Natalie began throwing clothes into a suitcase to leave. “I was in a complete panic,” she says.
Brazil offered what Lebanon suddenly could not, distance from the possibility of another explosion. But when Natalie's plane touched down, safety did not feel quite like homecoming.
“I felt a sense of relief,” she says. “But at the same time, I felt a deep sadness, because it was as if Lebanon had expelled me.”
She and her husband initially thought they had left for good. They settled in Rio with Natalie's mother and grandmother.
The explosion had driven Natalie back to the woman whose stories of Lebanon had filled her childhood. Neither knew how little time they had left together. Her grandmother died a year later.
Naima left Lebanon, too, still recovering from injuries that would travel with her. She went first to Portugal, where she holds citizenship through her father. Once her hands had healed enough, she rented an apartment and found work as a waitress. Then another wave of COVID-19 cost her the job. Unable to afford to stay, she packed again.
She, too, returned to her mother's land, Brazil. It was home, she says, but no longer her only one. A year later, she was back in Lebanon.
Natalie resisted the pull for longer. For three years, she and her husband tried to rebuild their lives in Brazil. But his career as a musician, his contacts, collaborators and professional life, had been built in Lebanon. Eventually, they agreed to return for three months, just to “test the waters”.
Her mother suspected three months might become longer.
“My mother was worried, thinking I might move back to Lebanon for good,” Natalie says. “And she was right; I ended up staying.”
