--- title: "Homeward bound, twice: the Brazilians who keep returning to Lebanon" description: "A financial collapse, a cataclysmic explosion and exile failed to break the pull of an ancestral homeland" author: "Albion Grey" published: 2026-09-25T17:44:39Z modified: 2026-09-26T18:06:28Z url: https://rews.cc/a/homeward-bound-twice-the-brazilians-who-keep-returning-to-le-52a81f language: en tags: ["migration", "lebanon", "brazil", "identity", "refugees", "world"] publisher: "Rews (https://rews.cc)" --- # Homeward bound, twice: the Brazilians who keep returning to Lebanon *A financial collapse, a cataclysmic explosion and exile failed to break the pull of an ancestral homeland* By Albion Grey · September 25, 2026 · https://rews.cc/a/homeward-bound-twice-the-brazilians-who-keep-returning-to-le-52a81f ## In brief - Brazil’s foreign ministry estimates about 20,000 Brazilian citizens live in Lebanon; Lebanon has held no census since 1932 - In Bekaa Valley villages such as Sultan Yacoub, Portuguese is still spoken after generations of two-way migration - Naima, a dancer, and Natalie, a Portuguese teacher, each moved from Brazil to Lebanon and faced being cast as outsiders - Both were caught in the August 2020 Beirut blast, which killed more than 200 people; Naima was badly injured - Both fled abroad after the explosion but later returned to Lebanon to stay Lebanon has spent much of the past seven years giving its people reasons to leave. A financial collapse beginning in 2019 vaporised savings and sent the currency plunging; protests filled the streets; electricity and public services failed; and on August 4th 2020 a warehouse explosion tore through Beirut, killing more than 200 people and injuring thousands. Waves of Lebanese emigrated, adding to a diaspora that long ago outgrew the country itself. Yet a curious counter-current survives. Some of the descendants of those who fled to Brazil generations ago have moved in the opposite direction—and, as an account from Al Jazeera makes clear, even explosions and exile have not persuaded them to stay away. The scale of the traffic is hard to measure. Brazil’s foreign ministry estimates that about 20,000 Brazilian citizens live in Lebanon, though the figure does not distinguish those of Lebanese ancestry from other Brazilians. Lebanon, for its part, has not conducted a population census since 1932, its sectarian arithmetic being too sensitive to count. What numbers cannot capture is how thoroughly migration has stitched the two countries together. In parts of the Bekaa Valley, Portuguese is still spoken. In Sultan Yacoub, a village near the Syrian border about a two-hour drive from Beirut and shaped by generations of migration to Brazil, it surfaces in supermarkets and pharmacies. In one *baqala* there, two old friends—one a veteran of years in Brazil and Venezuela, the other the son of a Brazilian-born father—chat in Arabic while repeatedly slipping into Portuguese, catching themselves, and switching back. What moving “back” does to a person’s sense of self is another matter. Bercito, a scholar of the subject interviewed by Al Jazeera, notes that in Brazil someone may be understood as Lebanese because that ancestry sets them apart; in Lebanon the markers change. “Suddenly a Brazilian accent, certain habits, or even imperfect Arabic can become markers of being an outsider,” he says. His conclusion cuts against the idea of an authentic identity waiting to be reclaimed: “Identities are not stable. They are constantly being negotiated in relation to other people and places.” ## Little by little Naima, a dancer, met the outsider’s label almost at once. She performs samba and capoeira as readily as Oriental dance, and the music of both countries. “In the beginning, dance school owners would tell me, ‘Ah, but you are ajnabi, you are a foreigner. Dance samba,’” she recalls. Acceptance came gradually—“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.” Acceptance did not require amputating one half of herself: she still performs Brazilian music alongside Oriental dance. Natalie, a teacher at the Guimaraes Rosa Institute, inhabits the in-between in her classroom. She teaches Portuguese, often to children with Brazilian roots growing up in Lebanon—some holding Brazilian nationality but speaking little of the language, their parents now trying to preserve the very culture migration has placed at a distance. She is alive to the irony of helping other people’s children learn Portuguese while wishing her own Arabic were stronger. “I can communicate in Arabic, but I’m not fluent … I wish I could be fluent,” she says. In Lebanon people regard her as Brazilian; in Brazil her Lebanese heritage becomes conspicuous. “When I’m in Brazil, I miss Lebanon, and when I’m in Lebanon, I miss Brazil.” ## Expelled, then reclaimed Both women were in Beirut when it exploded. Natalie was at home teaching a student when the blast shook her building apart, shattering windows and doors; friends were injured and 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, and she drifted in and out of consciousness on the way to hospital. “I lost too much blood,” she says. Her phone vanished in the blast; for about seven hours her family did not know whether she was alive. That same day Natalie began stuffing clothes into a suitcase—“I was in a complete panic”—and flew to Brazil. Arrival brought no uncomplicated homecoming: “I felt a sense of relief. But at the same time, I felt a deep sadness, because it was as if Lebanon had expelled me.” She and her husband settled in Rio de Janeiro with her mother and grandmother—the woman whose stories of Lebanon had filled her childhood, and who died a year later. Naima, still recovering from injuries that would travel with her, went first to Portugal, where she holds citizenship through her father. Once her hands healed she rented a flat and waited tables, until another wave of covid-19 cost her the job and she, too, decamped to Brazil. It did not hold. Naima was back in Lebanon within a year. Natalie resisted longer, spending three years rebuilding in Brazil; but her husband’s career as a musician—his contacts, collaborators, entire professional life—had been built in Lebanon. They agreed to return for three months, just to “test the waters”. Her mother suspected otherwise, and was right. “My mother was worried, thinking I might move back to Lebanon for good … And she was right; I ended up staying.” The pattern says something about both countries. Lebanon’s disasters are real, chronic and unresolved; its census is nearly a century out of date and its state barely functions. Yet belonging is not a calculation of public services. For the descendants of emigrants, the homeland exerts a pull that even being blown out of it, literally, may not extinguish. Lebanon has expelled many millions over the generations; it seems to have an equal talent for calling them back.