Lebanese in Brazil, Brazilian in Lebanon

Their families left Lebanon generations ago. For some Lebanese Brazilians, Lebanon’s pull never disappeared.

Beirut, Lebanon – The techno beat falls away for a moment as the DJ lines up another song. Its opening chords pulse through the speakers and the room erupts. In the crush of the club, people cheer and scramble onto wooden tables and chairs, craning over one another for a better view of the woman stepping onto the dance floor.

As her white silk skirt floats around her, Naima Yazbek, 55, twirls to the sound of the classical Arabic song Alf Leila wa Leila (One Thousand and One Nights), letting the music carry her through every flick of the wrist, every spin.

At Madame Om, a bearded man with broad shoulders snaps a paper fan to the beat, his clapping setting off others around him. For the length of the song, no one appears particularly concerned about whether the woman before them can speak Arabic, which passport she carries, or where she was born. The crowd simply wants to watch her dance. Outside this room, those distinctions have followed Naima for years.

A few days before the performance, sitting beneath towering pine trees outside Cafe Younes in Beirut's Hamra neighbourhood, she crosses her tanned legs and lights a cigarette. Large black fans turn slowly around her, stirring the hot city air.

Between puffs of smoke, she explains that dance was bound up with another reason for coming to Lebanon: understanding the culture she had grown up knowing through her family.

“As a belly dancer and singer, I wanted to be here, [to] learn the language, the culture, [and] to understand my family roots.”

Born in Sao Paulo into a family of Lebanese descent, Naima says her relationship with Lebanon began long before she first set foot in the country in the summer of 2009. Like millions of Brazilians whose family histories stretch back to Lebanon, she inherited a relationship with a place she knew first through other people's memories. Eventually, she would decide to make that place home.

Naima's Christian ancestors were among those who left what was then Ottoman-ruled Greater Syria for Brazil in the late 19th century. Economic hardship, including the decline of Mount Lebanon's silk economy, helped drive migration to the Americas, where expanding economies offered the prospect of work and a different future.

The migration would eventually create one of the world's largest Lebanese diasporas. Brazil's foreign ministry estimates that as many as 10 million Lebanese people and their descendants now live in the country.

For generations, Naima's family built its life there, often marrying within the Lebanese diaspora. But the idea of Lebanon never entirely disappeared.

In 1928, her great-grandfather even persuaded his wife, Odete, to try living in Lebanon. The experiment lasted only a few months. He returned to Brazil, feeling that the Lebanon he encountered was no longer the country he remembered.

More than 80 years later, their great-granddaughter would make the same journey and reach a very different conclusion.

Sitting in Beirut, Naima recounts taking a 23andMe ancestry test. It estimated her ancestry as 70.9 percent Lebanese. She repeats the figure proudly, an authoritative-sounding number, however imperfect, for a connection she had long felt without needing to measure it.

Ancestry, however, is not citizenship. Naima does not hold a Lebanese passport.

Lebanese nationality law generally allows fathers, but not mothers, to transmit citizenship to their children on equal terms. Naima's Lebanese ancestry runs through women on both sides of her family: her mother is of Lebanese descent but does not hold citizenship, while her father's Lebanese heritage came through his mother. Neither parent could therefore pass Lebanese nationality to Naima.

When she first arrived, she needed an iqama, or residency permit, through a sponsor. The country she regarded as part of her inheritance regarded her, legally, as a foreigner.

But the feeling she describes was quite different.

“From the moment I came here, I felt this thing, something I don't know how to explain, like spiritual, or karma, or mission.”

Her voice jumps up an octave. Her hands move through the air as though she might somehow make visible the feeling she is struggling to name. She had initially come for two months, intending to explore her Lebanese heritage. Instead, it became something more permanent.

“I came back to Brazil, and I couldn't sleep. I said, ‘I will sell everything.’ … I sold my car. I started from zero.”

Naima left most of her possessions with her mother in Sao Paulo. Into her luggage went clothes and the tools of her profession: Oriental dance costumes, finger cymbals, a tambourine, a shamadan and a sword.

Dance had taken her to the United States, Britain, Germany and Egypt, but she had never permanently left Brazil. This time was different.

On her first night back in Lebanon, she slept at a family friend's house.

Naima calls what happened a “return”. Strictly speaking, she was moving to a country in which she had never lived. But for descendants of migrants, returning home does not necessarily mean retracing one's own footsteps.

Diogo Bercito, a Brazilian historian and author of Brimos, about Syrian and Lebanese migration to Brazil, has spent years studying the ties between the two countries.

What interests him about the idea of “return”, he says, is precisely its apparent contradiction. Someone whose grandparents or great-grandparents left Lebanon can arrive there for the first time and still experience the journey as a homecoming.

“There are other ways to inhabit a place and belong to it,” Bercito says.

Descendants may grow up with family stories of Lebanon, its food and music, constructing what Bercito describes as an emotional and genealogical relationship with a place across distance.

But the Lebanon they inherit is inevitably one mediated through memory – and it may bear little resemblance to the country they eventually encounter.

“It is the place they have heard about their whole lives, but it is not precisely what they had in mind,” he says.

Natalie Nassif grew up with precisely such a Lebanon.

A few kilometres away from Naima's cafe, at the Olive Tree Cafe in Ashrafieh, the 40-year-old speaks softly over an iced latte about a country that entered her life through her mother and, especially, her grandmother long before she ever saw it herself.

Her mother was born in Kawkaba, in southern Lebanon's Nabatieh Governorate. In 1979, during Lebanon's civil war, she left for Brazil after her brother was killed. Relatives already there offered a foothold in a country whose language she did not yet speak.

Natalie's mother later met a Lebanese man while on holiday in Rio de Janeiro. They fell in love, Natalie says, and soon married. Shortly after Natalie was born, however, her father left and eventually returned to Lebanon. Natalie remained in Rio, raised by her mother and grandmother.

Lebanon was thousands of kilometres away. Inside their home, it was everywhere.

“I was listening to Arabic … especially from my mother and my grandmother and my uncles … I was eating Lebanese food almost every day.”

Much of that Lebanon took shape in the kitchen. Fairuz, and sometimes Wadih El Safi or Sabah, played from a cassette player in the background as the family gathered around the table to prepare kibbeh, sfiha, and shish barak by hand.

Sometimes, Natalie remembers, her grandmother would cry as she listened. She missed Lebanon, the neighbours and friends she had left behind, the food of the south and the son she had lost during the civil war.

But what felt natural inside their home could make Natalie feel conspicuous outside it.

“I was the Lebanese girl with Brazilian friends … I was shy to speak Arabic. I was listening to Arabic all the time, but I didn't want to be different from my friends … I was maybe not understanding at that point how proud I was to be Lebanese.”

Then, in 2005, when Natalie was 19, her father invited her to Lebanon, almost out of the blue. The country she knew until then had largely been constructed through her grandmother's stories.

Now she would encounter the place itself. But arriving in Lebanon also meant confronting something more personal: meeting her father.

“I was scared. I was like, I don't want this. But I couldn't go back.”

At Beirut airport, with the exit only metres away, her nerve faltered. “I was sitting before going out, before passing the exit,” she says with lighthearted laughter.

She lingered over her suitcase, putting off the moment when she would have to walk through the doors. “And I said, ‘I have to do it.’” She walked out.

On the other side stood the father she had not seen since she was a baby. He was clutching an enormous bouquet. She no longer remembers their colour, only her father raising a hand to wipe away his tears. Around him stood her uncles and grandmother, relatives Natalie had never met.

“Natalie! Natalie!” Her name came at her from all directions.

Overwhelmed, Natalie says she remembers wanting to leave the airport as quickly as possible. But once she was in the car, the unease began to lift. She spent the journey to the house gazing out of the window, taking in Lebanon.

Three weeks later, Natalie returned to Brazil consumed by the country she had spent years hearing about. She showed photographs to friends and family and talked about Lebanon constantly. Over the following years, the flights became more frequent.

In 2013, after leaving a stressful job in cinema production, she heard about an opening teaching Portuguese at the Guimaraes Rosa Institute, Brazil's cultural centre in Beirut.

She interviewed, got the job and moved there two weeks later.

Over the years that followed, Lebanon stopped being simply the country of her family's past. Natalie built a career there, made friends and married a Lebanese musician.

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.

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.”

“Here is the neighbourhood where my uncle was assassinated,” Natalie says, walking through Ashrafieh.

Apartment blocks rise on one side of the street, laundry hanging from narrow balconies. Trees obscure smaller houses on the other. Above comes the persistent whir of Israeli drones. It is August 2026, two months after a US-brokered agreement between Israel and the Lebanese government. Israeli forces remain in parts of southern Lebanon and strikes have continued despite the deal.

“When I walk here, I like to see the old people, how they interact with each other. It feels like going back in time to when my grandmother lived here.”

The grandmother who first gave Natalie a Lebanon to imagine is gone now, but the streets from her stories remain.

“I feel closer also to the stories … closer to my grandma, closer to the stories that she used to tell.”

Soon, Natalie is standing outside the house where her grandmother once lived. She pauses for a moment before continuing down the street. Some of the older houses are sand-coloured, others white-washed, their weathered facades and rusted bars on their windows contrasting with the apartment blocks that have risen nearby.

A few doors down live Jenevieve and her younger sister Souhad, both in their 70s and old friends of Natalie's grandmother. Whenever Natalie walks through the neighbourhood, she visits them.

They greet her with kisses and immediately ask after her family: How are her uncles Robert and Giro? How is her mother?

“They ask me the same question, because they are older … I feel that they miss the old time that they used to be together, even during the war.”

Natalie points towards a small lamp in the corner. Her uncle repaired it for the sisters some years ago.

“They don’t want to move it,” Natalie says softly. The bulb sits to one side on the socket shell.

One of the sisters disappears briefly and returns with a tray of foil-wrapped chocolates and a bunch of red grapes. They insist she eat while peppering Natalie with questions.

Soon, they ask to speak to Natalie’s mother. The sisters do not have mobile phones, so Natalie takes out hers and calls Brazil.

For a few minutes, the room in Beirut fills with voices stretched across the Atlantic. They talk about how much they miss one another, complain about the seemingly endless wars, and say how much they wish they could see each other again.

Then Natalie checks the time. She has a Portuguese class to teach. She says goodbye and steps back onto the paved road.

The Guimaraes Rosa Institute is a 15 or 20-minute walk away. To reach it, Natalie retraces the neighbourhood her grandmother once knew, passing her grandmother's former home and then her own.

At the end of the walk, her students are waiting for her to teach them Portuguese.