mr worldwide, neo
20/04/2024
i've always felt pride in having multiple ancestries, but as i grow older and start to think about where i want to go in life, thinking about where i came from kind of muddles my sense of belonging and identity. i wanted to talk about my feelings on ancestry, ethnicity and nationality, hoping that the reflection will make those feelings clearer.
first of all, an uncomfortable truth. i was born in Brazil 🇧🇷 and have lived here my entire life, only recently having started to spend any appreciable amount of time abroad. however, it is no secret that i don't feel much love for my home country. for the better part of my years i've looked to other countries with more admiration and had a desire to move out in the future. this is probably not an uncommon sentiment, but for me it was likely boosted by the fact that i hold a second nationality.
my grandfather on mom's side immigrated from Switzerland 🇨🇠around the 50's, seeking farm work in the countryside. he had 2 siblings who each went somewhere else in the world, each family branch eventually losing contact. his home canton was Grisons, an alpine canton with german and romansch-speaking communities — this latter being a romance language with a dwindling native population, but retaining its status as the lesser-known of switzerland's official languages. as a fun fact, there is evidence that his family actually originated in France 🇫🇷 several centuries earlier and that they even held duchy titles, but at some point migrated to CH. once in brazil, he met my grandmother, whose family was predominantly of Italian 🇮🇹 ancestry. my mom's mother had 3 siblings, only one of which is still alive, and i even have childhood memories of my great-grandmother.
although my grandma's family has been more present in our lives than my grandfather's, it's his name and background that has defined part of our identities. i say "we" because this refers to two generations: when my uncle and mom were born, my grandfather contacted the swiss consulate to inform them of the births, and as per CH's nationality laws, they automatically became swiss nationals. and then when my sister and i were born, he repeated the process, and the same rule applied to us. so the four of us hold dual brazilian 🇧🇷-🇨🇠swiss nationality. (italian nationality is notoriously difficult to obtain, requiring tons of paperwork to prove the filiation of multiple generations, so getting that was never really on the table for us.)
obviously, this fact has made me feel a little special my whole life. a lot of brazilians can trace their ancestry to different countries, but having a swiss background is kind of unusual, let alone having the citizenship. and it is a very fortunate turn of events indeed as the swiss passport is famously quite strong, allowing us to travel most places without much trouble. i've always been proud of being swiss, but it saddens me that i don't have the family name to show for it.
in brazil it is a custom to give a child 2 surnames: one from the mother, one from the father; combined with compound given names, this makes many brazilians have fairly lengthy full names. such a custom has apparently evaded both of my parents' families: my father and his brothers only carry their father's family name (though they do all have compound names), and my mom and uncle also only carry their father's. so of course, like many of my 1st-degree cousins, i only have a surname from my father's side.
after i moved to são paulo, it became a common occurrence to be asked "what a different looking surname, where is it from?" "it's from Lebanon 🇱🇧". back in my hometown, however, the distinctive name was not strange to the locals; it's said that my great-grandfather and great-grandmother on my father's side immigrated from lebanon and eventually arrived in the small town that would serve as a hub for most of the family branches, making a living from trade in the flourishing new community and later having my grandfather and several other children. they all had Arabic names, and i've heard that the family was in fact muslim, but that my grandfather specifically was raised catholic — as was the whole rest of our branch, and maybe others too but i don't really know. honestly, it's very hard to keep track of so many cousins and uncles of varying degrees and removednesses, many of whom relocated to other parts of brazil or simply don't keep in touch as much.
my grandfather's family was quite well-respected and owned a good amount of wealth in the tiny town, built from trade and investments. he married my grandmother, whose family i've always believed to have Spanish 🇪🇸 ancestry, but that might have had some italian mixed in as well. her side of the family is the one i know the least about, sadly, but i heard that their origins in spain are around Granada, an area that was long under arab control. if that is the case, it's a neat coincidence that there would be arab roots on both sides of my father's family. our lebanese family is scattered around the world: in brazil, north america, even lebanon itself; but unlike in my mother's side, many of the folks in my father's generation kept in touch with their roots and met distant relatives, despite the language barriers and differences in religion.
back in my hometown, everyone knows our family's name, and having that kind of history is indeed pretty cool. but to be honest, i've kind of felt like a black sheep since my teenage years. part of that is, of course, having been a teenager, but the feeling never really went away; especially with us living far away from the matriarch and cousins, with my relationship with my father becoming more strained, with my parents eventually separating, and just in general, with my absolute distaste for my hometown. i don't feel much attachment or interest in my arabic heritage, even if having the distinctive name and a respected family do give me pride.
on the other hand, as of now i've managed to never have visited switzerland. my uncle and aunt have lived there for a decade, my mom has got into the habit of visiting at least once a year, and now my sister has found a job there and moved as well. but me, every time there was an opportunity to go, i had other trips planned out, especially more recently. so i am proud of being swiss, and i do wish i had the family name, and i do want to discover my ancestor's land, but i'm not sure if at this moment i would call CH my home. it's just not the place i feel called to at this point in my life.
having revealed the general shape of my family tree, i wanna move on to a perhaps more contentious topic, that of ethnicity. i've always considered myself white. in brazil, ethnicity is mostly split into five categories: white, black, yellow, pardo or indigenous. since my entire family is light-skinned, i never thought that i'd be anything other than white. obviously, this makes sense considering my mom's side is basically all european, and my father's side is around half european as well, but what about our lebanese ancestry, which is such an important part of many of my relatives' identities?
i've seen much discourse on the internet that arabs are not white, and there are clearly many populations in arab countries that are much darker-skinned than us and that are subject to racism, but then are my family and i allowed to identify both as white and as arab? as far as i'm aware, the brazilian census classifies levantine arabs as white, our family has traceable origins to the Levant area, and i went to school with many folks with syrian or lebanese ancestry, who look a lot like me in terms of skin. are we all not arabs? please note i am not refuting the brown label, i'm just arguing that it doesn't apply to many communities of arab origins, it feels nonsensical for me to use it. i'm like so white i've been called an honourary irish, lol.
so i feel like my identity is in a constant tug-of-war between swiss (european) and lebanese; white and arab; and of course, brazilian and anything else. i don't want to stay here, but i don't feel attracted to either of my main-heritages. i'm very lucky to have swiss nationality, but i've never set foot in the country, and i wasn't even granted the family name. my lebanese family's origins are prideworthy, but i don't really get along super well with all of my many relatives, nor do i relate to the culture.
now the cynical thought would be, "stop overthinking it. you're just brazilian, get over it". and it's like, i don't fully hate this place! i want to see it get better, if only because it's my home for now. when b0ls0n4r0 was president, i spent a good portion of my online time sharing posts from the opposition, i wanted to show everyone the mess that we got ourselves into, and even offline i acquired something of a political mind. i campaigned for lul4, celebrated when he won, and felt disgust when the fascist's fans sullied my birthday by attempting a coup. and it's not just the macro-scale political struggles that cause me shame: brazilians have a bit of a reputation for being obnoxious on social media and games, and it's rather embarrassing to see. i've long been more involved with english-speaking online circles, so brazilian internet culture is basically alien to me. i feel no connection.
right now, the place that calls to me is Québec. i went into some of the reasons why in my post about languages, but the gist of it is: i came to love the language, i made a lot of supportive friends, i learned about its culture, and i felt sympathy for its history. i'm very specific about my attraction being for québec, not canada. my family keeps encouraging me to consider a life in switzerland like my sister, but i've told them i want to spend some time in QC first. i want to start a life there, be part of that world, even if just for a while.
i think that's about what i had to say on this topic. i don't know if i accomplished my goal to come to terms with my identity, but having a chronic need to auto-biograph, at least i managed to put on record my diverse family origins.