Homecoming. Experiences at the crossroads of a coloniser/colonised identity

by Ana Luiza Loio

I’m sitting in a classroom, amused at the situation I’ve landed in. Everyone around me is some eight years younger, which is taking me back to distant school times. Except these kids roll their R’s in a way that would make me spit everywhere and have funny words for things like ‘pedestrian’ or ‘ambulance lights’.

That was my first driving theory in class… in Portugal. It’s all familiarly unfamiliar, literally – my mom’s entire family is from here. I grew up hearing the gossip from their village in Viseu, having my grandma’s cozido for lunch on Sundays, and religiously wearing Ronaldo’s face on my jerseys every four years.

But this is my first time actually living in the country.

When I first enrolled for classes, the nice lady at the reception seemed surprised to see me hand in a Portuguese ID card rather than a residence permit. I quickly rushed to explain that I’m Portuguese, too. And she smiled, uninterested.

Making a point to tell Portuguese people that I’m Brazilian and Portuguese is something I do pretty often. But I know that it’s pointless. The moment my tongue touches the roof of my mouth rather than the back of my teeth when I say “bom dia” is when my foreignness is established.

I don’t know why it matters. I love being Brazilian. I grew up in Manaus, a massive city in the heart of the Brazilian Amazon. My favourite childhood memories involve a ton of maracujá ice cream and playing hide and seek with my cousins on a boat in the middle of the world’s biggest river. Yes, I was sometimes seen as “the Portuguese girl” back then, but that didn’t prevent me from participating in local culture. And even now, I’m still grateful that I get to experience both realities. That sense of moving between them has always felt like a gift – just one that I’ve come to understand differently over time.

That shift started with my sister. When Fernanda moved to Portugal as a teenager, I was already off to uni in the Netherlands. I watched her identity collide with the very culture we grew up celebrating. Even at a distance, seeing her struggle changed the way I understood my own belonging.

I’ll forever remember my mom crying on the phone, worried my sister couldn’t adapt in school. I’ll never forgive the teachers who threatened to take points off her exams if she didn’t write in “proper” Portuguese. Or the girls who made fun of her accent. Or the boys who called her a slut (and other creative words to the same effect). She was only fifteen, and I grew frustrated I couldn’t protect her.

“It’s sad to say because it’s a culture I have a lot of affection for, but I developed a certain kind of rage against Portuguese people”, says Fernanda. Her rage reminds me of a moment in Homegoing, Yaa Gyasi’s novel about how the legacy of slavery and colonization reverberates through generations. In it, Quey – half Fante, half British – names a snail Richard because the animal is “bad like the British are bad”. When he remembers that his own father is British, he shrugs it off.

This helps me realise that mine and my sister’s experience is far from individual. Across Europe, there are millions of people whose lives were touched by colonial history in different ways. So I begin reaching out to friends and acquaintances whose identities also sit in that uneasy space between a former colony and its coloniser.

All the people I spoke to expressed ambiguous feelings around national belonging. A friend whose parents are Moroccan but who grew up in Spain tells me he doesn’t feel like he belongs to either place. “You’re an inevitable guest in the group you’re trying to belong to”, he says. When I first met him, he told me I could call him Sam or Husam, no preference – and I’m now finding this a funny metaphor for how little he feels anchored to a cultural home.

“This helps me realise that mine and my sister’s experience is far from individual. Across Europe,
there are millions of people whose lives were touched by colonial history in different ways.”

Sam tells me that he always felt more belonging to Moroccan in-groups within Spain than with Spanish people in Spain or Moroccans in Morocco. A sentiment that is shared by Marco, who also grew up in Spain but whose parents are Venezuelan. He tells me about growing up surrounded by the Venezuelan kids of his parents’ friends. “We were all now being raised as Venezuelans on the weekends but then during the week we were spending all this time with Spanish kids”, he says. Inside these groups, Marco and his friends were going through that inevitable shape shifting process that distances you from clear-cut identity categories. He recalls that Venezuelan newcomers would often make fun of their Spanish accents, but within a year would be speaking the same way.

Language and accents come up again and again. Dewi, who was born and raised in the Netherlands to a Dutch mother and Indonesian father, tells me that it was the language barrier that immediately gave away her “Dutchness” when she travelled to Indonesia. People saw her Indonesian name, saw something familiar in her face, and would start speaking to her in Indonesian. And she’d explain, in her Duolingo-level Indonesian, that she had grown up in the Netherlands. It made her realise how differently the world reads her depending on where she is: familiar enough to be recognised, foreign enough to stand out.

In my sister Fernanda’s experience, the barrier wasn’t the language, but the accent. She spoke Portuguese flawlessly, but not Portuguese Portuguese. “I would ask the kids why they didn’t consider me Portuguese”, she tells me. “And their answer was always the same: ‘You’re not like us. You speak Brazilian’”.

Then there’s Neylo, a Brazilian friend who moved to Portugal at seven. He lived something similar, just at an age when it’s harder to resist the pressure to fit in. Today he can switch between accents effortlessly, but back in school he always used his Portuguese one. “Having the same accent as the people around me just felt logical, it avoided friction”, he says. “But it was also involuntary. It wasn’t a conscious decision”.

I used to be adaptable like that too. As a child, I could switch between a Brazilian and a Portuguese accent without thinking. I picked up the Portuguese one by imitating my grandmother and, for someone who had never lived in Portugal, it was surprisingly accurate. My family loved when I did it, and I loved the validation. I started losing that accent around eighteen, the same age I began spending nights out in Portuguese clubs during my summer holidays. That’s where I first encountered the nastier side of how Portuguese men spoke about Brazilian women. My sister says the same. “The discrimination came mostly from men. Extremely more, notoriously more”, she agrees.

It strikes me how identity categories intersect so clearly in these chats I’ve had. Gender, class, race all play a role in how people experience colonial legacies. Fernanda and I have had the privilege of being white – which opened doors to our family’s social ascension in Brazil, softened the discrimination my sister experienced in Portugal, and made the rest of Europe so much more sympathetic to us as we both moved around the continent. But not everyone I spoke to has had the same experience.

Sam tells me he feels that in Spain belonging is still largely filtered through whiteness. “It’s something you cannot change”, he says. “So you follow expectations, you do everything and it’s not enough for you to belong to that group”. He explains to me that growing up he was constantly reminded that he was a “moro” – a derogatory term used to refer to North African immigrants.

Marco, the Venezuelan friend who also grew up in Madrid, describes something different. He doesn’t recall many episodes of overt discrimination. This is partly because he was still very young, and partly because, as he puts it, “Latin Americans could go unnoticed” in contrast with Arab immigrants. And when Marco did feel othered, he finds it hard to separate what came from being Venezuelan from what simply came from switching schools a lot as a child. Still, he remembers Venezuelans being met with a mix of “dismissal” and“wannabe-ism”. “To Spanish people, we are exotic”, he says.

And then there are experiences like Dewi’s, where mixed ancestry introduces yet another layer. Her features signal Asian heritage even though she’s partly Dutch and always lived in the Netherlands . “I think discrimination makes you feel like you don’t belong in the group that is the majority”, she says. At the same time, she’s aware that varying degrees of whiteness brought privilege to both sides of her family history – to her mother’s Dutch background and her father’s mixed-race upbringing in Indonesia. “So you’re part of a history in which people are oppressed, but also the oppressors themselves”, she reflects.

This duality is something that’s been in my mind a lot too. Doing a traineeship at the European Parliament last semester, I told myself that it’s important for Global South voices to be present in these spaces. To reaffirm Europe’s responsibility for its colonial history. But I ended up feeling like I was just a cog-in-a-wheel in a system that fails to even acknowledge coloniality and genocide taking place in the world today – in Gaza, Sudan, Congo, and beyond. Though these political crises may seem distant, they are part of the same global system that shapes how people with Global South or post-colonial identities are racialised and treated in Europe. The lived experiences that inform the decisions of those in power are not so different from the attitudes you might hear from a casually racist neighbour.

This leaves me trying to figure out what to do with my own place in all of this. As a white Brazilian woman living in Europe, how can I turn my privileges toward repair rather than repetition? How can I honour my ancestry in fullness? Not just the European bits, but especially the indigenous and black people whose features no longer appear on my face but to whose lives I also owe my own life to.

I guess these questions are not exclusive to people with identities at the crossroads of a former colony and its coloniser. But I do notice that the clarity with which privilege and disprivilege show up in our family histories leads many of us to think of these things a lot.

It’s not a coincidence that Sam carries this awareness into his activism, pushing the Spanish left to take Black and POC representation seriously. Marco takes it into the classroom, challenging eurocentrism in his international politics studies. Dewi imagines it shaping her future as an English teacher, grounding her work in a decolonial approach. For Neylo, it shows up as the urge to travel widely and maybe one day return to Brazil to build something rooted in the communities he comes from. My sister feels it in the Amazon, hoping to work in sustainable tourism and make our region’s diversity more visible. And I carry it into storytelling and narrative change, making space for stories like this one.

In the end, we’re all trying to open room for more critical explorations of what “European” can mean. In political circles, I often hear that creating a cohesive European identity is difficult when there are supposedly 27 different cultures to consider. But listening to people whose lives sit at the intersection of former colonies and colonizing states shows me that the landscape is far more complex. If personal stories reveal the cracks in the system, policy is what can close them. So if Europe is serious about acknowledging these layered histories and the people who carry them, a Pact for Equality that invests in historical education, critical discussion, and multicultural exchange is the way to go. Because identity work cannot rely on individual awareness. It demands the political will to turn recognition into fairer structures.

“A Pact for Equality that invests in historical education, critical discussion, and multicultural exchange is the way to go.”