Almost Home: A Brazilian American's Reflections on Faith, Culture, and Immigration

3. Naturalization

51 3 Nat­ u­ ral­ iza­ tion I have an idea that some men are born out of their due place. Ac­ ci­ dent has cast them amid strang­ ers in their birth­ place, and the leafy lanes they have known from child­ hood re­ main but a place of pas­ sage. They may spend their whole lives ali­ ens among their kin­ dred and re­ main aloof among the only ­ scenes they have ever known. Per­ haps it is this sense of strange­ ness that sends men far and wide in the ­ search for some­ thing per­ ma­ nent, to which they may at­ tach them­ selves. . . . Some­ times a man hits upon a place to which he mys­ ter­ i­ ously feels that he be­ longs. Here is the home he ­ sought, and he will set­ tle amid ­ scenes that he has never seen be­ fore, among men he has never known, as ­ though they were fa­ mil­ iar to him from his birth. Here at last he finds rest. W. Som­ er­ set Maug­ ham, The Moon and Six­ pence, 1919 Som­ er­ set ­ Maugham’s words aptly de­ scribe those of us who leave home­ lands in ­ search of more fa­ mil­ iar ­ places. It is a ­ search not­ wholly ­ driven by fi­ nan­ cial need. Am­ bi­ tion alone can­ not ex­ plain it. There is more to it. Some­ thing else an­ i­ mates the im­ pulse, some­ thing about our lives back home feels mis­ placed, ­ slanted. We can­ not ex­ plain the strange­ ness of our birth­ places, nor ac­ count for the fa­ mil­ iar feel of our des­ ti­ na­ tions. Our fam­ i­ lies do not under­ stand it. That we do not fully be­ long to our own be­ fud­ dles ­ friends and ac­ quain­ tances, peo­ ple quite com­ fort­ able with their sur­ round­ ings. But we know bet­ ter. We sense that there is an­ other place else­ where, be­ yond what we have ex­ pe­ ri­ enced so far, where we will at last find our rest. I have wit­ nessed such con­ vic­ tion be­ fore—in the eyes of my Scot­ tish pas­ tor, dur­ ing col­ lege days. He ar­ rived in Bra­ zil soon after his or­ di­ na­ tion and never ­ looked back. ­ Decades later, at the end of his ca­ reer, home was the warm trop­ ics, among a peo­ ple who could not be more dif­ fer­ ent 52 Naturalization from his ­ Gaelic roots. That same in­ stinct drove an Ital­ ian anthro­ pol­ ogy pro­ fes­ sor to find his place in the co­ lo­ nial city of Sal­ va­ dor, Bra­ zil, amid de­ scen­ dants of ­ African ­ slaves. Meet­ ing him at a lec­ ture here in the­ United ­ States, I had to mar­ vel at how more Bra­ zil­ ian he was than I. Then there was the Ger­ man semi­ nary pro­ fes­ sor in Re­ cife, who left his coun­ try to es­ cape Hit­ ler. Bra­ zil was not just a point of des­ ti­ na­ tion; it be­ came his true home­ land. Per­ egrines all, they came seek­ ing a birth­ place among other ­ tribes. I re­ mem­ ber well the first time that sense of the fa­ mil­ iar over­ took me. Climb­ ing down from an air­ plane onto the hot New Mex­ i­ can tar­ mac as a high ­ school ­ foreign ex­ change stu­ dent, I was sur­ prised by how ­ things fi­ nally made sense, how life was fi­ nally fit­ ting, and how right it felt to be in that place. It is an eerie feel­ ing. I knew no one yet, had found no shel­ ter in this alien plot of land, and there were no as­ su­ rances that­ things would work out, that the whole ex­ pe­ ri­ ence might be en­ joy­ able. But I found I could nav­ i­ gate the place as if I had been born and ­ raised in it. Some­ how there was some­ thing in this so­ ci­ ety that felt com­ pletely nat­ u­ ral, as­ tound­ ingly “fa­ mil­ iar.” The same sense of fa­ mil­ iar­ ity would re­ turn when I made my way back to the ­ United ­ States for grad­ u­ ate stud­ ies. My ar­ ri­ val in Louis­ ville, Ken­ tucky, in 1981 felt like a home...