La Herida Colonial: How Becoming an Immigrant Revealed My Ever-Open Colonial Wound

By Karina Sgarbi

I arrive for the job interview early, as usual, which can be considered weird for a Brazilian – we are usually late. At this point I’m living in Lisbon, having moved to Europe with nothing but courage.

I had to take a train, a bus that was delayed and then walk for fifteen minutes to get to the building. At first, I was going in the wrong direction. It always happens: maybe Google Maps sometimes takes too long to point the way, or it’s me and this desire to just go, no matter where, no matter how. Funny thing is that I always eventually manage to find the right path. There is this thing inside me that makes me stop, analyse and simply change the route without a proper reason or explanation, and it always works out for the best. It is a way of being and nothing else.

After ringing the bell, I wait at the entrance. A kind woman opens the door and offers me some water. I drink, and I also pee, because the almost two-hour journey was a bit too much for my body. It’s spring and although Lisbon is a sunny city, this is a cloudy day. The two white men make me wait for a bit. I don’t have the option to complain, I can only accept. Finally, I’m put into a meeting room, but then made to wait a bit more.

I look around the boring meeting room, a big desk, some chairs, a phone and white walls with a grey floor. I’m not exactly the type of person who requires much preparation for things. I just go, and somehow I know what to say, how to say it, what to do, how to do it. In this case, I quickly checked the magazine website on my way here, just to have an idea of what I was getting into as the job advert didn’t say much.

The two white men finally arrive, and they seem kind. They ask me questions and I reply; I ask them questions as well, but honestly, I don’t care about the answers. At that point, I needed the money, and to prove to myself that I could do my job outside my home country. Failure is not an option. When you are alone and an immigrant, you can only find a way to make things work.

I’m happy about how the job interview is going. Of course, they don’t offer me a contract; it is a freelance thing, which is just fine. I’m ready to leave, but just before getting up the older white man looks at me and asks if I can write in Portuguese, and not in ‘Brazilian’. He even adds, ‘You Brazilians with these gerunds are killing the language.’ And laughs.

I wasn’t expecting that. I’ve been to Portugal before, as a tourist, and I was completely in love with the country and its poetry and the deepness of fado, but everything changes when you switch from a visitant to a resident. Or, in better words, when you become an immigrant.

I breathe deeply before answering. I smile and simply reply, ‘I write in Portuguese, which is the language we speak in my country.’ I could’ve answered at least fifty different things that came to my mind at that moment, but as I said before, I needed the money. I needed the job. So, I leave the office with a briefing for my first article about some modern hotels in Bairro Alto, and an interview with someone from some tourist association that I’ve never heard about.

I’m happy with the job – it’s not hard for someone who has been working for over six years as a proper journalist, and also the extra money is pretty decent. But there is something that bothers me, that makes me feel sick, like when you drink warm beer on a summer afternoon. It doesn’t go down well; it feels weird and bitter, and wrong. It was that comment by the old white man. Funny thing is that I know exactly what and how I feel about it, but I don’t have a name for it. Yet.

I don’t speak Portuguese simply because I want to, but because it is how we are taught to communicate in my country. As in every colonised land, you lose your native culture and get invaded by the white men’s supreme god (also white) and its violent religion, rape and exploitation. Just because they put their name with black ink on a clean piece of paper, saying the land was theirs. It feels even more bitter after encounters like these.

I arrive home with this feeling, and it brings me back to many different places, situations and conversations where I felt the same. This weird thing pains me, and it has been since I realised I was colonised. It sounds silly, but some things you only perceive when you are put in a different position. In my case, when I was outside my homeland.

Of course, you learn history in school. You know what colonisation is, and you know where you are from, but it’s not a simple journey to perceive its effects. Like a puzzle when you add the last piece, the effects of colonisation only take shape when you realise which part of the bigger picture you belong in.

Two years after the white Portuguese men situation, but now in London, I sit in the living room of the flat I live in Bethnal Green talking to two Argentinians. We discuss how we encounter each other despite the distances; we were, at that very moment, immigrants with different backgrounds and stories, but in the end, all the same.

And then I hear for the first time the expression that puts a name to the pain I felt inside me. The Argentinians mention a TV interview with some experts from Latin America which I can’t remember. The only thing that is crystal clear in my mind is this expression: la herida colonial. Or, in English, the colonial wound. It’s weird how you can hear something for the first time in your life, after being alive for over three decades, and immediately feel a click. There is a name for everything, it is just a matter of finding it.

La herida colonial, or a ferida colonial, is an expression that represents how the official history of the powerful groups has imposed some sort of collective imaginary, where colonisation was described as the discovery of the new land. A land, according to these white people, that needed development, education, religion, language and culture – as if my ancestors didn’t have any of that.

Still open, this wound refers to how colonisation left profound impacts that made our nation unequal, poor and excluded. And yet despite being natively occupied much before the white man arrived in their big caravels, we don’t recognise very well our origins. Racism, xenophobia, indigenous extermination and invisibilisation are still here.

La herida colonial. Putting a name to the feeling doesn’t make it stop hurting. But it makes me conscious of what I have to fight for while I’m here, and even more when I’m back home.