Lebanese in Brazil, Brazilian in Lebanon

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.