What travel taught me about my identity as a Black Jew-ish man

I remember arriving in Paris for the first time as if it were yesterday. It was the last week of the 2001 northern hemisphere summer, just a few days after the tragic events in Manhattan that, unfortunately, brought those two towers down.

The Charles de Gaulle airport was surrounded by French secret intelligence and CIA agents. As the only Black man on the plane, I was deemed suspect and interviewed as soon as I stepped onto the tarmac. I was in my early twenties and infatuated with the city. For my whole life, growing up in Brazil, I had dreamed of walking those Rues, strolling on the banks of the river Sienne and wearing a French beret while reading Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, or Jean-Paul Sartre, sipping a café with a cigarette in my hands.

But, looking back, these aspirations were not really me. Not the me I know today. Those aspirations were the idea of the utopian man generated over years of consumption of Western (mis)education, values and views. They were Eurocentric ideas of whiteness.

But I am not European. I am a Black Jewish man born in Brazil and living in Australia.

I have been thinking about this for years, but after the tragic events of October 7, something shifted in me. Today, I am fully subscribed to the belief that individual relationships trump politics and that connection is stronger than ideology and, in many cases, even identity.

To be clear, there is nothing wrong with being European, and this is not about attacking white people. This is about me recognising that those dreams were dreams I thought I should have and that I learned from an early age to believe were mine. They were not my dreams. Europe was not where I wanted to be. It was where I thought I should be.

I would have dreamed differently if only I had read Fanon before reading Orwell.

Identity is both learned and imposed. I learned certain values, ate certain foods, and read certain books, forming my views of the world.

At the same time, the way the world treats me, depending on my class, gender, and race, is central to my perceptions of reality. I am who I learned to be but also who the world perceives me to be, and this push and pull is constantly happening to all of us.

Over the past two decades, I have visited other European cities: Madrid, Brussels, Rome, London, and Lisbon, to name a few.
With every visit, I felt more and more distant from Europe. The looks I received on public transport, the suspicions in some eyes, and the services that were not provided in restaurants, told me I did not belong.

When people asked where I was from and I told them Australia, I was a little more welcome It was recognised code for I am not an immigrant.

Recently, I visited the Fiji Islands. It was only the second time, I have visited a majority melanated country. (The other was Jamaica.). What I first noticed was that although the locals knew I wasn't from there once they got close, from a distance, and until I spoke, I could pass as Fijian. My phenotypical similarities allowed me to roam the streets of Savusavu, feeling not like a stranger but somehow like a distant cousin.

Although the locals recognised that I was not Fijian, I felt at home as I roamed the lanes and explored the restaurants.

I was coming from Australia, where I have lived for over two decades and have been a citizen for the past fifteen years. Yet, in Fiji when they asked where I was from, I told them without hesitating: I am from Brazil. I am not embarrassed to be from Australia, but I want to say to them: I am one of you.
Is this how European descendants with white features feel when they visit European cities? Or how Asian Brazilian and Asian Australian feel when they visit other Asian nations? Do they say they are Brazilian or Australian (which they are), or do they talk about their heritage?

As I enjoyed myself parading on the streets of Fiji, I thought about my other identity. My Jewish identity is not visible except on Fridays, when I walk to my synagogue wearing a kippah.

For most Jews, there is only one country where they can feel that warm feeling I had in Jamaica and Fiji. Only in Israel, can Jews feel that sense of familiarity, of sharing connection and understanding that I experience when I am no longer the rare Black man. I am yet to visit it, but I expect, when I go, I will feel connected too.

When we travel, our passports name our official national identity, but much of who we are racially, culturally, gender-wise or socially economically travels with us in more complex identities.

I am first Guido, the Black man (because this is what others can see), then the member of the Jewish Australian community or, depending on the day, the flamboyant Brazilian. I am okay with all these identities.