I Don't Belong Here

Abstract

I Don't Belong Here (2015) is a performance about deportation and Portuguese deportees. Due to alcohol and drug abuse, a growing number of people have been expelled from the United States and Canada to be sent back to the small rural communities of the Azores Islands, from where they had originally left in their early childhood. With mainly American and Canadian cultural references, leaving behind their families and friends, and not even speaking Portuguese, these deportees live a disturbing experience of exile. The show created by the director Dinarte Branco and the playwright Nuno Costa Santos uses devices from the documentary theatre and transforms deportees into ‘experts of everyday life’ to confront us with biographies, memories and narratives of violence and addiction: lives that are tragically condemned to living for ever a citizenship ‘under the influence’. Dealing with people in a situation of marginality, the show was simultaneously a process of creation and inclusion, giving voice to individuals who converted the Islands of the Azores – known internationally as an Atlantic paradise - into an endless penitentiary topography.