Sofia Maia Ciel

Dreams Come Away is a personal immigrant story presented in fragmented language and a broken time structure, reflecting the protagonist's state of being—suspended in a limbo without a sense of belonging, yet constrained by borders, stereotypes, and political rules. Despite the individual's good intentions and relentless hard work, including a PhD and an extensive list of publications, the story underscores the impossibility of escaping defining social structures such as poverty, class, ethnicity, and especially language. Language here serves a particularly ambiguous function; it is both the writer's identity marker—a means of escape, a shield, and a last resort—and, at the same time, as it is always a foreign language, not a mother tongue, it is an alienating and harmful tool that reinforces the feeling of never being good enough, of never truly being at home even in the language.

Keywords: borders ; discrimination ; ethnicity ; glottophobia ; immigration ; language ; precarity ; priviliges ; social class ; temporarity