When Manuel Tur challenged the Brazilian novelist and playwright Bernardo Carvalho to write an original text, the result was Pátria [Homeland]. Part 2 of Retrato de Família [Family Portrait], a cycle in which Tur has been exploring oppressive family environments, Homeland is a monologue by an isolated, deranged man. The author of his own obsession, he talks to the walls and plants, narrating himself as an expatriate and a victim of injustice. Then, a foreigner knocks on his door, ready to contradict him. “I ended up believing the tale I was telling and forgetting myself.” Truth and lies, reality and fiction, origin and belonging (the shadow of an absent father hangs over all this) tangle together, building blocks and hindrances in this search for identity. Manuel Tur challenges us to witness, as though we were looking through a keyhole, “this sort of anguish” that is identity disaggregation, uprooting and loneliness. The homeland is a mirage here, an abstraction. This father, this man without a name, a time and a country speaks for all of us.