Resilience, Pleasure, and Recent Mana’eesh at Minneapolis’s Lebanese Pageant

Each September, households, buddies, and parishioners collect in St. Maron’s Church parking zone in Northeast Minneapolis for the annual Lebanese Pageant. The perfume of lahmajeen and rooster kebab sandwiches, painstakingly ready by volunteers, fills the air; a way of jubilation is palpable. The 2024 competition, held September 21 and 22, marked 33 years since its inception. The competition has spent greater than three a long time serving as a vivid reminder — and casual educator — of Lebanon’s 7,000-year historical past: Its tradition, traditions, folks, and, in fact, its delicacies.

This marked my eleventh yr attending the Lebanese Pageant — I’ve made it an annual custom since a buddy instructed me about it again in 2013. Gatherings like St. Maron’s present a approach for me to raised know my group at massive, and the folks, traditions, and cultures that make it so vibrant. A number of of my different native favorites embody the St. Mary’s Coptic Pageant in South St. Paul, or the Armenian Pageant at St. Sahag church. These festivals play enduring roles each inside these diasporic communities and past them. Laurent Hage, chairperson of the Lebanese Pageant, tells me that the competition is a gathering place for extra than simply St. Maron’s parishioners — many individuals from numerous Levantine communities attend. “That provides us extra accountability and extra visibility as effectively, to essentially protect the tradition and preserve doing it,” he says.

This yr, although the Lebanese Pageant maintained its normal sense of pleasure, information of the unfolding crises in Lebanon appeared to hold within the air over the two-day period. A number of days earlier than the competition, on September 17, 11 folks have been killed and round 2,700 injured in an Israeli pager assault focusing on Hezbollah operatives; that weekend, Israel started a sequence of airstrikes which have since killed hundreds of individuals and displaced greater than 1 million. Israel and Hezbollah have traded fireplace on a near-daily foundation for the previous yr, however the current airstrikes mark a severe escalation in violence.

Ali Elabbady

Ali Elabbady

Chorbishop Sharbel Maroun, generally known as Abouna to his parishioners, has served the church since 1989. He tells me that he had seen through Fb that some Lebanese festivals in different cities had been canceled within the wake of those occasions, however he didn’t need to cancel St. Maron’s. In its 33 years, the competition has been foregrounded by battle and disaster earlier than. Lebanon has lengthy been an “enviornment” the place numerous wars have performed out, Chorbishop Maroun says, citing the primary and second World Wars; the invasions of 1982 and 2006; and the present-day battle. He himself had lived by way of a part of Lebanon’s civil warfare earlier than emigrating to the U.S. within the Nineteen Eighties.

“Battle will not be the making of harmless folks, on all sides and in all international locations,” Chorbishop Maroun says. He wished to forge forward with the competition to spotlight the vitality of Lebanese tradition — even and particularly amid the present disaster. “Once we take a look at the state of affairs in Lebanon, what can we do? Will we simply sit down, lament amongst ourselves, and cry? Or can we attempt to join with these in Lebanon in prayers, and present the world what we’re all about, and why our life is particular?” Ten p.c of the competition’s proceeds go to assist Caritas, a company that’s presently delivering essential help to folks in Lebanon amid the battle.

St. Maron’s

St. Maron’s

Along with the Lebanese feast served on the competition, there’s music and conventional dancing — dabke, to be particular, a Levantine people dance — video games for teenagers, silent auctions, a “cultural retailer” providing conventional meals and spiritual objects, and excursions of St. Maron’s church, a stately stone constructing topped with a golden dome. Chorbishop Maroun says Lebanon is a small nation — one of many smallest within the Levant area, in truth — that has made massive cultural contributions to the world, enumerating all the things from the Phoenician alphabet to Charles Malik, a key author of the United Nations constitution.

That aspect of cultural training is a part of the competition’s mission, however so is the easy pleasure of sharing traditions. “We need to present we’re a those who love life, even once we’re 6,000 or 7,000 miles away from Lebanon,” Chorbishop Maroun says. “We try to point out that we come from one thing that we’re all very pleased with.” He instructed me that, through the years, the competition has expanded, and now many journey from surrounding states to attend: After the pandemic, it was bittersweet and all of the extra particular to see households and buddies reuniting with embraces and handshakes.

Once I arrived on the competition, I rushed to get my area in line for the contemporary mana’eesh, a flatbread usually lashed with a za’atar and olive oil combination throughout the size of dough, which may also be coated in cheese upon request. (A model seasoned with both minced meat and spices known as lahmajeen.) I devoured the accompanying creamy labneh, mint, tomatoes, and olives much more rapidly than the bread itself. My perennial Lebanese Pageant favorites embody rooster kebab sandwiches smeared with toum, a daring garlic unfold; and rice pudding, aromatic with orange blossom water and topped with crushed pistachios. Different festivalgoers opted for conventional desserts like zalabieh, a fried dough seasoned with cinnamon and sugar, which have an analogous consistency to churros.

St. Maron’s

Ali Elabbady

St. Maron’s

I chatted with a number of the volunteers who have been making the mana’eesh, baking it on a domed grill. They instructed me they felt blessed for his or her group and people outdoors of it who wished to partake within the competition and find out about Lebanon’s traditions. For the reason that competition’s inception within the Nineteen Nineties, they mentioned, they’d handled misguided conceptions about Lebanon and its folks. The competition, in any case, isn’t about geopolitics: Folks come to be taught concerning the nation’s tradition, about “what we do and who we’re,” Hage says. And despite the fact that St. Maron’s church is the anchor of the competition, folks of many alternative spiritual backgrounds — adherents of various sections of Christianity, Muslims, and others — volunteer to place it on yearly.

Within the weeks for the reason that competition, because the disaster in Lebanon has deepened, Hage tells me that it’s been very current within the hearts and minds of these at St. Maron’s — folks have been speaking about it “day-after-day,” he says. However the group, which has seen its share of battle, is resilient, and dedicated to dwelling totally. “We discuss it, however we don’t cease life,” he says. “You see folks very upset or very anxious, however they don’t cease what they’re doing day-after-day, proper? That’s one thing that we’ve realized over the past 50 years of warfare.”