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 “Lebanese
food, we make it every Sunday. I make kibbe, cabbage rolls.
When I get depressed I make grape leaves. I’m Pat Davis,
Abe’s Bar-B-Q,
Clarksdale, Mississippi, at the famous corner of 49 and 61.
My father was from Zahale, Lebanon. He came to America in the
early 1900s. He was doing some pretty good peddling. Back then,
the Lebanese mostly were peddlers. 1924 he opened up a barbeque
restaurant.
This is the main highway where The Crossroads are,
where we think Robert Johnson made a deal with the devil to
play good blues music. Robert Johnson used to sit around where
the sycamore trees were, playing his guitar, drinking a Bud
and eating one of our barbeque sandwiches.”
— Pat Davis, Abe’s Bar-B-Q
Photo - Syrian peddler, Kalil Michwee,
circa 1917 in The South. Courtesy of the Birmingham Library |
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Reading Kibbe
Crumbs by
John T. Edge |
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Historian James Cobb calls
the Mississippi Delta the “most Southern place on earth.” His
read of that region – an hour’s drive from my home
in the Mississippi Hill Country town of Oxford – is
faceted and accommodates contradictions. More simplistic
reads of the Delta assume that a profoundly Southern place
must be solely defined by tensions between Blacks and Whites,
between descendants of Scotch-Irish and African American
peoples.
And those tensions have been famously strong in the Delta.
But there are other stories, other peoples. Chinese grocery
stores, remnants of late 19th century immigration and assimilation,
still dot towns like Greenville. Sicilian Creole restaurants
such as Lusco’s and Giardina’s are still the
stalwarts in Greenwood. And Lebanese restaurateurs of the
kibbe-and-fried-chicken school still hold forth in Clarksdale.
The Delta is Southern to its core. But the fabric of peoples
that call this place home has always been more variegated
than many would suspect.
— John T Edge / Southern
Foodways Alliance / University of Mississippi
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Community
& Conventions |
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The Southern Federation of
Syrian Lebanese American Clubs |
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Organized in 1931 by first-generation
Americans of Syrian Lebanese descent, the entire national
Federation Family gathers twice annually at their Summer
and Mid-Winter Conventions to celebrate their heritage through
food, dance and cultural activities. Couples meet, kids learn
how to dance the Dabke, the national dance of Lebanon, scholarships
are given out and community bonds are strengthened. “Years
ago it was the Lebanese Convention, now it's the Syrian
American Lebanese Convention. “Most of the young men
come to find young wives. I found mine there.” Pat Davis
told us.
Irv Schwary, from New Orleans and former
president of the Federation, told us that The Southern Federation
of 18 states is the only group that has continued to flourish
over the years. “I
think it’s
because we gear our conventions towards the family and the
young ones. They love the Lebanese
music and dancing.”
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Dancing at one of the local
club functions, 1988. Courtesy of Irv Schwary |
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Cooking |
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Over 3.2 million people
of Arab descent make their home in the United States. Of
that number, approximately 56 percent are of Lebanese descent,
making them the largest single group of Arab immigrants in
the United States. The largest concentrations are in the
Midwest, especially in Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, and Toledo.
The Arab American
National Museum in Dearborn, Michigan searched
their archives for us and sent us these photos of community
cooking.
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Tangential
Notes |
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Maude Schuyler Clay - Delta
Land |
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On our way to Clarksdale we stopped in Greenwood, Mississippi,
with Alice Waters to go visit the Viking Range plant, and the
new school the company was building in town. We were exploring
the possibilities of an edible
schoolyard becoming part of the school’s design and
curriculum in a state with such a low rate of literacy and high
rate of obesity. At Turnrow
Books in Greenwood we met Mississippi photographer, Maude
Schuyler Clay, who grew up in the area and has captured its crumbling
and beautiful soul in hundreds of haunting black and white photographs. In
her book, Delta
Land she documents collapsing churches and farmhouses,
delta dogs, river beds and woods. She graciously shares
a few of her images. Maude is also the niece of famed Memphis
color photographer, William
Eggleston. |
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Kim’s Lunchbox |
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Head out New Africa Road in Clarksdale during
cotton harvest during lunchtime. Several
miles down you come to Kim’s Lunchbox, a big shed with a kitchen in the
middle of cotton country. That’s where a lot of farmers and locals
go for a break and a meal. Fried chicken, salmon croquettes, yams, greens,
pie. Friday nights, Kim’s got steak. Taxidermy, historical
photographs, the walls talk. Kim cooks, her mother helps in
front. It’s pure community. As one customer put it, “They’ve
got a tin roof, and they have animals hanging up on the wall, saddles, and bobcats,
rattlesnakes and a lot of deer horn. It’s just a comfortable place to come
to. ” |
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Khalil Gibran |
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Gibran Khalil Gibran was a
Lebanese-born poet, philosopher and artist. Born in Bisharri,
Lebanon (at the time a Syrian Province of the Ottoman Empire)
in 1883, Gibran emigrated with his family at age 12 to the
United States where he spent much of his adulthood. Gibran's
best-known work is The Prophet, a book composed of 26 poetic
essays.
"Pity the Nation" a poem from his book 'The Garden
of The Prophet' seems to resonate and inspire even today.
Legendary Beat Generation Bookseller and Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti,
of City Lights Books in San Francisco, on the 50th Anniversary
of Jack Kerouac’s “On The Road”, Allen
Ginsberg’s “Howl" read his newest poem
by the same title "Pity the
Nation" (After Kahlil Gibran). We've included both versions
here below. To watch Ferlinghetti
perform on youtube
click here. |
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PITY
THE NATION - Khalil Gibran
Pity the nation that is full of beliefs
and empty of religion.
Pity the nation that wears a cloth it does not weave, eats
a bread it does not harvest, and drinks a wine that flows not
from its own wine-press.
Pity the nation that acclaims the bully as hero, and that deems
the glittering conqueror bountiful. Pity the nation that despises
a passion in its dream, yet submits in its awakening.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice save when it walks
in a funeral, boasts not except among its ruins, and will rebel
not save when its neck is laid between the sword and the block.
Pity the nation whose statesman is a fox, whose philosopher
is a juggler, and whose art is the art of patching and mimicking.
Pity the nation that welcomes its new ruler with trupetings,
and farewells him with hootings, only to welcome another with
trumpetings again.
Pity the nation whose sages are dumb with years and whose strong
men are yet in the cradle.
Pity the nation divided into fragments, eachfragment deeming
itself a nation. |
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PITY
THE NATION - L. Ferlinghetti
(After Khalil Gibran)
Pity the nation
whose people are sheep,
and whose shepherds mislead them.
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars, whose sages are
silenced,
and whose bigots haunt the airwaves.
Pity the nation that raises not its voice,
except to praise
conquerors and acclaim the bully as hero
and aims to rule the world with force and by torture.
Pity the nation that knows no other language but its own
and no other culture but its own.
Pity the nation whose breath is money and sleeps the sleep
of the too well fed.
Pity the nation -- oh, pity the people who allow their rights
to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away.
My country, tears of thee, sweet land of liberty.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti,2007 |
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Copyright © 2006
The Kitchen Sisters
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