Mint Grows Through the Cracks in the Foundation: Food Practices of the Lebanese Diaspora in New England (USA)

AMY E. ROWE DECEMBER 2008 Mint grows through the cracks in the foundation: Food practices of the Lebanese Diaspora in New England (USA) Food & Migration Workshop, SOAS, 2-3 Feb. 2009 Amy E. Rowe I. Introduction: (Lebanese) Mint in the (American) Landscape The house had been empty for a while, and it looked a little tired but we knew we could fix it up quite easily. It just needed a little TLC [tender loving care]. When we looked at the exterior of the property with our surveyor, that was when I first noticed the mint growing everywhere. It was running through the flowerbeds and even through the cracks in the foundation of the house, through the concrete! We knew immediately this must have been a Lebanese house at some point. Who else would have large plots of mint around here? We laughed at the hearty nature of the herb—it is so resilient! It will keep on growing despite having no Lebanese owners tending it. This gave us a good feeling about the place—we felt it gave us a connection. We bought the house the next day… (Fieldnotes, 30 Nov. 2005). This excerpt is from a conversation with Jean and Mike, a third-generation1 Lebanese couple about the house they had bought in Winslow, Maine in 2002. After Jean narrated the discovery of the mint, her husband Mike described that after buying the house they asked their Lebanese friends and family questions about the property. They learned that a first-generation Lebanese brother and sister from the Sarkis family had lived there many years before (both never married). But Jean and Mike did not really need this confirmation—the mint had already told them this must be the case. It just helped them put a name to the Lebanese history of the house. The mint points to historic food practices and suggests that despite the Lebanese brother and sister moving away long ago, there is a Lebanese resilience embedded in that place. Discussion about mint often emerged during my fieldwork with descendants of Ottoman-era Lebanese immigrants in rural New England (U.S.A.). As a close confidant, Doris, declared soon after we met: “You can always tell a Lebanese house by the size of the plot of mint growing in the garden.” At first I took this sort of comment to be an enjoyable exaggeration, a way to tell me that fresh and dried spearmint leaves were an important ingredient in Lebanese cooking. Yet as people increasingly pointed out places where mint was growing near houses, I came to realize that this was in fact a way in which they themselves identify a Lebanese house. The Lebanese mention that if they see mint growing near a person’s home they will use that as a starting point to ask questions to find out if the residents of the house are Lebanese. They discussed this code with me, offering it as something I could use to identify Lebanese houses. It was shared as an “old wives tale,” but delivered with an undertone of seriousness as a true way to locate and identify the Lebanese people in American towns. While mint is in plain view in the landscape, only those who know how to interpret its significance can read the Lebanese story. The mint is a material artefact of 1 First-generation refers to the migrants while second-generation (etc.) refers to those born in the U.S. 1 AMY E. ROWE DECEMBER 2008 Lebanese food practice which endures in an arguably American cultural space—the house structure itself, the neighbourhood, the layout of the streets, the (presumably) American inhabitants of houses once Lebanese people move out. Thus the house that Jean and Mike purchased has processual aspects (Carsten & Hugh-Jones 1995); rather than serve as a static backdrop to social life, it balances a dominant American expression (in the bricks and mortar, the architectural style, etc.) with subtle, organic Lebanese attributes (living, growing plants which envelop the house and have the potential to feed the inhabitants). The Lebanese aspects are not diminished just because Lebanese people are no longer living there and tending to the mint. The plant outlives people, and can narrate a Lebanese presence in a unique way. I open this paper with a discussion of (Lebanese) mint growing around an (American) house because it indicates how my informants imagine a Lebanese cultural space. As I will show, they enact food practices within spaces like this which are in harmony with the surrounding American cultural space (and expectations) and go largely unnoticed by non-Lebanese people. Further, their foodways have been symbolically detached from “Lebanese culture” so that my informants—who identify as white Christian Americans and reject “Lebanese-American” ethnic labels—can use them. In short, my fieldwork findings reveal that food practices are central to constructing my informants’ sense of “Lebanese” identity, yet are precisely designed for themselves as “assimilated” “Americans.” These observations are especially significant because “ethnic” food practices are commonly assumed—within popular culture and academia—to signify valiantly holding on to an ethnic past or to indicate participation in multicultural America. Production/consumption of “ethnic” food is often depicted as a symbol of being a hyphenated ethnic American due to resisting total assimilation or as proof of being “unmeltable” (as in Michael Novak’s (1972) formulation). This suggests either a decision to not become entirely American (by valiantly holding on to artefacts of the past), or an inability to do so. In a review of academic literature regarding the relationship between American ethnic identities and food, J. Holtzman assesses that the literature does not interrogate the process: “Although a rich and engaging literature exists, many studies tend toward the atheoretical, relying on popular culture notions of the resilience of ethnic difference within the melting pot, rather than theorizing this phenomenon” (2006: 366). I would also add that a lessening in frequency of using ethnic foods is often construed as evidence that ethnic peoples are assimilating (Alba 1990, Douglas 2003); measurements about the degree of ethnicity are often made in relation to frequency of eating ethnic cuisine at home, or to eating the “authentic/traditional,” not hybrid or creolized, versions of the cuisine (c.f. Lu & Fine 1995). Thus conceptions of purity, frequency, inherence, and nostalgia emerge as the key terms dominating the discussion of food and migration. My intention in this paper is to hold such standard assessments aside in order to ask how and why identities are expressed via food and food practices for people who are not recognized as an “ethnic” or “minority” group today because they are “assimilated,” but who do express what one might call “Lebanese” cultural traits that link them to others in the Lebanese diaspora. Ethnographic examples will demonstrate how they use food practices to locate one another, communicate, maintain relationships, honour their ancestors, and pass knowledge to the next generation. 2 AMY E. ROWE DECEMBER 2008 II. Maintaining the Assimilation Standard Before addressing the modes of food-based interaction, I will provide more detail about the specific fieldwork context. I did a year of fieldwork with people of Lebanese ancestry in rural and small town northern New England—meaning in the following states: Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont. Sometimes referred to as the northcountry, this region is imagined to be a mixture of untouched nature and pre-industrial agricultural villages with a “Yankee” (WASP) population descended from early colonial pioneers (c.f. Brown 1995, Wood 1997, Lewis 1993, Lindgren1995, Senecal 2003, Conforti 2001, Nissenbaum 1996, Harrison 2006). Produced and reproduced for well over a century in paintings, postcards, magazines, novels, travel brochures and the like, this image holds incredible popularity and makes it difficult to imagine that Arabic-speaking Christian immigrants2 settled here in the early twentieth century and that their descendants are dispersed throughout the region today. Often described as one of the “whitest” parts of the nation in common parlance and confirmed by U.S. census measurements,3 ethnic and racial “others” (i.e. those other than the white Yankee racial types) are not thought to be constituent members of the region’s population. Yet around twenty percent of New England’s population4 was foreign-born in the early twentieth century, with these immigrants considered to be “ethnic” and “not-quite-white” or of “inbetween” racial designation (c.f. Samhan 1999, Orsi 1992, Barrett & Roediger 1997, Jacobson 1998). The expectation for these first- generation immigrants was to “assimilate,” meaning one had to shed “foreign” ways, to mix with others in society, and to join the “melting pot” in which diverse types melted into a singular uniformity (Lowe 1996: 29-30). The Lebanese in the northcountry worked both as factory workers (especially in textile factories) and as peddlers, working door to door selling wares and covering a vast geographical terrain. Those who peddled often opened small grocery or dry goods stores in areas where they worked, and subsequently encouraged relatives and co-villagers to join them. What this meant was that there was a low-density Lebanese population spread across the region; though some towns, like Barre, Vermont, Dover, New Hampshire, and Waterville, Maine, had larger concentrations of first-generation Lebanese, by and large their numbers were small and the pressure to assimilate, alongside other foreign-born Europeans, was strong. Some of my informants described they themselves raced toward becoming American while others framed it as not really a choice but as a necessity for survival in American society—that is if they wanted to do business, to succeed (in a monetary sense), and gain acceptance within the larger society.

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