“Cedars in the Pines,” an exhibition about Lebanese immigrants in North Carolina, opened Saturday at the North Carolina Museum of History. The exhibit will run through Aug. 31.

More than 270 people attended the reception at the museum Friday, which included a performance by the Triangle Lebanese Association according to Marjorie Merod, assistant director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies.

The exhibit represents the culmination of three to four years of work, according to Akram Khater, the director of the Khayrallah Program for Lebanese-American Studies, director of the Middle East Studies Program and a professor of history. 

It started as an oral history project funded by Moise Khayrallah, a Lebanese-American, who approached Khater in his quest to gain a sense of community in the land of the pines. The project’s purpose involved collecting stories and memorabilia from those who immigrated to the state from about 1880 to the 1920s and from 1945 onward.

“After 9/11 the whole idea of being Arab-American became so closely tied to terrorism, and that of course includes the Lebanese-Americans, and when people are thinking nicely about Lebanese Americans, they think of tabouli, so it’s between terrorism and tabouli: Those are the two things we seem to be,” Khater said. “It’s just that we were seen as these newcomers and these ‘others’ that both culturally and physically were alien to America.” 

The exhibit will tell the story of the Lebanese immigrants in three parts: journeys (how and why they immigrated), belonging (how they integrated to life here) and being (how they maintained a sense of identity and heritage), according to Khater. Each of the sections will contain panels with text, photos and artifacts, such as an old Arabic Bible, newspapers, musical instruments, clothing and religious iconographies.

“I think it makes us more aware of the history of our neighbors,” Merod said.

Visitors will also get the chance to simulate life as an immigrant through interactive stations, according to Khater.

“When the first wave arrived here, many of them — men and women — worked as peddlers,” Khater said. “They would carry these suitcases, and they would literally walk the back roads of North Carolina to farmhouses and small towns selling things like thread and needle, lace, clothes, sheets, towels — anything that people needed. In essence they were the original Sears catalog…and so we have this low-tech thing in which you pick up one of the suitcases, which has 25 pounds, and imagine yourself walking 50 miles with that.”

Other simulations include letting people experience what it felt like to be in a third-class cabin as the Lebanese crossed the Atlantic, hearing early Arabic music and touching silk, a former cash crop. In Lebanon, its decline helped spark the immigration in the first place. More high-tech activities allow attendees to play games in which they decide whether they should leave Lebanon or not after being presented with a scenario, as well as an Xbox dance game in which participants can learn how to dance the dabke, according to Khater. 

Children’s programs, music concerts and film festivals will make debuts periodically throughout the exhibit’s duration in order to attract the general public, but especially K-12 students to the exhibit, according to Khater.

“I think the biggest challenge is trying to tell the story in a way that is evocative and not sensationalist,” Khater said. “People entrusted us with one of the most precious things they have, which is their very own life story.”

For example, many participants seemed to be reluctant to talk about race because they had arrived during the time of the Jim Crow laws, which enforced racial segregation and made a welcoming atmosphere hard to come by, according to Khater.

  “When we ask them these stories, many of them are of course long past those days. They’ve settled into the American mainstream ,and it’s perhaps their parents and grandparents who struggled more than them, and so I think in many ways they would tell the story much more passingly — they would just kind of minimize how important [race] was,” Khater said. “So on one hand you have to respect the story, and on the other hand, you have to tell the story: that there were race issues.”  

The Lebanese make up the largest Arab community in the United States, with about 16,000 Lebanese-Americans living in North Carolina, according to Khater.

“Anyone that has grown up in North Carolina probably knows a Lebanese-American,” Merod said. 

With such a large population, many of which are highly educated, they contribute about $4.5 billion to the state’s economy each year, Khater said. Key Lebanese economic players include the George family, who own Merchant’s Distributors and Lowe’s Foods, and Greg Khatem, who helped revitalize downtown Raleigh by opening a number of restaurants such as Sitti. 

We can also enjoy Lebanese cuisine and get a sense of their culture through music and film festivals, Khater said.

“All of these things enrich life here and give it meaning,” he said. “It’s not that there’s anything unique about Lebanese or Arab Americans — I think you can see the same things about the Polish, about Jews, about Mexicans, Hispanics — and it is this constant infusion of new people that add to the tapestry of life here.”

In a land of immigrants, the Lebanese have also become “neighbors,” according to Khater.

“In daily conversations and in daily interactions we bring a different way of being and thinking, a different way of family, a different way of appreciating the world, even a different perspective of what the world looks like — politically, culturally, economically,” he said.

Once the exhibit leaves the museum on Aug. 31, the Lebanese story will continue with an exhibit at Tryon Palace in New Bern, after which it will move to Charlotte, according to Khater. Cedars in the Pines, which currently consists of about 30 participants, will then make national rounds after they build a center in Washington D.C., as well as build relations with the international Lebanese community.

“The story of immigration is universal, and it’s ironic that the first wave that comes here in the 1600s starts getting threatened when the 1700 wave comes in and the 1800 and the 1900, but if you look at it the story is very similar,” Khater said. “It’s people trying to make a better life for themselves.”