La Mi-Carême, this almost thousand-year-old celebration, which had largely disappeared from Quebec, is starting to be celebrated again. Three localities, including Montreal, have recently been added to the very short list of places where we highlight this moment of rejoicing used to make preposterous costumes… and the social fabric.
Thursday evening. Rosemount. A small radio plays a violin tune. The apartment looks like a normal little party with friends. In no time, about twenty masked and costumed people fill the house, guitar, tambourine and melodica in hand. Let’s go for the Mid-Lent celebration.
“You have to pack the furniture to dance,” says one of the masked guests. “Tamp down the walls! replies another.
An hour later, all these beautiful people leave the place to invade a new accommodation. This curious hullabaloo is repeated in three apartments in the same alley. This is what the revival of Mi-Carême looks like in Montreal, a tradition lost with post-war modernity.
This celebration, as its name suggests, has divided the period of deprivation of Lent for centuries. The game at this party is to dress up until you become unrecognizable to your neighbors. We then go from house to house, like on Halloween, but to collect food and alcohol. Historians trace the origin of Mi-Carême to medieval France, where the rigor of Lent imposed in 1091 by the Council of Benevento had provoked resistance. This masked carnival then made it possible to break the prohibitions without being recognized.
Landed in America with the French regime, Mi-Carême flourished in Quebec and Acadia until the 1960s. Acadie — have kept this practice going.
In today’s Montreal, we dress up as best we can: Venetian masks, sunglasses, balaclavas… It matters less, because visitors here are strangers. The important thing is to get to know your neighbours, says party organizer Mireille Malaket on Friday morning.
“We created a community in that alley. It’s a small village, basically, that corner. And then, it’s really to create a neighborhood social fabric. For many, we arrived at their place like strangers. Who are they, playing the violin in my living room? »
Inspired by the Mi-Lent of the Magdalen Islands, Mireille Malaket would like to see a tradition continue that allows “people who live next door without knowing it” to meet.
Sad irony of fate, she will have to leave her neighborhood this summer, victim of a resumption of housing.
A queer Mi-Carême in Rimouski
Mi-Carême is also reborn in Rimouski. The capital of Bas-Saint-Laurent had not seen such masks and costumes in March since the 1960s, confirms the artist behind the Mi-Carême de Rimouski project, Flo Mailhot-Léonard.
Again, the party took a carnivalesque turn. Twenty-five artists in small groups circulated “spontaneously, without schedule” in five houses and in a residence for the elderly in order to brighten up the Saturday evening.
“We are a small community. Some people recognized each other, like in the traditional game,” she notes.
She also wanted to add an “inclusive touch” by inviting drag queens to the ball and by grafting the celebration to the Festiqueer in Rimouski.
This addition does not swear with the past, underlines Flo Mailhot-Léonard. “There has been a history of cross-dressing since the Middle Ages,” she notes, while evoking the “Mid-Carême balls” which brought together the gay community of Paris in the 1920s.
We stopped running the Mi-Carême when the religious power diminished.
“From the outset, it is a protest party. […] Religious authorities tried to ban the party. At the end of the 19theearly XXe century, we have plenty of examples of priests who issued bans on Mi-Carême. When there were these ordinances, it was because Mi-Carême continued to be celebrated behind the priest’s back. When there are no longer these ordinances, this is where the Mi-Carême stops being celebrated, ”recounts the one who accumulates hours of research on the subject. “In fact, we stopped running the Mi-Carême when religious power diminished. »
Isle-aux-Grues started the Mi-Carême festivities again in 1976, after a break of 15 years, which gives hope to Flo Mailhot-Léonard to rehabilitate this piece of history. This time, “we are changing the traditions so that they are sustainable”.
Tomorrows that sing in Saint-Grégoire
In the Saint-Grégoire sector, in Bécancour, Marie-Ève Bourke also relaunched the Mi-Carême ball, in the form of a house-to-house parade that lasted three days.
“We arrived at people’s homes, festive, with music on small speakers. We stayed away from the door so they wouldn’t feel attacked. Masked strangers anyway… And there, I ended up lifting my mask. I was saying that we celebrate Mi-Lent. We explained what it was and we invited them to the party of [samedi]. We wanted to have a village festival. Today, it’s every man for himself, so we wanted to bring the people of the village together. »
No one had kept the memory of Mi-Carême in the village, except for a native of the Magdalen Islands. “We remember American Mardi Gras, but it’s not quite the same,” says Ms.me Bourke. The final celebration at the local Cultural Center drew hundreds of people, including masks. Public figures from the village lent themselves to the game of being discovered by the crowd.
And this is just the beginning, promises Marie-Ève Bourke.
“I would like to return to village life. Do you know your neighbor? Do you care about the people around you and do you want to celebrate with them? The more we go to Mi-Carême, the more you will be able to recognize the person who passes by your door. »
Despite the three years of pandemic which have stopped everything, this festival of masks and deceptions is not about to die out in the more isolated villages, guardians of tradition.
Mi-Carême “enthusiasts” always prepare their costumes in secret, months in advance, confirm to the Duty Natashquan regulars. “My team has ideas [de costumes] for the next twenty years, ”noted Édith Rousseau, the organizer at L’Isle-aux-Grues, on local television. Same story with Madelinots with their inexhaustible imagination.