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Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora, by Emily Raboteau
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A decade in the making, Emily Raboteau's Searching for Zion takes readers around the world on an unexpected adventure of faith. Both one woman's quest for a place to call "home" and an investigation into a people's search for the Promised Land, this landmark work of creative nonfiction is a trenchant inquiry into contemporary and historical ethnic displacement.
At the age of twenty-three, award-winning writer Emily Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau could not yet say the same for herself. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she'd never felt at home in America. But as a reggae fan and the daughter of a historian of African-American religion, Raboteau knew of "Zion" as a place black people yearned to be. She'd heard about it on Bob Marley's Exodus and in the speeches of Martin Luther King. She understood it as a metaphor for freedom, a spiritual realm rather than a geographical one. Now in Israel, the Jewish Zion, she was surprised to discover black Jews. More surprising was the story of how they got there. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is same she asks herself: have you found the home you're looking for?
On her ten-year journey back in time and around the globe, through the Bush years and into the age of Obama, Raboteau wanders to Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians and African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family--people that have risked everything in search of territory that is hard to define and harder to inhabit. Uniting memoir with historical and cultural investigation, Raboteau overturns our ideas of place and patriotism, displacement and dispossession, citizenship and country in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.
- Sales Rank: #655722 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-01-08
- Released on: 2013-01-08
- Format: Kindle eBook
From Publishers Weekly
"In this profound and accessible meditation on race, novelist (The Professor’s Daughter) and scholar Raboteau depicts her travels from Israel and Jamaica to Africa and the Deep South in search of the elusive African-American notion of “home.”" —Publishers Weekly
From Booklist
"Part political statement, part memoir, this intense personal account roots the mythic perilous journey in the writer’s search for home, in the U.S. and across the globe... sure to inspire intense debate about the search for meaning." —Booklist
From Kirkus Reviews
"No quest for home is ever limited to a simple place, and the author evokes that reality beautifully by focusing on the spiritual aspect of the search for many of African descent...An excellent choice for readers interested in religion, philosophy and the elusive concept of home." — Kirkus
Most helpful customer reviews
22 of 23 people found the following review helpful.
Every little thing gonna be all right ... I hope
By Hui Shen ben Israel
SEARCHING FOR ZION: THE QUEST FOR HOME IN THE AFRICAN DIASPORA by Emily Raboteau (2013, 350 pages) is a most compelling, fascinating and absorbing read. Raboteau, a writing teacher at City College in Harlem, explains her personal, painful journey through our world in a quest for her own identity, her own "home".
Perhaps seeking something she can never get from her distant black father (one of America's most prominent professors of religious history) yet completely ignoring her white mother, New Jersey-born Raboteau starts us with her journey to see her childhood best friend, a devout Jew living in Israel. Raboteau ended with the painful shock of trying to get into Israel at all - she looked too Arab. Once there, she was hurt by the suffering of both the Palestinians and the Jews.
It was strange to see Raboteau's photo all over the net. She looks just like my baby sister: white as a sheet, black hair, deep brown eyes. I have seen a photo of one of her brothers, who looks just like my four brothers: black except with mocha skin. Raboteau herself is as painfully white as I am, contrary to her self-described "wooden spoon" complexion. I know how that feels, not wanting to be quite so pale one day, wondering whether I am really all that pale another day.
This color-confusion makes no sense, and Raboteau never found any answer for it. She would find in Israel she was often mistaken for an Arab; in Maine, close to her native New Jersey she felt what it was like to be purely black since "there are no blacks in Maine"; in Jamaica, probably the most hypocritical place on the planet, she felt what it was like to be despised as "white" (which she technically is according to her skin color).
Later, in Jamaica, someone would tell her she looked like a sabra (native-born Israeli). Amazingly she already understood through her childhood friend what it was like to feel despised as a Jew, though Raboteau herself is Catholic, raised Christian.
This is the story of a person who actually needed a definition of "home" before she could understand what her own definition might be. She discovers the painful, horrible situations of black communities around the world: Beta Israel, the Ethiopian Jews who are being treated like dogs in Israel. The African Hebrew Israelites, a nearly 40-year-old community of American blacks in the Negev Desert in Israel (of whom Whitney Houston had been a member). Among the Ras Tafari of Jamaica who dream of Ethiopia as their home - and an amazing group of little-known Ras Tafarians living in Ethiopia in a sort of accursed, suspended state with no citizenship.
Like me, Raboteau cannot fathom the weird, ignorant hatred borne by those Jamaicans who love and follow Bob Marley's music/message. A lover of Marley's music and message, as I am, Raboteau cannot ever reconcile the evil homophobia which makes Jamaica and its people officially the most homophobic country on earth. She also finds Marley's old Ras Tafari sect drowned in some horrid racism that demonizes everyone who is white.
Bob Marley's father was white! He preached unity and the meaninglessness of skin color! In Ethiopia, among the Jamaicans settled there, she sees a broken-down community of 200 that had once numbered in the thousands, still pining for Haile Selassie. Naturally, they are despised by the locals.
In short, Raboteau found nothing but lost, pained black communities in exile as the Jews had been, among the Americans who continue to carry the scars of slavery, among others who continue to carry the burden of their skin. They are so readily like one another that Raboteau began to feel queasy at the circular conundrum of disenfranchised blacks she had discovered encircling the world. In a Jamaican Sephardic synagogue, she found a mix of black and white Jews who simply said their families had been there for nearly 4 centuries.
They seemed lost also, these Jamaican Jews, because they could not bear up to the slaveholding tenets their ancestors had brought upon the West. Yet the Ethiopian Beta Israel managed to sneak their own personal slaves into Israel with them when they emigrated - and I was disgusted to read that because my colleague, Simcha Jacobovici, had been in a small way responsible for that mass exodus that took so many years.
You must read this book. Raboteau is nothing if not a faithful reporter. She does not hide her immaturity, her lack of general knowledge or her occasional lack of proper English writing skills. At times a bit too self-absorbed, she still manages to convey a sharp, stinging feeling and a great deal of accurate fact. I admire her ability to describe (if not understand) people's weird religious ways. Her restraint among so many stupid zealots is most admirable. Bill Maher should take lessons from her.
This book is a deeply personal book for me. I have often confirmed I am a Jew and proud of it. I have described my black father, whose ancestors might have been Jamaican (we don't know), both my immigrant parents being from old Mexican families, my Catholic upbringing as a Converso Jew.
Too well do I know Raboteau's chilling sense of loss, with her very pale skin never being quite black enough sometimes, sometimes of being a bit too 'black' for comfort (which I actually think is more "person-of-color" than "black"). The desire for spiritual "home" when it is in one's own head the entire time. And the ugliest thing of all: the division amongst people.
I have lived Raboteau's most sensitive pain, being too pale to pass for anything much at all. I have ocular albinism and as a result am pasty white like a German, with violet eyes. Yet I have the black blood in me, and at the most incredible times there are people who have somehow detected it. It is odd, since the black people I have come to love so much do not believe for one second that I am half black or that I am an albino.
The pain is unbearable and nearly indescribable. Raboteau has explained and described it in this book - I think critics of this work totally miss the entire line of thought. She will show you a world full of people who rail against discrimination and division while they do nothing but make it worse. At least she risked herself to bring us this brilliant piece of deep reporting mixed with an autobiographical urgency for one so young (she is still in her 30s).
No more of this fine reading will I spoil for you. Get this book! It is one of the most important books you can ever study, and I do recommend you study it carefully.
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Much more than a memoir; left me breathless and amazed
By Trudie Barreras
This is an astoundingly powerful memoir that is in fact much more than a memoir. To say that it educated me in many areas about which I previously hadn't a clue, including the culture of reggae music and Rastafarians, the existence of Beta Israel, and a great deal of the history of parts of Africa, is just the beginning. In addition, Raboteau brought into clearer focus some recent events with which I have personal connections, such as the Civil Rights marches and boycotts in Alabama (we were teaching at Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University from 1966 - 1974). And then of course there is the vivid description shared in the last section of the book concerning Hurricane Katrina as viewed through the eyes of her cousins.
What I believe Raboteau has accomplished most in superlative style, however, is to share a tremendous diversity of cultural, sociological and spiritual insight not only with keen and vivid observation and lyrical description, but also without losing a sense of balance and reality. She neither glosses over defects in the various circumstances, characters and situations she describes, nor does she become critically judgmental. She "tells it like she experienced it", and leaves the readers to enter with her into the immediacy of the experience or not, as they see fit. The characters she introduces us to are real and fascinating people, not stereotypes in any sense of the word.
The book does indeed leave me a bit breathless and amazed that this young woman was brave enough to investigate all those various cultures, many in states of upheaval and even violent transition, by herself. Never having been a particularly intrepid adventurer, I doubt if I'd have even begun a similar Odyssey. However, although at times she left me feeling a bit white-knuckled, she also left me with a profound sense that I'd enjoyed a valuable opportunity for an enriching glimpse of a vibrant world quite far from my own.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Respectful, honest, fascinating
By Jaylia
This fascinating and powerful memoir took me to places I didn't know I wanted to go and considered questions I didn't know I had. When author Emily Raboteau visits her lifelong best friend at her new home in Israel it sets Raboteau off on a ten year quest to find a homeland of her own. With a black father and white mother giving her an appearance that made it difficult for people to classify her, Raboteau often had the sense that she didn't fit in anywhere. She became intrigued with the idea of a black Zion, or homeland, and that led her first back to Israel to visit the Beta Israelis, Jews from Ethiopia with a long religious tradition who are renamed and re-educated when they immigrate to Israel, and also a community of African American Israelis who have lived for decades in the Negev Desert .
After that she travels to Jamaica to understand more about the culture and beliefs of Rastafarians, Ethiopia to see the settlement created there by Jamaican transplants who are convinced Ethiopia is their promised land, and Ghana to talk to African Americans who relocated there seeking connection with the continent of their ancestors. Raboteau is deeply curious about these peoples, why they moved where they did and how they feel about it now, and this book provides a mesmerizing inside look at their subcultures. She treats everyone she meets with sincere respect, but doesn't gloss over or ignore their shortcomings and inconsistencies--for instance in Ethiopia it's the Jamaicans who are colonizers and they don't always treat the locals well, in spite of their own experience of colonization.
The book ends with Raboteau visiting her Hurricane Katrina displaced relatives in the American South, where she tours sites of the Civil Rights Movement and again considers questions of what makes a home. I learned a lot reading this book, and enjoyed the journey immensely. As an added bonus, Raboteau has a wonderful way with words, deftly picking out details to set a scene or describe the many people she met in her travels.
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