Synopsis
"A brilliant illustration of the ways in which race is an artificial construct that, like beauty, is often a matter of perspective."-The Wall Street Journal
"Frank and expansive . . . Each impressionistic, deeply personal vignette is a building block, detailing [Raboteau's] far-flung search for 'home'--a 'promised land' that's as brick-and-mortar tangible as it is spiritually confirming."--Chicago Tribune
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 twenty-three, Raboteau traveled to Israel to visit her childhood best friend. While her friend appeared to have found a place to belong, Raboteau couldn't relate. As a biracial woman from a country still divided along racial lines, she'd never felt at home in America, unable to find her "Zion," which she defined as a metaphor for freedom. But in Israel, the Jewish Zion, Raboteau was surprised to discover black Jews. Inspired by their exodus, Raboteau sought out other black communities that had left home in search of a Promised Land. Her question for them is the same she asks herself: have you found the home you're looking for?
On this ten-year journey back in time and across the globe, Raboteau visits Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the American South to explore the complex and contradictory perspectives of Black Zionists. She talks to Rastafarians, African Hebrew Israelites, Evangelicals and Ethiopian Jews, and Katrina transplants from her own family, overturning our ideas of place and patriotism, and displacement and dispossession, in a disarmingly honest and refreshingly brave take on the pull of the story of Exodus.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author
Emily Raboteau is the author of the critically acclaimed novel, The Professor's Daughter. Her fiction and essays have appeared in Best American Short Stories, Best African American Fiction, The Guardian, Oxford American, Tin House and elsewhere. Recipient of numerous awards including a Pushcart Prize and a Literature Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts, Raboteau also teaches creative writing at The City College of New York in Harlem.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Searching for Zion
By Emily RaboteauGrove Press
Copyright © 2014 Emily Raboteau
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8021-2227-8All rights reserved.
ISRAEL: We’re Going to Jerusalem
The security personnel of EL AL Airlines descended on me like a flock of vultures. There were five of them, in uniform, blockading Newark Inernational Airport’s check-in counter. Two women, three men. They looked old enough to have finished their obligatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces but not old enough to have finished college, which meant they were slightly younger than me. I was prepared for the initial question, “What are you?”, which I’ve been asked my entire life, and, though it chafed me, I knew the canned answer that would satisfy: “I look the way I do because my mother is white and my father is black.” This time the usual reply wasn’t good enough. This time the interrogation was tribal. They questioned me rapidly, taking turns.
“What do you mean, black? Where are you from?”
“New Jersey.”
“Why are you going to Israel?”
“To visit a friend.”
“What is your friend?”
“She’s a Cancer.”
“She has cancer?”
“No, no. She’s healthy.”
“She’s Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“We grew up together.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“Shalom,” I began. “Barukh atah Adonai…” I couldn’t remember the rest of the blessing, so I finished with a word I remembered for its perfect onomatopoetic rendering of the sound of liquid being poured from the narrow neck of a vessel: “Bakbuk.”
It means bottle. I must have sounded like a babbling idiot.
“That’s all I know,” I said. I felt ridiculous, but also pissed off at them for making me feel that way. I was twenty-three. I was a kid. I was an angry kid and so were they.
“Where is your father from?”
“Mississippi.”
“No.” By now they were exasperated. “Where are your people from?”
“The United States.”
“Before that. Your ancestors. Where did they come from?”
“My mother’s people are from Ireland.”
They looked doubtful. “What kind of name is this?” They pointed at my opened passport.
I felt cornered and all I had to defend myself with was my big mouth. It was so obviously not a time for joking. “A surname,” I joked.
“How do you say it?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s French.” There was a village in Haiti called Raboteau. That much I knew. Raboteau may once have been a sugar plantation, named for its French owner, one of whose slaves may have been my ancestor. It’s also possible I descended from the master himself. Or from both – master and slave.
“You’re French?” they pressed.
“No, I told you. I’m American.”
“This!” They stabbed at my middle name, Ishem. “What is the meaning of this name?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly. I was named after my father’s great-aunt, Emily Ishem, who died of cancer long before I was born. I had little idea where the name came from, just a vague sense that like many slave names, it was European. My father couldn’t name anyone from our family tree before his great-grandmother, Mary Lloyd, a slave from New Orleans. Preceding her was a terrible blank. After Mary Lloyd came Edward Ishem, the son she named after his white father, a merchant marine who threatened to take the boy back with him to Europe. To save him, Mary shepherded her son to the Bay of St. Louis where it empties into the Mississippi Sound. There he grew up and married a Creole woman called, deliciously, Philomena Laneaux. They gave birth to my grandmother, Mabel Sincere, and her favorite sister, Emily Ishem, for whom I am named.
“It sounds Arabic,” one of them remarked.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you speak Arabic?”
“I know better than to try.”
“What do you mean?”
“No, I don’t speak Arabic.”
“What are your origins?”
I felt caught in a loop of the Abbot and Costello routine, “Who’s on first?” There was no place for me inside their rhetoric. I didn’t have the right vocabulary. I didn’t have the right pedigree. My mixed race had made me a perpetual unanswered question. The Atlantic slave trade had made me a mongrel and a threat.
“Ms. Raboteau! Do you want to get on that plane?”
I was beginning to wonder.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Answer the question then! What are your origins?”
What else was I supposed to say?
“A sperm and an egg,” I snapped.
That’s when they grabbed my luggage, whisked me to the basement, stripped off my clothes and probed every inch of my body for explosives, inside and out. When they didn’t find any, they focused on my tattoo, a Japanese character. According to the tattoo artist it meant different, precious, unique.
I was completely naked, and the room was cold. My nipples were hard. I tried to cover myself with my hands. I remember feeling incredibly thirsty. One of them flicked my left shoulder with a latex glove. “What does it mean?” he asked. This was the first time I’d been racially profiled, not that the experience would have been any less humiliating had it been my five hundredth. “It means Fuck You,” I wanted to say, not merely because they’d stripped me of my dignity, but because they’d shoved my face into my own rootlessness. I have never felt more black in my life than I did when I was mistaken for an Arab.
***
Why was I so angry? As a consequence of growing up half white in a nation divided along racial lines, I had never felt at home in the United States. Being half black, I identified with James Baldwin’s line in The Fire Next Time about black GIs returning from war only to discover the democracy they’d risked their lives to defend abroad continued to elude them at home: “Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring.” Though my successful father, Princeton University’s Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion, was an exception to the rule that black people had fewer opportunities, and though I had advantages up the wazoo, I remained so disillusioned about American equality that much of my young adulthood was spent in a blanket of low-burning rage.
I inherited my sense of displacement from my father. It had something to do with the legacy of our slave past. Our ancestors did not come to this country freely, but by force – the general Kunta Kinte rap of the uprooted. But it had even more to do with the particular circumstances of my grandfather’s death. He was murdered in the state of Mississippi in 1943. Afterwards, my grandmother, Mabel, fled North with her children, in search, like so many blacks who left the South, of the Promised Land. It was as if my father, whose father had been ripped from him, had been exiled. My father’s feelings of homelessness, which I took on, were therefore historical and personal. And truthfully, because he left my family when I was sixteen, my estrangement had also to do with the loss of him. My family was broken, and outside of its context, I didn’t belong. The EL AL security staff had turned up the flame beneath these feelings. At twenty-three I hadn’t seen much of the world. I hadn’t yet traveled beyond the borders in my own head.
But now I was boarding a plane to visit my best friend from childhood, Tamar Cohen. With Tamar, I had a home. We loved each other with the fierce infatuation of preadolescent girls—a love that found its form in bike rides along the tow-path, notes written in lemon juice, and pantomimed tea parties at the bottoms of swimming pools. The years we spent growing up in the privileged, picturesque, and predominantly white town of Princeton, New Jersey, where both of our fathers were professors of religious history, were marked by a sense of being different. Tamar’s otherness was cultural: her summers were spent in Israel, her Saturdays at synagogue, and, up until the seventh grade, she attended a yeshiva. I was black. Well, I was blackish in a land where one is expected to be one thing or the other. That was enough to set me apart. I didn’t fit. I looked different from the white kids, though not exactly black.
My otherness was cultural too. I played with black dolls, listened to black music, and, thanks to my parents if not my school, learned black history.
Being different allowed Tamar and me to hold everyone else in slight disdain, especially if they happened to play field hockey or football. We were a unified front against conformity. We stood next to each other in the soprano section of the Princeton High School Choir like two petite soldiers in our matching navy blue robes, sharing a folder of sheet music with a synchronicity of spirit that could trick a listener into believing that we possessed a single voice. When I received my confirmation in Christ, I borrowed Tamar’s bat mitzvah dress.
We were bookish girls, intense and watchful. We spent afternoons sprawled out on my living room rug doing algebra homework while listening to my dad’s old Bob Marley records – Soul Rebel, Catch a Fire, and our favorite, Exodus. Our Friday nights were spent eating Shabbat dinner at her house around the corner on Murray Place. I felt proud being able to recite the Hebrew blessing with her family after the sun went down and the candles were lit: “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam…” Blessed are You, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe…I didn’t actually comprehend the words at the time, but I believed the solemn ritual made me part of something ancient and large.
Perhaps stemming from that belief, much to my father’s chagrin, I started to keep kosher, daintily picking the shrimp and crab legs out of his Mississippi jambalaya until all that remained on my plate was a muck of soupy rice. It was her father’s turn to be upset when we turned eighteen and got matching tattoos on our left shoulder blades. The Torah forbids tattooing (Leviticus 19:28). Tamar’s might someday disqualify her from burial in a Jewish cemetery but we were determined that, no matter where in the world we might end up, no matter how much time might pass, even when we were old and ugly and gray, we would always be able to recognize each other.
Tamar’s father was an expert in medieval Jewish history, while mine specialized in antebellum African-American Christianity. Both men made careers of retrieving and reconstructing the rich histories of ingloriously interrupted peoples. Tamar and I knew at a relatively young age what the word diaspora meant—though to this day that word makes me visualize a diaspore, the white Afro-puff of a dandelion being blown by my lips into a series of wishes across our old backyard: to be known, to be loved, to belong. Our fathers were quietly angry men, and Tamar and I were sensitive to their anger and its roots. I was acutely aware of that grandfather I had lost to a racially motivated hate crime under Jim Crow, though my father didn’t discuss the murder with me. He didn’t need to give words to my grandfather’s absence anymore than Tamar’s father had to give words to the Holocaust. We weren’t raised on diets of victimhood. But there were powerful ghosts in both our houses.
The security personnel of EL AL Airlines descended on me like a flock of vultures. There were five of them, in uniform, blockading Newark Inernational Airport’s check-in counter. Two women, three men. They looked old enough to have finished their obligatory service in the Israeli Defense Forces but not old enough to have finished college, which meant they were slightly younger than me. I was prepared for the initial question, “What are you?”, which I’ve been asked my entire life, and, though it chafed me, I knew the canned answer that would satisfy: “I look the way I do because my mother is white and my father is black.” This time the usual reply wasn’t good enough. This time the interrogation was tribal. They questioned me rapidly, taking turns.
“What do you mean, black? Where are you from?”
“New Jersey.”
“Why are you going to Israel?”
“To visit a friend.”
“What is your friend?”
“She’s a Cancer.”
“She has cancer?”
“No, no. She’s healthy.”
“She’s Jewish?”
“Yes.”
“How do you know her?”
“We grew up together.”
“Do you speak Hebrew?”
“Shalom,” I began. “Barukh atah Adonai…” I couldn’t remember the rest of the blessing, so I finished with a word I remembered for its perfect onomatopoetic rendering of the sound of liquid being poured from the narrow neck of a vessel: “Bakbuk.”
It means bottle. I must have sounded like a babbling idiot.
“That’s all I know,” I said. I felt ridiculous, but also pissed off at them for making me feel that way. I was twenty-three. I was a kid. I was an angry kid and so were they.
“Where is your father from?”
“Mississippi.”
“No.” By now they were exasperated. “Where are your people from?”
“The United States.”
“Before that. Your ancestors. Where did they come from?”
“My mother’s people are from Ireland.”
They looked doubtful. “What kind of name is this?” They pointed at my opened passport.
I felt cornered and all I had to defend myself with was my big mouth. It was so obviously not a time for joking. “A surname,” I joked.
“How do you say it?”
“Don’t ask me. It’s French.” There was a village in Haiti called Raboteau. That much I knew. Raboteau may once have been a sugar plantation, named for its French owner, one of whose slaves may have been my ancestor. It’s also possible I descended from the master himself. Or from both – master and slave.
“You’re French?” they pressed.
“No, I told you. I’m American.”
“This!” They stabbed at my middle name, Ishem. “What is the meaning of this name?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, honestly. I was named after my father’s great-aunt, Emily Ishem, who died of cancer long before I was born. I had little idea where the name came from, just a vague sense that like many slave names, it was European. My father couldn’t name anyone from our family tree before his great-grandmother, Mary Lloyd, a slave from New Orleans. Preceding her was a terrible blank. After Mary Lloyd came Edward Ishem, the son she named after his white father, a merchant marine who threatened to take the boy back with him to Europe. To save him, Mary shepherded her son to the Bay of St. Louis where it empties into the Mississippi Sound. There he grew up and married a Creole woman called, deliciously, Philomena Laneaux. They gave birth to my grandmother, Mabel Sincere, and her favorite sister, Emily Ishem, for whom I am named.
“It sounds Arabic,” one of them remarked.
“Thank you,” I said.
“Do you speak Arabic?”
“I know better than to try.”
“What do you mean?”
“No, I don’t speak Arabic.”
“What are your origins?”
I felt caught in a loop of the Abbot and Costello routine, “Who’s on first?” There was no place for me inside their rhetoric. I didn’t have the right vocabulary. I didn’t have the right pedigree. My mixed race had made me a perpetual unanswered question. The Atlantic slave trade had made me a mongrel and a threat.
“Ms. Raboteau! Do you want to get on that plane?”
I was beginning to wonder.
“Do you?”
“Yes.”
“Answer the question then! What are your origins?”
What else was I supposed to say?
“A sperm and an egg,” I snapped.
That’s when they grabbed my luggage, whisked me to the basement, stripped off my clothes and probed every inch of my body for explosives, inside and out. When they didn’t find any, they focused on my tattoo, a Japanese character. According to the tattoo artist it meant different, precious, unique.
I was completely naked, and the room was cold. My nipples were hard. I tried to cover myself with my hands. I remember feeling incredibly thirsty. One of them flicked my left shoulder with a latex glove. “What does it mean?” he asked. This was the first time I’d been racially profiled, not that the experience would have been any less humiliating had it been my five hundredth. “It means Fuck You,” I wanted to say, not merely because they’d stripped me of my dignity, but because they’d shoved my face into my own rootlessness. I have never felt more black in my life than I did when I was mistaken for an Arab.
***
Why was I so angry? As a consequence of growing up half white in a nation divided along racial lines, I had never felt at home in the United States. Being half black, I identified with James Baldwin’s line in The Fire Next Time about black GIs returning from war only to discover the democracy they’d risked their lives to defend abroad continued to elude them at home: “Home! The very word begins to have a despairing and diabolical ring.” Though my successful father, Princeton University’s Henry W. Putnam Professor of Religion, was an exception to the rule that black people had fewer opportunities, and though I had advantages up the wazoo, I remained so disillusioned about American equality that much of my young adulthood was spent in a blanket of low-burning rage.
I inherited my sense of displacement from my father. It had something to do with the legacy of our slave past. Our ancestors did not come to this country freely, but by force – the general Kunta Kinte rap of the uprooted. But it had even more to do with the particular circumstances of my grandfather’s death. He was murdered in the state of Mississippi in 1943. Afterwards, my grandmother, Mabel, fled North with her children, in search, like so many blacks who left the South, of the Promised Land. It was as if my father, whose father had been ripped from him, had been exiled. My father’s feelings of homelessness, which I took on, were therefore historical and personal. And truthfully, because he left my family when I was sixteen, my estrangement had also to do with the loss of him. My family was broken, and outside of its context, I didn’t belong. The EL AL security staff had turned up the flame beneath these feelings. At twenty-three I hadn’t seen much of the world. I hadn’t yet traveled beyond the borders in my own head.
But now I was boarding a plane to visit my best friend from childhood, Tamar Cohen. With Tamar, I had a home. We loved each other with the fierce infatuation of preadolescent girls—a love that found its form in bike rides along the tow-path, notes written in lemon juice, and pantomimed tea parties at the bottoms of swimming pools. The years we spent growing up in the privileged, picturesque, and predominantly white town of Princeton, New Jersey, where both of our fathers were professors of religious history, were marked by a sense of being different. Tamar’s otherness was cultural: her summers were spent in Israel, her Saturdays at synagogue, and, up until the seventh grade, she attended a yeshiva. I was black. Well, I was blackish in a land where one is expected to be one thing or the other. That was enough to set me apart. I didn’t fit. I looked different from the white kids, though not exactly black.
My otherness was cultural too. I played with black dolls, listened to black music, and, thanks to my parents if not my school, learned black history.
Being different allowed Tamar and me to hold everyone else in slight disdain, especially if they happened to play field hockey or football. We were a unified front against conformity. We stood next to each other in the soprano section of the Princeton High School Choir like two petite soldiers in our matching navy blue robes, sharing a folder of sheet music with a synchronicity of spirit that could trick a listener into believing that we possessed a single voice. When I received my confirmation in Christ, I borrowed Tamar’s bat mitzvah dress.
We were bookish girls, intense and watchful. We spent afternoons sprawled out on my living room rug doing algebra homework while listening to my dad’s old Bob Marley records – Soul Rebel, Catch a Fire, and our favorite, Exodus. Our Friday nights were spent eating Shabbat dinner at her house around the corner on Murray Place. I felt proud being able to recite the Hebrew blessing with her family after the sun went down and the candles were lit: “Barukh atah Adonai, Eloheinu melech ha’olam…” Blessed are You, Lord, our God, sovereign of the universe…I didn’t actually comprehend the words at the time, but I believed the solemn ritual made me part of something ancient and large.
Perhaps stemming from that belief, much to my father’s chagrin, I started to keep kosher, daintily picking the shrimp and crab legs out of his Mississippi jambalaya until all that remained on my plate was a muck of soupy rice. It was her father’s turn to be upset when we turned eighteen and got matching tattoos on our left shoulder blades. The Torah forbids tattooing (Leviticus 19:28). Tamar’s might someday disqualify her from burial in a Jewish cemetery but we were determined that, no matter where in the world we might end up, no matter how much time might pass, even when we were old and ugly and gray, we would always be able to recognize each other.
Tamar’s father was an expert in medieval Jewish history, while mine specialized in antebellum African-American Christianity. Both men made careers of retrieving and reconstructing the rich histories of ingloriously interrupted peoples. Tamar and I knew at a relatively young age what the word diaspora meant—though to this day that word makes me visualize a diaspore, the white Afro-puff of a dandelion being blown by my lips into a series of wishes across our old backyard: to be known, to be loved, to belong. Our fathers were quietly angry men, and Tamar and I were sensitive to their anger and its roots. I was acutely aware of that grandfather I had lost to a racially motivated hate crime under Jim Crow, though my father didn’t discuss the murder with me. He didn’t need to give words to my grandfather’s absence anymore than Tamar’s father had to give words to the Holocaust. We weren’t raised on diets of victimhood. But there were powerful ghosts in both our houses.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Searching for Zion by Emily Raboteau. Copyright © 2014 Emily Raboteau. Excerpted by permission of Grove Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.
Other Popular Editions of the Same Title
Search results for Searching for Zion
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Acceptable. Item in acceptable condition! Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00080111374
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: World of Books (was SecondSale), Montgomery, IL, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Item in good condition. Textbooks may not include supplemental items i.e. CDs, access codes etc. Seller Inventory # 00085089398
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: BooksRun, Philadelphia, PA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Fair. The item might be beaten up but readable. May contain markings or highlighting, as well as stains, bent corners, or any other major defect, but the text is not obscured in any way. Seller Inventory # 0802122272-7-1
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0802122272I4N00
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: ThriftBooks-Dallas, Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. No Jacket. May have limited writing in cover pages. Pages are unmarked. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0802122272I4N00
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: ThriftBooks-Atlanta, AUSTELL, GA, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Good. No Jacket. Pages can have notes/highlighting. Spine may show signs of wear. ~ ThriftBooks: Read More, Spend Less. Seller Inventory # G0802122272I3N00
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Published by
Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 2014
ISBN 10: 0802122272
ISBN 13: 9780802122278
Used
Softcover
Seller: Better World Books: West, Reno, NV, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Very Good. Pages intact with possible writing/highlighting. Binding strong with minor wear. Dust jackets/supplements may not be included. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 13994971-6
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Published by
Grove/Atlantic, Incorporated, 2014
ISBN 10: 0802122272
ISBN 13: 9780802122278
Used
Softcover
Seller: Better World Books, Mishawaka, IN, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Condition: Good. Former library copy. Pages intact with minimal writing/highlighting. The binding may be loose and creased. Dust jackets/supplements are not included. Includes library markings. Stock photo provided. Product includes identifying sticker. Better World Books: Buy Books. Do Good. Seller Inventory # 14243347-6
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: Once Upon A Time Books, Siloam Springs, AR, U.S.A.
Seller rating 4 out of 5 stars
paperback. Condition: Good. This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear . This is a used book in good condition and may show some signs of use or wear . Seller Inventory # mon0003494242
Stock Image
Searching for Zion
Seller: HPB Inc., Dallas, TX, U.S.A.
Seller rating 5 out of 5 stars
Paperback. Condition: Very Good. Connecting readers with great books since 1972! Used books may not include companion materials, and may have some shelf wear or limited writing. We ship orders daily and Customer Service is our top priority! Seller Inventory # S_400294366