Searching for Zion

October 22, 2012
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.” Being both white and black, with an Irish mother and Southern-born black father, and growing up in Princeton, N.J., where her father taught African-American religion at Princeton, Raboteau had always felt “blackish in a land where one is supposed to be one thing or the other.” Raboteau looks at various scenarios of “home” for black folks and finds it’s never quite what they imagined it to be. For the slaves, for example, Canaan was due North, yet once they got there it didn’t prove to be a place of milk and honey. For her Jewish best friend, Tamar, “home” meant Israel, which institutionalized the Right of Return to any wandering Jew, even Ethiopians, yet Israel’s exclusion of Palestinians deeply unsettled Raboteau (“What kind of screwed-up Canaan has an intifada?”). For the Rastafarians, who look at their nation of Jamaica as a kind of Babylon, praying in the name of Bob Marley for One Love, as long as it excludes homosexuals, the Promised Land is Ethiopia, home of king Haile Selassie, whom many Rastafarians believe was a martyr. Yet among the Ethiopians and Ghanaians, Raboteau discovered unhealed wounds from racism, slavery, and economic inequality. Even among the devoted followers of the slick Southern preacher Creflo Dollar, the author never quite reconciled deep-seated unease about safety with faith, though her earnest, interior study is well worth the journey.

December 1, 2012
Part political statement, part memoir, this intense personal account roots the mythic perilous journey in the biracial writer's search for home, in the U.S. and across the globe. At 23, she leaves Harlem to visit her high-school friend Tamar Cohen in Jerusalem. Tamar lost her grandfather to the Holocaust; Emily lost her grandfather to a Jim Crow hate crime. For black Jews, like those from Ethiopia, could Israel be home? Then she interviews Americans who immigrated back to reverse the Middle Passage in search of a homelandin Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Ghanaand, finally, she does the American South, including a civil rights tour and a visit to New Orleans after Katrina. Even readers who do not want all the local detail will be held by the candid contemporary search for meaning, not all of which is heroic: the Ethiopians resent the American tourists' sense of entitlement, honoring their dead but dismissive of the locals now. Never self-important, this is sure to inspire intense debate about the search for meaning, whether it concerns the din of patriotism or the lack of closure.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)

August 1, 2012

The biracial Raboteau chronicles her own search for a place to feel at home and, more broadly, the hunt for Zion--the Promised Land--which has specific meaning for Africans and the African diaspora as well as for Jews. Can't wait to read.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 1, 2012

A well-regarded novelist, the biracial Raboteau considers the concept of home by probing both her own effort to fit in and, more broadly, the hunt for Zion--the Promised Land--which has specific meaning for Africans and the African diaspora as well as for Jews.

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

November 15, 2012
Rather than a simple analysis of where scattered Africans ended up geographically, Raboteau (The Professor's Daughter, 2006) dissects the search for home as a search for belonging. 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. In this way, she gives the diaspora both historical and contemporary context. As a mixed-race woman, Raboteau embodies the quest for a sense of self, and she explains her personal dilemma early on. "I didn't think of myself as the 'tragic mulatto, ' straight out of central casting," she writes. "The role was an embarrassing cliche from a dusty, bygone era, but I struggled against it all the same. If Barack Obama could transcend it, why couldn't I? I belonged nowhere. I wasn't well. Was the sickness my own, my country's, or a combination of the two?" Stories of her disaffected youth spent with a Jewish friend lead easily into the beginning of the author's global search party. Her first travels took her to Israel, where she learned of a large community of black Jews from Ethiopia. From Israel and the Jewish faith, she moved to explore the Rasta faith in Jamaica and then in Africa. Raboteau explored other issues of identity in Africa, as well, including African-Americans who settled in African cities and the genesis of trans-Atlantic slavery. The author never shies away from the difficult questions surrounding her--e.g., the Rasta worship of a dictator or the inherent double standards of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Her head-on confrontation of these subjects makes the book easier to digest, and her treatment of the issues results in the unwritten conclusion that none of the communities she visited truly accomplished what they set out to do. In the end, the author found her answers in a way that many will see coming, but Raboteau approaches the conclusion from a fresh perspective that keeps it from feeling stale. An excellent choice for readers interested in religion, philosophy and the elusive concept of home.

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