Citizen Azmari. Ilana Webster-Kogen
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“How long will you be here?”
“Four days.”
“And what have you come for?”
“An interview.”
Wrong answer. I should have just said that I was here for the beach. I had done this a dozen times before, and knew better. Waiting in the immigration queue at Ben-Gurion Airport, I had a feeling that I might well experience the bureaucracy that my students and Palestinian friends knew well, but that I had always been protected from as a Hebrew speaker with an Israeli-sounding name. Every time I entered the country, I worried that this time would be difficult. I should have given my usual answer, that I was here to visit my cousins ….
“What kind of interview? Do you have an invitation?”
“No, it’s not formal. I arranged it over email.”
“Where is it?”
Deep breath. Tell the truth. Don’t look guilty. Be prepared for a long wait.
“In Jaffa. I teach music in London, and I’m here to interview Ester Rada.”
“Wow, what fun [Eizeh keif lakh!]. Enjoy [Teheni!]!” Passport handed back, visa issued. The security apparatus identified me as a desirable.
The Palestinian rappers I’ve worked with who have Israeli passports, as well as my students and colleagues (and husband), have all been in the interrogation rooms. I am fortunate to have avoided any unpleasantness from the Israeli security apparatus in my many visits, but the privilege comes at a price, and this visit clarified for me what that price is.
Ester Rada is currently Israel’s biggest star on the international music circuit, and the Israeli recording industry is excited to claim her. She overcame systemic prejudice growing up, earned professional credentials in a music troupe during her military service, and made a success of herself abroad. As a leftist who veers away from Israeli politics in her repertoire, Rada is the product of a system that she often disagrees with politically, and she navigates the international festival scene carefully. Non-Jews buy tickets to her concerts in France and the United States, and across Europe, where the international Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement increases in strength with every Israeli diplomatic misstep. This leaves her with some decisions to make about her career, such as whether to move abroad, or whether to collaborate with African diaspora musicians. With these complex entanglements, explicitly political lyrics would be limiting. I understand why she performs in English.
Yet the self that Rada portrays in recordings and onstage is the result of a complex set of cultural processes and multidirectional musical influences. Rada’s collation of Ethio-jazz, neo-soul, jazz, funk, and reggae represents sonically a gradual reorientation of Ethiopian-Israelis in their host society. By backing away from political or subversive lyrics, and working entirely at the level of source material, musical structure, visuals, and ornamentation, Rada works through a set of identities—Ethiopian, Israeli, black—that read differently in front of diverse audiences. As long as “black music” is the language of her performance, Rada’s political ideology can be discerned by an engaged listener. She proposes a route to belonging that circumvents the nationalist narratives that have until recently excluded Ethiopians from one paradigmatic story of exile (Jewish) by inserting them into the alternative paradigm of exile (Afrodiasporic).
For Ethiopian-Israelis, Rada’s cut ’n’ mix compositional style, her Ethio-soul arrangements of jazz standards, and her contemporary interpretations of Ethiojazz standards represent a dramatic reconfiguration of the Ethiopian position in Israeli society via Afrodiasporic narratives of citizenship. For the immigrants who struggled to integrate through the 1980s and ’90s (Parfitt and Trevisan Semi 1999), and their children who are disappointed that proud military service (Shabtay 1999: 174) has not yielded upward mobility, the narrative of Jews returning to the homeland (BenEzer 2002) no longer seems an apt metaphor. Instead, young people I know like Shoshana from Haifa, who wears dreadlocks and thinks about moving to New York, are identifying with the opposite global flow, of leaving Africa and encountering blackness as a disadvantage. For these Ethiopian-Israelis, Rada’s music establishes their experience within a lineage of black otherness, blackness serving for her as a route to cultural capital. In her cover of “Four Women” as in her cover of “Nanu Ney” and her original compositions, Rada draws from Afrodiasporic narratives, connecting the United States to Jamaica, Jamaica to Ethiopia, and the Ethiopian-Israeli to the African American experience. Afrodiasporic solidarity suggests a route to prestige and acceptance in Israeli society, demonstrating ironically that a performer is better accepted as a representative of Israeliness the further she moves away from Israeli musical style.
TWO
Ethiopianist Myths of Dissonance and Nostalgia
June 29, 2009, Jerusalem
“Don’t worry, the food here is kosher.” Little did Fantahun know that that was the least of my worries. In fact, the meat’s religious credentials made things worse. As a vegetarian, I decline meat regardless of its ritual status. I don’t even know how to say “vegetarian” in Amharic, and thanks to a communication mishap in Addis Ababa, where I had to make do with a lunch of “fasting macchiato,”1 I’m loath to just ask for fasting food, roughly the Ethiopian equivalent of vegetarian. To decline expressly prepared kosher meat will certainly offend my hosts, who would presume that I don’t trust their precautions. Virtually every Ethiopian restaurant in Israel (apart from one that has cleverly gone vegan) displays its certificate of religious supervision (te’udat kashrut) flamboyantly. A refusal would be tantamount to a repudiation of the hard-fought battle for Beta Israel’s religious acceptance by the Ashkenazi elite. I have to eat this plate of meat, I realize.
When Fantahun, my massenqo (one-stringed spike fiddle) teacher, invited me to lunch, I assumed that he meant the rather upscale Ethiopian restaurant in south Jerusalem, popular among intellectual types. Instead we veered onto a side street in the Russian Compound and into a private residence. I didn’t really know where I was, but Fantahun said that it was one of his regular haunts. At the threshold stood an Ethiopian woman dressed in street clothes, rather than the white robes I had grown accustomed to at every Ethiopian restaurant from Washington, DC, to Abu Dhabi. After taking an order from Fantahun she disappeared into the back of the house, a platter of beef materializing fifteen minutes later. We talked as we ate but the informal setup made me nervous. I had no official status (Israel doesn’t issue research visas—I was there on a tourist visa), and there was certainly some kind of zoning restriction against a restaurant in a private home. Getting busted wouldn’t do me any favors at passport control. Relax, I thought, as long as nobody’s chewing chat next door,2 there’s nothing to worry about.
Alas. We finished lunch and moved to the next room, where a small group of men with bloodshot eyes were making their way through a giant pile of leaves. The chat plant is known in some of Ethiopia’s neighboring countries as khat, and its legal status, as an amphetaminelike stimulant, varies from place to place. It is popular among men in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Yemen. When chewed, it produces a mild head-buzzing, euphoric effect (Anderson, Beckerleg, Hailu, and Klein 2007). Or it makes people violent; female travelers in Addis Ababa have to be especially vigilant when traveling by taxi in the late afternoon. Originating in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, where men consume it socially, chat is prevalent wherever there are Ethiopian, Eritrean, or Somali populations. It has an in-between status in the UK, most Ethiopian-owned convenience stores advertising in the window in Ethiopic script (fidal) that they sell it. But whereas in the UK I would pass such notices without giving them a thought, the sight of a group of intoxicated men in a neighborhood I didn’t know gave me pause. Still, not wanting to insult Fantahun, I clutched the mini-bushel he passed me, halfheartedly chewing a small piece and wondering what its legal status was in Israel.
Such is the level of formality and legality of most Ethiopian-Israeli establishments that provide food and entertainment. These semilegal restaurants are an important part of the social network