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.