that she was black. I myself wouldn’t have noticed that she was Israeli, because she has established a musical style (Afrodiasporic) and a performative self that are culturally ambiguous enough to render her nationally ambiguous. By the time she released a series of hit songs toward the end of 2013 such as “Life Happens” and “Bad Guy,” I had nearly missed a permanent, almost imperceptible shift back into Israeli society because of her success. For the first time, a black solo Israeli musician was touring internationally, yet she was doing so without her audience necessarily knowing that she was Israeli. And whether these are aesthetic decisions made to astutely navigate an antioccupation cultural boycott of Israeli musicians, or subtle political statements rejecting racism, she does all of this exclusively through her musical style.
While in some ways she is placeless, Rada’s music does bear a strong influence from her upbringing in Netanya. Considering the coastal stopover city halfway between Tel Aviv and Haifa, which claims the highest absolute number of Ethiopian citizens in Israel, allows several elements of her music to fall into place. When I interviewed her in 2015, she explained that African American culture influenced her early in life. At that time black role models at the margins of Israeli society were scarce, and the soundscape of her childhood was, in her own words, a combination of anonymous Ethiopian and popular African American songs: “A lot of music that—I don’t even know the names of the performers. Music that my mother played at home … When I was in Netanya, I listened to Afro-American music—MTV—hip-hop—total hip-hop—Tupac”6 (interview, Jaffa, March 5, 2015).
Given a climate of prejudice that Ethiopians encountered in the 1990s—beginning with the rabbinate’s request for symbolic conversion and culminating in the “blood affair” (Seeman 2009: 163)—Rada would have been aware of racism from a young age. In a migration context, where Ethiopian culture did not yet have cultural capital, and where African American music was popular across Israel, “black music” would have been an effective outlet for catharsis and prestige. Other young Ethiopian-Israelis in Netanya, such as the future rap group Axum (see chapter 5), were, like Rada, likely to emulate African American musicians instead of Ethiopian ones. Rada’s throaty, low, raspy vocal style symbolizes this debt to the music of the African diaspora (see Ratner 2015 for examples from hiphop) rather than to Ethiopian musicians like Aster Aweke, whose high-pitched voice and melismatic songs punctuated by ululation mark her as Ethiopian. I have written elsewhere about Washington, DC, Ethiopian soul singer Wayna (Webster-Kogen 2013),7 whose vocal style is a melismatic and ornamented R&B sound. However, her high-pitched tone still bears the traces of Ethiopian vocal style and tonality. In contrast, Rada sings nearly an octave lower than Wayna, erasing all trace of Ethiopian accent or tone color from her performance.
Her repertoire similarly draws from African American musical form. Her cover of Nina Simone’s song “Four Women,” for example, implores Ethiopian-Israelis to look beyond local, failed forms of integration and to find black voices that speak to them from among the cultural resources of the black Atlantic. In a splintered community that lacks political leadership or patronage in the corridors of power (Kaplan 2010, Weil 2004), musicians like Rada intervene in political discourse about the Ethiopian place in Israeli society, even when they avoid explicitly political associations. Rada’s music, which is the least Israeli-influenced of the source material in this book, constitutes an understatedly powerful critique of Israeli prejudice. My analysis centers on close reading rather than ethnographic description; I interviewed Rada, have met her on several additional occasions, and have attended many of her concerts, where I have spoken with her fans. But as is the case throughout this book, I look to music for evidence of that which goes unsaid because of social taboos against explicit critique. Through her musical critique, on the other hand, Rada offers an alternative narrative for Ethiopian-Israelis that transforms the attribute of blackness into a source of cultural capital.
In this chapter I offer a close reading of five songs from Rada’s concert repertoire, considering her body of work as a unified whole as I disentangle the Afrodiasporic myths that influence Ethiopian-Israeli performers today. I borrow from Dick Hebdige’s explanation of cut ’n’ mix from the book of the same name (1987) to define Rada’s compositional and arrangement style, arguing that the iconic sounds of Ethiopia and the African diaspora insert Ethiopian-Israelis into a black Atlantic narrative.8 Each song described in this chapter combines African American, Caribbean, and Ethiopian sounds in different combinations to connect Rada to a lineage of black musicians in white-majority societies,9 linking Ethiopian-Israelis to the historical narrative of the African diaspora instead of the Israeli narrative of rejecting the Jewish diasporic state of exile (shelilat hagalut). When considering these songs and their multidirectional musical influences together as a single style—Ethio-soul—I discern a reconfiguration of an otherwise unstable narrative of marginal citizenship characterized by limited participation in national culture. First, I examine “Four Women,” the Nina Simone song that features centrally in Rada’s live performance; second, three original songs: “Sorries,” “Life Happens,” and “Bazi,” all of which combine Ethiopian and Afrodiasporic styles in different ways; and third, her rendition of “Nanu Ney,” an Ethio-jazz standard from the 1970s, the performance of which connects musicians directly to their African roots and cuts them off from their Israeli ones.
AFRODIASPORIC MYTHS
I previously defined myths as a set of narratives of origin, election, and ethnohistory (Smith 2008: 40–43). I arrive at a working definition of myth from the disciplines of folklore and religious studies (see Segal 1999; also Campbell 1978, Ellwood 1999), cultural or area studies (see Herskovits 1961; Mintz and Price 1992 for African diaspora; Levine 1965, 1974, for Ethiopia; Gertz 2000, Morris 1988, Sternhell 2002 for Israel), and nationalism (Smith 2008). From these disciplines’ divergent approaches, I arrive at a definition of myth as a narrative that symbolically constructs or binds a group. This is not a judgment about the truth of a narrative but an analysis of the way the narrative becomes emotionally charged and powerful for a group. In the first half of this book, I spend a chapter on each of the three sets of myths, interpreting Zionist/Jewish, Ethiopianist, and Afrodiasporic myths through the lens of musical performance, and examining the social mechanism through which musicians actively create new myths of origin, election, and ethnohistory. In the Ethiopian-Israeli context, these creations and collections of myths can be read as political positionings that navigate citizenship, ultimately making space for Ethiopians in the Israeli public sphere.
Among the Zionist, Ethiopianist, and Afrodiasporic myths that mobilize musical style to construct citizenship narratives for Ethiopian-Israelis, the three sets of narratives converge around the Ethiopian-Israeli experience in their collective sense of ethnohistory. These narratives are modern reconfigurations of older tropes based initially on the paradigm of Jewish exile, the dispersal of the Jews by the Babylonians in 586 BCE (and later, and lastingly, by the Roman Empire in 70 CE). The nineteenth-century Zionist myths that propelled the founding of the State of Israel are based on medieval narratives of Jewish return to the biblical homeland—called shivat Tziyon (return to Zion) or ahavat Tziyon (love of Zion)—that were incorporated into Jewish liturgy, theology, and thought, and into the modern nation-state.10 But the metaphor of Jewish exile was also mobilized across the African diaspora, with African American slaves forcibly converted to Christianity in particular identifying symbolically with the people of Israel via the biblical myth of slavery in Egypt (“Let my people go”). The initial paradigm of Jewish exile has been refashioned repeatedly, and Ethiopian-Israelis draw inspiration from many of those refashionings.
First, the Jewish longing for return transformed into a set of political movements for Jewish self-determination during the nation-building nineteenth century (see Gertz 2000, Morris 1988, Sternhell 2002, and chapter 3). Second, the Solomonic narrative in Ethiopia claimed that Ethiopia supplanted Israel as Zion (Levine 1965, 1974). Third, African American appropriation of biblical metaphor (see Gilroy 1993, Mintz and Price 1992) transformed African American vernacular English. Most students
