Many of these guest workers depart after a few years, but some stay on as long-term residents, a small but visible number marrying Israelis and raising children who eventually serve in the Israeli military (military service being the ultimate symbol of integration in Zionist tropes). This urban environment full of international culture and migrant workers influenced my research immensely. Conducting fieldwork about marginalized minorities in and around Tel Aviv reveals multiple points of disparity, since the city’s assets (a vibrant arts scene and an abundance of sushi restaurants) and its downsides (the abject poverty of its many immigrants and the exploitation of labor migrants) go hand in hand. Indeed, Ethiopian-Israelis are not the only population that has troubles in Tel Aviv, but they constitute a group that encapsulates the inherent paradoxes and hypocrisies of the cosmopolitan city.
Finally, although I refer throughout this book to Tel Aviv, the city is officially called Tel Aviv-Jaffa, and the relationship of Israeli Jews to their Arab neighbors, on both sides of the Green Line (1949 armistice lines), affects everyday life profoundly. I will touch only briefly in this book on issues pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but it looms in the background of any discussion of race, ethnicity, class, religion, culture, language, and national identity in modern Israel. It is relevant to this book insofar as the conflict is the source of many Israeli cultural and political anxieties, but I also submit this book as a case study of a minority trying to come to terms with Israeli citizenship through cultural output.
OVERVIEW
In the first three chapters, I unpack the narratives of Ethiopianist, Afrodiasporic, and Zionist imagery. Chapter 1 examines Afrodiasporic myths of citizenship through the work of Ester Rada, perhaps the most prominent Ethiopian-Israeli entertainer today. Through her convention of singing in English, while constructing a composite Afrodiasporic style comprising soul, reggae, jazz, gospel, and Ethio-jazz, she suggests that Ethiopian-Israelis look to the African diaspora as a mechanism for upward mobility and acceptance in Israeli society.
In chapter 2, I outline the Ethiopianist myths that glorify a certain version of Ethiopian history and frame Ethiopian-Israelis as central to it. I describe a weekly performance at Habesh, an Ethiopian restaurant in Tel Aviv, as a prism through which to understand Ethiopian musical principles. For decades scholars have relied on Michael Powne’s Ethiopian Music (1968), a descriptive work based chiefly on secondary sources, to understand the Ethiopian modal system (qignit) that descends from church modes and forms the basis for popular midcentury Ethio-jazz. The typology is contested but taught today in conservatories in Ethiopia (Weiser and Falceto 2013: 2). The first mode is called tezeta, translated as “nostalgia”; it is a feeling, a style of song, and a musical mode based on the song of the same name (the major variant is the common pentatonic C D E G A C). Tezeta is a major focus of chapter 2. The second mode, anchihoy, is the most common in Ethio-jazz, built on the tritone and played C D ♭ F G ♭ A C. The third, batti, is named after a city of the same name, and widely used in Azmari music (C E F G B C). The fourth mode is ambassel (C D ♭ F G A ♭ C). All four modes were on display at Habesh, which served as a central meeting point for the geographically scattered Ethiopian-Israeli population. Ethiopian imagery (instrumentation, tonality, ornamentation, choreography) is invoked there as a mechanism of nostalgia (tezeta) and critique of Ethiopian marginality. Ethiopianist imagery offers a foil to a dominant Israeli perception that Ethiopians “came without culture.”
Chapter 3 focuses on the work of one band: the internationally renowned group the Idan Raichel Project. This chapter offers a close reading of three of Raichel’s songs, arguing that the heavy emphasis on Israeli musical conventions renders the inclusion of Ethiopian musicians and source material an appeal to the Israeli public to accept them in Israeli society, writing them into dominant Zionist national narratives of home and return.
After exploring the three divergent narratives of citizenship, I devote the next two chapters to their reconfiguration for performance for the wider Israeli public. Chapter 4 explores public and national performances of Eskesta, the Ethiopian shoulder dance, arguing that public displays of physical virtuosity reveal and subvert the often-explicit prejudice against Ethiopian-Israelis as lesser citizens. I argue that the public display of bodily otherness borrows from Afrodiasporic conceptions of blackness, and from Ethiopianist imagery of rural life as a mechanism for framing Ethiopians as valuable citizens.
Chapter 5 further considers the reconfigurations of Afrodiasporic, Ethiopianist, and Zionist myths through Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop. Hebrew lyrics and consistent invocation of the repressive state apparatus render Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop more concerned with integration into Israeli society than with political subversion. Through a close examination of the best-known Ethiopian-Israeli hip-hop/reggae song to date, Axum’s “Ma Im Hakesef” (What About the Money), I demonstrate that Afrodiasporic narratives of exclusion and Ethiopianist iconography of exceptionalism ultimately serve a narrative of Israeli multiculturalism. I deal in this chapter exclusively with music created by Ethiopian-Israelis, and not with the primarily imported hip-hop that Ethiopian-Israeli teenagers listen to. That material is treated thoroughly and sensitively by David Ratner in his Hebrew-language book about (usually African American) rap shaping the lives of young Ethiopian-Israelis (2015). In effect, Ratner engages in reception theory while this book’s chapter engages in close reading of a locally produced song.
Throughout my examination of Ethiopian music as framing the rights of struggling citizens, I acknowledge that the city of Tel Aviv has been thoroughly transformed over the past decade by a wave of immigration from Eritrea, consisting primarily of asylum seekers who live in the poor southern districts of town. Chapter 6 describes Levinski Street, the nerve center of Tel Aviv’s Ethiopian life, and I map the city’s Ethiopian music scene around it. The encounter along Levinski between Ethiopian citizens and Eritrean asylum seekers sets the tone for the frameworks and challenges of citizenship for Ethiopian-Israelis. By mapping the emerging local Horn of Africa mediascape, I establish the limitations of Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship in tension with other black cohabitants and with other citizen minorities.
Finally, in the conclusion, I frame Tel Aviv as an emerging node in the Ethiopian transnational migration network—a stop on the tour circuit for Ethiopian musicians like Rome, London, or Washington, DC (the latter already written about by Shelemay 2006a and 2009). By facilitating the establishment of discrete citizenship narratives, Ethiopian-Israeli musicians have opened a dialogue with Ethiopia that the rupture of emigration curtailed. Therefore, Ethiopian-Israeli musical influence is beginning to feed back into Ethiopia and across the network, establishing new peripheries and dialogues across Ethiopian cultural life.
As a mechanism for the Azmari, wax and gold facilitates the negotiation of ostensibly fixed boundaries of speech. Ethiopian-Israeli musicians challenge the seemingly inflexible boundaries of Israeli citizenship through the same mechanism; they occasionally do so through lyrics, but more commonly by invoking schizophonic, often decontextualized sounds as challenges to accepted ideologies. Across musical styles, rappers, dancers, and instrumentalists mobilize nonverbal mythologies of cultural history to reposition and reimagine their status in Israeli society, proposing an alternative to the state’s unfinished attempts at immigrant absorption. Considering the tension in Israel-Palestine over citizenship and belonging, evidence that musicians bypass the policymakers’ top-down frameworks effectively might offer some alternatives to the nationalist narratives dominating the headlines today.
ONE
Afrodiasporic
