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 of black music will be familiar with the “spirituals” song style of Southern slavery, in which “Let my people go” borrows from biblical myth and reimagines slavemasters as Pharaoh. Fourth, the Rastafari return to Ethiopianism through Marcus Garvey’s prophecy, and subsequent worship of Haile Selassie (Ewing 2014, Grant 2010, Lemelle and Kelley 1994) confirmed Ethiopia’s importance in the African diaspora. And fifth, the pan-African awakening in the era of postcolonial struggle and negritude looked to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia as African seats of power (Fredrickson 1995, Wilder 2015).
These themes fit together heterophonically in Rada’s musical style. In the United States as in Israel, “black music” stands in for a history of violence that is expressed through and mitigated by a musical tradition. Much of the African diaspora can relate to this experience through a shared history of chattel slavery, and for many people around the African diaspora, Ethiopia symbolizes black independence. The long-established connections between Haile Selassie, Jamaica, reggae, the black Atlantic, and African American music create a network of identity resources. The links between the black Atlantic and Ethiopia are slowly developing, with Ethiopia’s best-known musician Teddy Afro placing on international charts for the first time in 2017 with his album Ethiopia. Likewise, Ester Rada creates a musical connection between Ethiopian-Israelis and the black Atlantic through Ethio-soul by adapting the lexicon of Ethio-jazz to a disparate array of Afrodiasporic popular music, linking the musical style to shared narratives of suffering and longing. However, in the absence of socially conscious lyrics, this dynamic plays out entirely at the level of musical structure, especially through Rada’s call-and-response with the band. Rada’s phrasing and flow, legato but syllabic (sharply articulated at the level of individual words), in contrast to the horn section’s staccato stabs and dull articulation, connect African American popular music to Ethio-jazz, heterophonically demonstrating the spiritual links between the United States, the Caribbean, and Ethiopia.
Afrodiasporic Myths and Style
I describe the collections and reconfigurations of recognizable myths that Ethiopian-Israelis mobilize to define the terms of citizenship as resting on their positioning as black, Jewish, and having arrived directly from Africa. I call the myth clusters mobilized in this chapter the Afrodiasporic myths, because they draw from a set of narratives originating in the African diaspora, with which Ethiopian-Israelis had little direct contact before immigration to Israel. When these narratives reference Jewish or Ethiopian experience, they draw Ethiopian-Israelis in as active participants in the cultural history of the Middle Passage. Rada’s music symbolically mobilizes the circuit (see Ratner 2015)—New York–Kingston–Addis Ababa—in her musical style, and by doing so she frames the Ethiopian-Israeli experience in the context of Afrodiasporic oppression.
In different combinations, the aforementioned five-point list of narratives works in tandem to create a circuit of black ethnohistory, in which a dignified