Following from the work of Don Seeman (2009: 102) and Shalva Weil (1995: 3), I posit that Ethiopian-Israelis engage in wax and gold (sem-enna-werq) regularly, and that musicians make aesthetic choices according to the acknowledged parameters of critique. As I explore the different Ethiopian musical genres being created in and around Tel Aviv, I present these aesthetic choices as implicit signals that reorient Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship away from the top-down integration framework, and toward alternative narratives that build a collective sense of contribution to Israeli society based on tangible achievements and repositioning in the context of global migration flows.
I frame the Azmari figure and the technique of wax and gold as a key theoretical strand in this book, but wax and gold was also a crucial element of my fieldwork experience in Tel Aviv in 2008–2009. Working with Ethiopian-Israelis required constant navigation of taboo, veiled opinions and self-censorship because the stakes of representation were so high. In his outstanding book on the Falash Mura’s return to Judaism, One People, One Blood, anthropologist Don Seeman frames wax and gold, in effect, as etic versus emic knowledge: “The term wax and gold also stands for a pervasive cultural aesthetic that applies equally to a form of prose in which meaning is elusive and masks are common. It can take a real virtuoso to crack the code of semana worke when it is well performed, because the surface meanings themselves contain multiple levels to confuse or misdirect those who lack the perspicacity to see what lies beneath” (2009: 74).
My fieldwork experience transpired much as Seeman describes: people were willing to talk to me, but the content of what they said was often less useful than the dynamics driving what they did not say at first. The everyday practice of wax and gold as Seeman frames it is indeed partially due to a “pervasive cultural aesthetic,” and it is widespread because the stakes of working with Ethiopian-Israelis are so high.
Scholarly representation has affected Ethiopian-Israelis’ legal and immigration rights since long before they were called Ethiopian-Israelis (which is to say, back in Ethiopia). As early as the nineteenth century, the claim of Jewish ancestry, along with its endorsement by respected Jewish scholars like Jacques Faitlovitch (see Trevisan Semi 2004), has affected the group’s right to religious legitimacy and, later, Israeli citizenship. In his compelling analysis of conversion, Seeman explains that rabbinic or governmental authorities often appropriate researchers’ assertions about Ethiopian-Israeli status to determine religious legitimacy, as they did with Kay Kaufman Shelemay’s findings (1986, 1991). In an especially poignant case, Hagar Salamon offers a moving explanation of her personal battle over whether to expose the practice of slavery (barya) among Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia (see 2002 for an intense ethnographic account). Ethiopian-Israelis are aware of this dynamic of scholarly research and often exercise reserve accordingly.
By the time I began my fieldwork in summer 2008, these issues of representation and fieldwork ethics were already well-known in the subdiscipline of Beta Israel studies, which focuses on Ethiopian Jews in Ethiopia and Israel. I embarked on fieldwork aware of the potential appropriation of research findings by interested parties. Hence at every stage I have taken issues of anonymity extremely seriously, offering often-minimalist details about my informants, some of whom are engaged in legal battles against the Israeli state. Unless an interviewee is a public figure whose identity cannot reasonably be shielded, I have anonymized all of my informants, as well as some details like the town where they live.
As I carried on my fieldwork, exercising what might be characterized as extreme caution, I soon became aware of the limitations of the semistructured interview in the context of everyday practice of wax and gold. Shalva Weil’s article “It Is Futile to Trust in Man” (1995) speaks for itself in this respect, and Seeman confirms that interviews are conducted with the wax-and-gold dynamic in the background (2009: 100–102). Recognizing that my own interview material was clouded by guarded speech, and an overwhelming hesitation among many informants about criticizing the State of Israel explicitly, I soon realized that musical style and text itself might be a site where the “gold” emerges. Therefore, this book offers far more analysis of musical text and style than it does of direct quotation of interview material. For an anthropologist left uncomfortable with my reliance on musical source material rather than the words exchanged in interviews, I contend that musical style is an area where unguarded attitudes toward the State of Israel emerge. If this book is read as especially musicological, then, it is because my analysis delves into musical style and genre as a response to what I perceive as a wax-and-gold dynamic in everyday speech about controversial issues.
It is not an overstatement, then, to say that I rely on wax and gold as a main theory and a key method in this project. I look to some of the extraordinary work done with Ethiopian-Israelis by anthropologists and folklorists as a model for using alternative forms of communication as source material. In addition to Don Seeman’s work (2009), and his outstanding recent article on the moral judgments of coffee rituals and possession among Ethiopian-Israelis (2015), I look to Hagar Salomon’s work on dream analysis (2002) and jokes (2011). Both scholars nimbly use their extensive interview material to derive their conclusions, but they also draw from a variety of nonverbal and intangible aspects of interpersonal exchange. Itsushi Kawase’s stunning documentary film work in Ethiopia on Azmaris (2010) further demonstrates the probative value of musical performance in its own right. My discussion of Azmari citizenship, then, relies primarily on analysis of musical style that engages in critique of the state, when individuals might not do so in their everyday speech.
I should add as a caveat that the concept of Azmari citizenship is inherently paradoxical: some Ethiopian-Israeli musicians would hesitate to say explicitly that their musical style is coded political statement, so overt confirmation of my interpretation is limited by the very social conventions I describe. Ultimately, though, I posit the Azmari figure, and the practice of wax and gold, as an effective way of understanding how Ethiopian-Israelis—even those too young to remember the institution of the Azmari from Ethiopia—relate to Israeli society.
MUSIC AND MYTH, MUSIC AS MYTH
Throughout this book, I describe schizophonic, decontextualized, individual sonic references as invoking Afrodiasporic, Ethiopianist, or Zionist myths. I adopt the terminology of myth as one conceptual framework for understanding sound because I interpret these decontextualized sounds as what the religiousstudies scholar Ivan Strenski terms “a dramatic development of dogma” (1992: 117, dogma being understood as religious doctrine or moral code). Only a short time after beginning my fieldwork, I came to recognize that certain performance practices represent social or political positionings that, whether intentionally or not, invoke narrative tropes of inclusion that are recognizable to most Ethiopian-Israelis. Many, like dreadlocks or biblical references in lyrics, are easy to discern as appealing to histories of blackness or Jewishness, but are only interpreted as advocating a method of integration by active listeners who are attuned to the narrative and dramatic power of performing these disembodied schizophonic sounds. Therefore, I suggest that sounds themselves, rather than (or in addition to) speech and stories, constitute a kind of multisensory myth that invokes and articulates etiologies and ideologies of belonging.
Ivan Strenski derives his definition of myth from Bronisław Malinowski’s work, rather than through the prism of folklore and comparative religion.9 Malinowski’s ethnographically informed interpretation contrasts with the work of religion scholars like Robert Segal who more or less ignore political motives underlying form insofar as they maintain that the form of myth derives from the social function it performs in society. As Strenski articulates the position of anthropology, myth is “a story which is told in order to establish a belief” (1992: 121). Malinowski thus takes the perspective that, insofar as myths address power relations within a social group, they constitute the public performance of ultimately political narrative tropes. That definition provides the theoretical underpinning of myth as I define it in this study, as does Michael Jackson’s assertion about the exchange of rumors and folktales: “It is in this two-way transformation of private into public personae, and shared worldviews into personal allegories, that narratives attain