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 Myths
Ester Rada and the Atlantic Connection
Levinski Street, the congested hub of migrant south Tel Aviv, came to be one of my regular haunts during fieldwork. But when I first stepped off the train from the airport in July 2008, I had the same initial impression as most Tel Aviv residents—that it was run-down and looked unsafe. It hardly resembled the “White City,” the secular, left-wing, and gay-friendly Bauhaus capital on the beach that is notoriously isolated from the rest of the country. I walked the length of Levinski en route to my friend Sam’s apartment, passing a number of Ethiopian businesses on the way, the bus station (see Hankins 2013), and the Nahum Records Ethiopian music emporium, plus the abandoned spots that would some years later become the Red Sea Internet Café and the Ethiopian restaurant Tenät. As I turned onto Ha’aliyah Street, the neighborhood began to change, and by the time I reached Florentin Street I was in a different world. This was the neighborhood of Florentin, the capital of hipster Tel Aviv, and its aforementioned main street is lined with renovated Bauhaus buildings, mixed with bars like the nearby Hudna (“truce” in Arabic, a mixed Jewish-Arab project, where deejays spin records outdoors until 4 a.m.). This former working-class Mizrahi neighborhood (inhabited by Jews of Muslim lands who have immigrated to Israel, known in Israel as Mizrahim, the plural term) has slanted younger in the past decade, with the soundscape of Greek folk songs on Friday afternoons replaced with psy-trance, and Bukharian pastries traded in for quinoa. Florentin is still grungy, but it’s privileged, and today it’s the epicenter of creative energy in the controversial capital, a gathering-point for left-leaning middle-class young people postmilitary. There aren’t many Ethiopians on this side of Ha’aliyah, though, and the imaginary border between Levinski and Florentin delineates Israel’s insiders (middle-class citizens) from its others (visible minorities, ’48 Palestinians, African refugees). Yet thanks to the profusion of hipsters who listen to reggae and sport dreadlocks, iconographies of blackness adorn the bodies of Tel Aviv’s tastemakers. These young people have a patron saint: her name is Ester Rada, she is Ethiopian-Israeli, and her music navigates marginality through the musical vernaculars of the Middle Passage.
Rada wasn’t known yet to the residents of Florentin in 2008, and given the stark contrast between rich Bauhaus Tel Aviv and poor migrant Tel Aviv, perhaps separated by Ha’aliyah, I couldn’t have predicted upon my arrival that an Ethiopian-Israeli soul singer would be Israel’s next ambassador to Glastonbury and WOMAD. Ethiopian-Israelis are not just economically marginalized in Israel; the admittedly complicated basis of their citizenship is still sometimes called into question by the religious mainstream (Anteby-Yemini