Searching for Zion

Searching for Zion: The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora by Emily Raboteau
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

A history of people who are searching for a lost home and for the promised land.

Emily Raboteau, daughter of an eminent historian and herself a student of history, writes a personal and family history as well as a story of people searching for the promised land.

I saw it displayed on a stand of new acquisitions in our local library, and grabbed it. Since the book is an intensely personal one, I'm making this a personal review, or rather reaction, so I'll explain why it attracted my attention. The first thing was the word "Zion". I've been interested in Zionist churches since the age of 14, when I met a Zionist minister who mentored me in the Christian faith, which was then a fairly new discovery for me, having had an almost entirely secular upbringing. So I wanted to see if the book said anything about Zionist Christians (it didn't). 

The second thing that attracted me was the name of the author. I knew of Albert Raboteau, the church historian, who, having been raised a Roman Catholic, later became Orthodox, so I wondered if the author was related to him. It turned out that she was his daughter.

An African-American, of mixed race, she grows up envying her childhood best friend, a Jew, who emigrates to Israel to find her promised land. So she travels to Israel to visit her friend, and see if she found the promised land, and that sparks off her interest in other people looking for a promised land, and what she finds is ambiguous.

The trouble with a promised land it that one usually finds other people already living there, and so it is and was with modern and ancient Israel. Raboteau meets "Black Jews" who came from Ethiopia, and had left Ethiopia because they saw Mount Zion in Jerusalem as the promised land.

But for Rastafarians, Ethiopia itself is the promised land, so her journey takes her to Jamaica, drawn partly by her interest in Bob Marley's music, and the fact that Marley, like herself, was of "mixed" ancestry. Raboteau did not mention in her book, however, that in the end Bob Marley found his personal Zion in the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church, into which he was baptised  not long before his death. It seems a rather strange omission, given the theme of the book.

Raboteau then visits Ethiopia, and Rastafarian settlements there, and looks at the relations between the incomers and the native Ethiopians. Then Ghana, where many African-Americans, influenced by Marcus Garvey, sought their home and promised land, only to find that most the the Ghanaians saw America as the promised land, and would sacrifice a great deal to go there.

What I found particularly interesting there was her descriptions of different perceptions of history. I've never been to West Africa, but did read something of its history both for a university degree and afterwards. West Africa is where many of the slaves who were taken to the Americas in the 17th to 19th centuries came from. And African Americans, many of whom were descended from those slaves, had n inaccurate perception of the slave trade. 

That was something I became aware of through participating in the question & answer web site Quora, where many of the questions asked about the slave trade showed an anachronistic understanding of history. Emily Raboteau, as a historian, is aware of these attitudes, and examines them critically, from both a historical and personal point of view. The perception of many African Americans seems to be that slavery was a result of racism. But it is really the other way round -- racism is, in many cases, particularly in North America, a result of slavery. The slave trade was in fact an example of entrepreneurship, and slave traders, both black and white, were in it for the money (those words are mine, not Raboteau's, but it is my summary of what she was saying on the subject).

Emily Raboteau returns to the USA, and visits a Neopentecostal prosperity church, which for many black Americans seems to offer a different kind of promised land, exalting exactly the same human impulses that led to the slave trade. And finally she visits the US South, recently ravaged by Hurricane Katrina, where many of her own relatives have become displaced people, but her cousin refuses to speak the language of victimhood and says they are not victims, but survivors.

In reading it, I was reminded of some other books I had read: The long Road Home by Ben Shephard, about people who were displaced after the Second World War, many of whom had no homes to return to. The second is From the Holy Mountain by William Dalrymple. about following in the footsteps of a couple of pilgrims of antiquity, and visiting the places they visited in modern times. It, like Searching for Zion, bring the personal touch to history, and Emily Raboteau's odyssey is a personal pilgrimage as well as a study of other pilgrims. 

Another book that this one reminded me of was The Anatomy of Exile, which I read just after being deported from Namibia in 1972. That was the second major occasion in my life that I was driven to wonder who I was and where I belonged. The first was when I had to leave South Africa in a hurry to travel to the UK to study in 1966. Themes of home, identity, exile, belonging and pilgrimage became prominent then, but I have dealt with these in other blog posts, like What is African: race and identity.

Other historians, and sociologists and anthropologists have written about displaced people, or people searching for a promised land, or people wondering where they belong, in a dry, objective and academic manner. But Emily Raboteau does not. She looks at the history from both sides, and analyses her own reactions, and this is what makes the book really worth reading. She tells other people's stories well, but gives her own reactions to those stories and weaves them with her own story. People talk about narrative theology; this is narrative history.

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The Plague by Albert Camus

The Plague by Albert Camus

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


At the start of the restrictions on "social distance" intended to prevent or at least slow the spread of the corona virus, I recommended some books to read during quarantine and social isolation, and this was one of them. And since it's about 60 years since I read it, I thought I ought to take my own advice and read it again.

When I first read it as a teenager various people told me that though it was ostensibly a story about an outbreak of bubonic plague in the city of Oran in Algeria, then a French colony, which led to the whole city being placed under quarantine, it was really a kind of allegory of the Nazi plague that had devastated Europe a few years before it was published. I didn't really see it at the time. Sometimes a story is just a story, and that is what I thought this one was.

But now I am older I have read many more books and many more literary genres and have greater knowledge of history and experience of life, so perhaps I would see the allegory that had escaped me before. But I have to confess that I didn't. I thought it no more an allegory than The Lord of the Rings is an allegory.

Yes, a lifetime of experience enabled me to see things that I did not see before, so I was looking through different eyes.

One of the things I saw for the first time was that at the beginning of the book a journalist, who is trapped in the city by the quarantine, had come to write about the conditions under which the Arab population of the city were living, and that was practically the last mention of the Arab population at all. We are told nothing, absolutely nothing, about how the plague affected them. But when the Nazi plague came to France, the Jews did not cease to exist. I am sure many of them would have wished to be as invisible during the Nazi occupation as the Arabs are in Camus's book.

Camus himself was trapped in Nazi-occupied France, and when he writes of the plague as "exile", he writes from real experience. It makes little difference whether the exile is caused by political conditions, war or disease, the effects are the same. And it is not just those whose homes are outside and who are trapped in the plague-ridden city who are exiles; those who have homes in the city experience exile too, and exile, in Camus's view, is essentially separation from people you love and who love you.

Between 1966 and 1972 I experienced something like such exile four times in my life, and twice in one year. The first was when I had to skip the country to study in England in 1966. Of course I was planning to go anyway, but the haste of my sudden departure (on the road to Bulawayo within five hours of a phone call from a Security Policeman) left loose ends and unfinished business in relationships that made it feel like exile to me. Then after  my return when Bishop Inman kicked me out of the Missions to Seamen in Durban when I had only been there for six months, and I went to Namibia. After a couple of years there I was beginning to feel at home and was then deported by the South West Africa administration. I went to stay with my cousin in Pietermaritzburg and four months later was banned to Durban. But out of each of those events good things eventually came, lessons were learned, and I met people I would not otherwise have met (including my wife Val), so I would have been poorer for not having met them.

After the last of these exiles, in 1972, I read The Anatomy of Exile to help me to interpret the experience, and coming to The Plague with some experience of exile enables me to see a bit more of what Camus is getting at.

The other major difference between my first reading and now is that we are now in the middle of a "lockdown" because of an infectious disease, and it is interesting to see how what Camus describes compares. Many things he described are very similar, but in The Plague there is little social distancing. People are still allowed to walk the streets, frequent cafes and attend church services. Even when the pneumonic variety of transmission of Yersinia Pestis appears, no one seems to be required to wear face masks. Only sports fixtures are cancelled, though not so much for fear of contagion as because in Camus's book they have been requisitioned as quarantine centres for those whose family members have been hospitalised with the plague. In Camus's book there is a vaccine, though supplies are inadequate because no one had envisaged an outbreak on such a scale. And of course the plague is bacterial, not viral, so antibiotics are more effective against it nowadays.

At some points I thought I might give it five stars on GoodReads instead of my original four, but a couple of things put me off. One is the invisibility of the Arab population mentioned earlier. The second is a small boy, the son of a rather strict magistrate, who is taken ill. His name is Philippe, but later his father refers to him as Jacques. Not remembering the names of the people you love doesn't seem to be a good thing in a book about love and exile.



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Anatomy of exile

This month's synchroblog, in the week in which Lent begins, is on Experiences in the wilderness. March Synchroblog – Experiences In The Wilderness – 3/9/2011 | synchroblog:

During the season of Lent we are reminded that all of us experience wilderness times in our lives – times of searching, of mourning, of anticipating, of waiting, of watching, of unknowing, of struggling, of preparation. Join us during the season of Lent for this month’s synchroblog as we reflect and share insights and thoughts about “Experiences In The Wilderness”.

As I look back on my life I can recall several experiences that could be said to be experiences of the wilderness, some literal, some figurative.

• Flight into exile in the UK
• Being fired by the Anglican bishop of Natal
• Being deported from Namibia
• Churchlessness

I won't go into all the details of all these now; for the sake of those who might be interested, I've linked a couple of them to other posts that give some more details.

The first, flight into exile in the UK, was not a real wilderness experience, though it felt like it at the time. I had finished my BA degree at the University of Natal, and was working as a bus driver in Johannesburg to try to raise money for postgraduate study in the UK. I needed to be in the UK at the end of September, but in January a man from the Security Police phoned me and wanted to see me. I thought he was either going to give me a banning order, or confiscate my passport, so I scarpered the same night, driving to Bulawayo and catching a plane to London from there. When I got back two-and-a-half years later they came and confiscated my passport. It wasn't really exile, but it felt like it because of the sudden and unexpected parting from friends and family and arriving in a strange country with no money and no job. I felt, in a very mild way, what refugees must feel like.

The last, churchlessness, was when we left the Anglican Church in 1985, and asked to join the Orthodox Church, which entailed writing a letter to the bishop. The bishop referred the letter to the Pope, who said he must refer it to the Holy Synod, but then died before the Holy Synod could consider it. The Anglican Church sent a lawyer after me, who unfairly and unjustly accused me of stealing church property, and was extremely nasty about it. So we were left in a kind of ecclesiastical wilderness, and at times both Val and I entertained thoughts of going up to the railway line that runs over the road from us and throwing ourselves under a passing train. Neither of us told the other about these thoughts until long afterwards; it was definitely a spiritual wilderness experience.

After being deported from Namibia I read a book called The anatomy of exile: a semantic and historical study, and though I can now remember very little of what it said, it made me reflect on the experience of exile, and to realise that what I missed most was not so much places, as people.

But in Lent, and especially in the first week of Lent, we are reminded that all our earthly experiences of exile are actually pointers to a larger exile, and the hymns of the church focus on the expulsion of Adam and Eve from Paradise.

In Western theology there is the idea of dwelling in the Land of Unlikeness, where we have lost the likeness of God in which we were created.

In the Orthodox Church we have the picture of of Adam weeping at the gates of Paradise and lamenting:

The Word of God the Father,
begotten before the ages,
in the latter times willed to be incarnate of the Virgin
and endured crucifixion unto death.
He has saved mortal man//
by His Resurrection.

v. (6) If You, O Lord, should mark iniquities, Lord, who could stand? But there is forgiveness with You.

Tone 6 (from the Lenten Triodion)

The Lord took a handful of dust from the earth.
He breathed into it, and created me, a living man.
He made me lord and master of all things on earth;
truly I enjoyed the life of the Angels.
But Satan the deceiver tempted me in the guise of a serpent;
I ate the forbidden fruit and forfeited the glory of God.
Now I have been delivered to the earth through death.//
O my compassionate Lord, call me back to Eden!

v. (5) For Your name's sake I have waited for You, O Lord, my soul has waited for Your word; my soul has hoped on the Lord.

When the Enemy tempted me,
I disobeyed Your command, O Lord.
I exchanged the glory of my mortal body for shame and nakedness.
Now I must wear garments of skins and fig-leaves;
I am condemned to eat the bread of bitter hardship in the sweat of my
brow.
The earth is cursed and brings forth thorns and husks for me.
O Lord, You took on flesh from the Virgin in the fullness of time;//
call me back and restore me to Eden!

v. (4) From the morning watch until night, from the morning watch, let Israel hope on the Lord!

O Paradise, garden of delight and beauty,
dwelling-place made perfect by God,
unending gladness and eternal joy,
the hope of the Prophets and the home of the saints,
by the music of your rustling leaves beseech the Creator of all
to open the gates which my sins have closed,
that I may partake of the Tree of Life and Grace,//
which was given to me in the beginning!

v. (3) For with the Lord there is mercy and with Him is plenteous redemption, and He will deliver Israel from all his iniquities.
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This post is part of a Synchroblog, in which several bloggers post articles on the same general theme. This month's theme is "Experiences in the Wilderness", and here are some other blog posts on the theme.

• Patrick (at Dual Ravens) was prolific with a four part series called “Musings” and they can be found here: Part One, Part Two, Part Three and Part Four
• Katherine Gunn at A Voice in the Desert writes What is Wilderness?
• Wendy McCaig giving us a View from the Bridge brings A Voice Calling in the Wilderness
• EmmaNadine who describes Life By List wonders about Life in the Wilderness
• Tammy Carter of Blessing the Beloved is taking a rest as she Puts down the axe
• Jeremy Myers writing at Til He Comes ponders The Gaping Chasm of Suicide
• kathy escobar shares the carnival in my head and writes about belonging
• Steve Hayes of Notes from underground describes Anatomy of exile
• Marta Layton at Marta’s Mathoms writes On Sabbaths, Mountain-Tops… and Brothers’ Keepers
• Liz Dyer at Grace Rules discovers Beauty In The Wilderness