Oh man. No. I don't even know what to say here. This after the last story in the collection had me pulling my hair. There was too much going on and I loathed the main character, Reginald. I think Raboteau was dunking on hoteps with this short story, but it just didn't grip me at all. Also if you want to know about hoteps, please go Google that. I am not energetic enough today to talk about the never ending messiness in the African American community. Let's just say that Raboteau did a great job with it and Reginald sucked. 

 

"The Tangled Woods" follows college professor Reginald Wright (eyeballs last name) who is angry at his life, his wife, and young son. Apparently he was attracted to his wife when she was "woke" but now questions who she is, what they are doing together, etc. on their way to a family vacation to the Poconos. We are quickly given insights into the real Reginald and then the ending comes along with a thunk that did not work at all. 

 

So there's not much there I have to say with this. Raboteau starts to pull the layers away from Reginald and you realize he's crap. And you wonder how much his wife knows/gets. And there are some hints there even with his son. But then things swerve into some thing about Make America Great Again or something (I started to roll my eyes so hard I couldn't focus) and it just didn't land where I think she wanted this to. And though I gave the one story a pass on not really being horror (since it's told via a young boy and how his and his friends imaginations work) I can't on this one. It's not really horror. It's just Reginald doing dumb things repeatedly and I don't think catching a clue about them and someone someone gets beaten up. I don't know. I was glad to move on after completing this one. 

Full Disclosure: I received this book as an ARC from the Amazon Vine program in exchange for a review, and this review also can be found on Amazon.

Searching for Zion was first excerpted in The Believer, which published the chapter titled: "Points to Ponder when Considering Repatriating Home", which stirred my interest in Raboteau's larger work.

Ten-years in the making, Searching for Zion could be catagorized as a personal memoir, a family memoir, a travel memoir, a work of history and a study in comparative religions. It transcends all, though, as a narrative of a young 'witness', as the author finally styles herself at the end, searching for a definition of home.

"Points to Ponder" is perhaps the most riveting chapter in the entire book: Raboteau skillfully disects the legacy of slavery in Ghana while describing her visit to the slave castle of Elmina and discussing the relationships between African Americans who 'Repatriate home' to Ghana and the Ghanians who never left.

The fates of diasporas are an educational interest of mine and I was rapt with Ms. Raboteau's history of Black Zionism. She travels from Harlem to Israel to Jamaica, to Ethiopia and Ghana, and finally to the Black belt of the American south, seeking answers from the communities of the Black diaspora to the question: What is Zion? And where? All the while she investigates her own feelings of displacement, or misplacement, and how they relate to her African-American heritage and her relationship to her father.

I am not a fan of the new creative-non-fiction that has become so popular recently. There are few things that I dislike more than reading a blurb of a book, describing some strange or forgotten history, only to pick the book up and in chapter three have to read about the author's fraught relationship with their mother or the backpacking trip they took through Moravia when they were 19. It is a rare author who can pull off inserting history into personal memoir or personal memoir into history, but Raboteau succeeds by writing a book that, by making its focus neither personal history nor greater history, but a search for a definition, seamlessly incorporates both personal memoir and narrative history together into a coherent, organic whole.

The only thing that this book was missing, for me, was Harlem. After starting off in the first chapters describing her neighborhood, Raboteau stops. She seems to insinuate that Harlem was Zion, too, for blacks fleeing the South, and that Harlem was a departure point for many seeking Zion elsewhere, but it is always in the perifery, never at the forefront. Many of Ms.Raboteau's interviews are incredibly probing, and she doesn't seem to let people off easily. I wonder if she chose not to cover her neighborhood because she didn't want to put her neighbors on the spot; or maybe I am wrong and she wasn't really hinting at a place for Harlem in her quest for Zion.

Highly recommended.

This fascinating and powerful memoir took me to places I didn't know I wanted to go and considered questions I didn't know I had. When author Emily Raboteau visits her lifelong best friend at her new home in Israel it sets Raboteau off on a ten year quest to find a homeland of her own. With a black father and white mother giving her an appearance that made it difficult for people to classify her, Raboteau often had the sense that she didn't fit in anywhere. She became intrigued with the idea of a black Zion, or homeland, and that led her first back to Israel to visit the Beta Israelis, Jews from Ethiopia with a long religious tradition who are renamed and re-educated when they immigrate to Israel, and also a community of African American Israelis who have lived for decades in the Negev Desert .

 

After that she travels to Jamaica to understand more about the culture and beliefs of Rastafarians, Ethiopia to see the settlement created there by Jamaican transplants who are convinced Ethiopia is their promised land, and Ghana to talk to African Americans who relocated there seeking connection with the continent of their ancestors. Raboteau is deeply curious about these peoples, why they moved where they did and how they feel about it now, and this book provides a mesmerizing inside look at their subcultures. She treats everyone she meets with sincere respect, but doesn't gloss over or ignore their shortcomings and inconsistencies--for instance in Ethiopia it's the Jamaicans who are colonizers and they don't always treat the locals well, in spite of their own experience of colonization.

 

The book ends with Raboteau visiting her Hurricane Katrina displaced relatives in the American South, where she tours sites of the Civil Rights Movement and again considers questions of what makes a home. I learned a lot reading this book, and enjoyed the journey immensely. As an added bonus, Raboteau has a wonderful way with words, deftly picking out details to set a scene or describe the many people she met in her travels.