A Self-Identified Black American's Quest for 'Home' Ends in NYC

choi

Thomas Chatterton Williams, Home Thoughts From Abroad. A black writer sets out to discover where, if anywhere, African-Americans might feel at home. Wall Street Journal, Jan 22, 2013
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB ... 31773238245506.html
(book review on Emily Raboteau, Searching for Zion; The Quest for Home in the African Diaspora. Atlantic Monthly Press,


My comment:
(a) The review opened with the sentence: "'You don't have a home until you leave it,' James Baldwin reported from self-imposed exile in Paris."

James Baldwin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Baldwin
(1924-1987; black American writer; while in NYC, "Baldwin began to recognize his own homosexuality. In 1948, disillusioned by American prejudice against blacks and homosexuals, Baldwin left the United States and departed to Paris;" He would live as an expatriate in France for most of his later life)

(b) Emily Raboteau
(i) Emily Raboteau, My search for Creflo Dollar; I set out to find the Promised Land and that quest brought to a prosperity-pushing Atlanta mega-church. Salon. com, Jan 6, 2013
http://www.salon.com/2013/01/06/ ... o_dollar/singleton/
("I left Ghana, returned to New York, and got married. Victor and I had a joyous ceremony of twenty close family members at an Episcopal church in Washington Heights across the street from a bus station overrun by drug addicts. Together we bought a run-down one-bedroom apartment, joining our possessions, our hang-ups, our dreams")
* There is no need to read the rest of the Salon article, about a black preacher named Creflo Dollar.
* hang-up (n; First Known Use 1952):
"a source of mental or emotional difficulty; broadly : PROBLEM"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/hang-up
(ii) Visiting Writers Series: 2012 -2013. Department of English, University of Vermont, undated
http://www.english.vt.edu/graduate/MFA/12-13vwsindex.html
(Emily Raboteau and Victor LaValle: Friday, February 1, 7:00 PM,
VBI Conference Center (Virginia Bioinfomatics Institute, Duck Pond Drive and Washington Street); He [Victor] serves as Director of the Fiction Concentration at Columbia University's School of the Arts)

This Victor is her husband.
(iii) audiologo (a blogger's screen name), Junot Díaz: 2 days after the Pulitzer in conversation with Albert Raboteau and Emily Raboteau. Apr 13, 2008
http://audiologo.blogspot.com/20 ... er-pulitzer-in.html
(photo 4: Emily and her father, Princeton Professor Albert Raboteau)
(iv) Later the review averred, "In Jamaica, she [Ms Raboteau] burns her pale skin."

burn (vt): "to injure or damage by or as if by exposure to fire, heat, or radiation : scorch <burned his hand>"

Here it means exposure to sun.  

(c) Zion
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zion
(used as a synonym for Jerusalem; referred to a specific mountain near Jerusalem (Mount Zion); sections 1 (heading: Etymology), 6 (Zionism), and 11 (Mount Zion today))
(d) The review said, "Tamar abruptly made aliyah to Israel."

aliyah (n; Modern Hebrew for "ascent"; First Known Use  circa 1934):
"the immigration of Jews to Israel"
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/aliyah
(e) For Ethiopian Jews, see Beta Jews
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_Jews
(Encyclopaedia Aethiopica (EAE) uses "Beta Jews" to mean "House of Israel" or "Community of Israel;" also known as Ethiopian Jews)

* I have no idea why Ms Raboteau described Ethiopian Jews as "red-brown." They look like typical Africans to me.
(f) The review stated, "The African Hebrew Israelites are followers of a prophet named Ben Ammi Ben-Israel, a Chicago foundry worker who in 1966 claimed to have had a divine vision instructing him to return his 'lost tribe' to Jerusalem. Soon after he and 30 of his disciples decamped to the Holy Land. Visiting their shantytown in the Negev Desert, Ms Raboteau finds little more than an obscurantist cult that practices polygamy."
(i) Ben Ammi Ben-Israel is a black man born in Chicago as Ben Carter.
(ii) For Negev Desert, see Negev
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Negev
(The origin of the word negev is from the Hebrew root denoting 'dry')
(iii) obscurantist

(g) Ms Raboteau wrote Ethiopian Jews maintain that blacks have "different bones [from Ethiopian Jews] and descend from the cursed line of Ham."

Ham (son of Noah)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ham_(son_of_Noah)
(h) Before coming to US, I wondered if blacks in US would return to Africa to find a spouse. During my 27-year sojourn in US, I did not read anything like this. So this book review is intriguing to me. And after reading it, I gather blacks in US feel ease at home in US.