culture.
This book reports on how Ethiopian-Israelis leverage music as participation in national life and the public sphere in the absence of what were once the primary routes into Israeli society: religion and the military (see Shabtay 1999: 176, who argues that military service has been successful for integration, especially where religion has failed). The troubles of Ethiopian integration came to the fore in the 1990s, after 1991’s Operation Solomon rendered Ethiopian-Israelis a permanent visible minority in Israeli society, the first major population group in Israel who could lay claim to being both black and Jewish. This historical moment coincided with Paul Gilroy’s (1993) exposition of the black Atlantic (the transnational circuit of the slave trade that facilitated cultural exchange across Africa, Britain, the Caribbean, and the Americas) as an alternative public sphere represented through music. Meanwhile, multiculturalism and the fall of the Eastern bloc facilitated sociological interest in citizenship and identity-based analyses within ethnomusicology. For Ethiopian-Israelis, the legacy of this period has been a search for black consciousness as an alternative to assimilation into an Israeli national identity from which they found themselves largely excluded. Accordingly, over the past twenty years, scholars in the subdiscipline of Beta Israel studies (the study of Ethiopian-Israeli history, religion, and culture) have couched much of their work in the conceptual language of identity. Yet Ethiopian-Israeli social problems emanate from a fundamental rupture in the social contract: that the rights and privileges of citizenship have been compromised by a public consensus, reported across this book, that renders Ethiopian-Israelis a special, sometimes disadvantaged category of citizen.
The sociologist T. H. Marshall argues that the twentieth century’s framing of citizenship is based on an economic and social contract that guarantees the rights of the welfare state, or what he calls social citizenship. He explains that social citizenship derives from older models of political citizenship (the right to participate in public life and decision-making) and civil citizenship (the right to liberty and property) (1949: 10–12). Jürgen Habermas expands on Marshall’s formulation by broadening the rights and responsibilities of citizenship beyond “political membership” (1994: 24) to “active participation” (ibid.) in “deliberative democracy” (1994: 32). For Ethiopian-Israelis, Habermas’s formulation of rights (the right to immigrate to Israel because of Jewish ancestry) and responsibilities (serving in the military, making a discernible contribution to the state’s security) has not yielded the opportunity for active participation in deliberative democracy. More specifically, while participating in state institutions (like the military) might help to integrate young Ethiopian-Israelis, that integration does not automatically lead to upward mobility.
Ethiopian-Israeli citizenship might be better understood in the context of newer articulations of citizenship that have emerged since the 1990s with the fall of the Soviet Union, the breakup of the Balkan states, and the rapid globalization of migration flows. Bart van Steenbergen (1994:151) surveys the emerging ideas of neorepublican citizenship (considering each individual as officeholder), cultural citizenship (the ability to participate in national culture), global citizenship (participation beyond the boundaries of the nation-state), and ecological citizenship of the earth citizen. All of these configurations of the individual’s relationship to the nation-state, based on the global flows of migrants and the reformulations of national boundaries, apply to some degree to Israel’s idiosyncratic political history as an ethnic democracy (Smooha 1997) that is composed primarily of the descendants of immigrants, and favors Jews over its non-Jewish (Arab, Bedouin, Druze, etc.) constituents. Fundamentally, though, the Ethiopian-Israeli case is sui generis because of religious baggage (antisemitism in Ethiopia being contrasted with religious delegitimization in Israel), racial elements (blackness in a “white” society), and the diasporic imaginings of being part of the Jewish community-in-exile in the past, and, currently, at least for young people, part of the African diaspora.
In this book, I unpack the Ethiopian-Israeli relationship with the state, but I do so through the back channel of musical style. I argue that Ethiopian-Israelis use wax and gold to navigate the rights (to immigrate) and responsibilities (military service) of citizenship, effectively behaving like Azmaris. I call this process Azmari citizenship, and following from Hagar Salamon’s description of Ethiopian-Israeli folk stories that are “coded and indirect” (2010: 165), I demonstrate that a widespread wax-and-gold musical habitus navigates Ethiopian-Israeli exclusion and belonging. Since political activism—public protest, formation of political parties—has yielded few tangible victories for this population, music offers an alternative political framework whereby nonspeech can be performed and interpreted as political statements. Musical style thus constitutes an alternative argument for civil rights, whether through Azmari music, Eskesta dance, hip-hop, soul, reggae, or fusion projects. Across musical styles, musical acceptance in the broader Israeli mainstream translates quite directly into civil rights and even the right to immigrate. Hence musicians and their audiences use music (and sound more broadly) as a forum for establishing political principles about how to vote, where to live, and how to react to top-down state initiatives.
My analysis of these musical strategies rests on a series of myths, mobilized and reconfigured through music and sound, and I dedicate a chapter to each of the myth clusters before presenting their reconfiguration in targeted Israeli contexts. Each myth cluster comprises a variety of cultural touchstones, clichés, and narratives whose imagery (sometimes visually, but more often through sonic references) can—notwithstanding Steven Feld’s labeling of these references as “schizophonic” (1996)—be as richly evocative as they are succinct. I frame aesthetic choices through the terminology of myths because conventions of tonality, instrumentation, and repertoire are often clustered together seemingly indiscriminately, without necessarily considering original source material. This is not a criticism; indeed, musicians creatively reappropriate schizophonic sounds that signal blackness, Ethiopianness, or Israeliness as a mechanism for framing themselves within an idealized tradition. An accordion implies Israeli folk song; a “Yo” indicates debt to African American culture; and ululation signals an Ethiopian wedding. Working through the way these myths inform the construction of a soundworld to compensate for an unstable immigrant identity, Ethiopian-Israelis navigate their uncertain status in Israeli society through sound with an effectiveness notably lacking in political organization and community work.8
AZMARI CITIZENSHIP: WAX AND GOLD AS THEORY AND METHOD
I take the figure of the Azmari as point of departure for this study of music and citizenship. The Azmari lives in perpetual debt to patrons, who can revoke lodging and financial support at any time; hence the folk-poet must recognize the boundaries of acceptable speech. Critical lyrics that mock patrons demonstrate the Azmari’s virtuosity, but a critique that is too biting or disrespectful can find the musician out of work immediately (Kebede 1977). For an Azmari, caustic critique is often obscured through humor or flowery language, suggesting a larger truth: that hidden within (any kind of) musical texts are messages and meanings that are subtle and obscured but that might be poignant critiques of power.
In his classic study of Amhara culture, Donald Levine explains the mechanism of wax and gold in detail, based on the flexibility of the Amharic language. He offers the following couplet as an example: “Ya-min tiqem talla ya-min tiqem tajji / Tallat sishanu buna adargaw enji” (1965: 6). He translates the couplet as: “Of what use is beer, of what use is honey-wine? / When seeing an enemy off, serve him coffee.” But he explains that when the second line is said aloud, “buna adargaw” is elided and pronounced as “bun adargaw” (reduce him to ashes). He argues that in wax and gold, we find a key to understanding northern Ethiopian culture: the possibility of communicating in several, perhaps opposing registers at once.
The sociopolitical dynamics of Azmari norms are familiar even to the Israeliborn generation, since the State of Israel requires certain behaviors as a precondition for immigration and the benefits of citizenship (see Seeman 2009: 28, 91, for the religious preconditions today). One of these implicit behaviors is obedience, and Ethiopian-Israeli social protests are frequently reactions to governmental strictures on further Ethiopian (Falash Mura) immigration. As a result, many Ethiopian-Israelis, known to Israelis as “shy and quiet” (Seeman 2009: 25) behave, whether individually, collectively, or inadvertently, like Azmaris: they learn quickly which kinds of critique of the state apparatus are acceptable and which will cause them trouble