David Evans' Reflections on the book

Almost twenty years ago W.E.B. DuBois’ classic The Soul’s of Black Folk provided a new lens for my experience in America.  It is no overstatement to say that DuBois’ text is perhaps the most appropriate comparative example, in style and content to Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion. Raboteau’s text provides an example of an African American author who uses the self as a lens through which to understand a land and a people.  In Souls, DuBois suggested that his presence always provoked the unuttered question, “How does it feel to be a problem?” As I recall that question, I remember feeling the unbearable emotional weight of it as I collapsed on my college apartment floor. 

Though not a mixed race person, I identified similarly with Emily Raboteau's description of her presence in the United States.  As she puts it, “My mixed race had made me a perpetual question.” Like DuBois did in the U.S. South, Raboteau reveals her own curiosity, and sometimes terror, in order to provide the reader with insight into African Diasporic communities found in five nations:  Israel, Jamaica, Ethiopia, Ghana, and the U.S. Southern Black Belt. Nearly each new encounter begins with the question, “What are you?” 

It wasn’t necessary for me to experience America the same as Raboteau, who describes having never felt more black than when she was "mistaken for an Arab," in order for me to identify with her narrative. It was her quest for home that resonated with me. As an African American, I too have lived with a deep longing for home. Describing the African American experience, Dubois said, “After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son.” To address this experience, Raboteau leaves home to find it. Her journey traverses more than time and space, it explores some of the most basic questions of human existence: “who am I?” “what am I?” “to whom do I belong?” “where do I belong?” 

Raboteau’s quest is much more anthropology than autobiography.  While her own vulnerability provides an essential entryway into the journey, her book transcends her own story.  She studies the elusive concept of Zion from the perspectives of those who dwell in the mythical lands of promise.  Searching for Zion is a reminder of the spiritual romanticism and existential disappointment that one finds in searching for home in a land far away.  She writes, “At its root, my quest wasn’t about identity, it was about faith.”  This faith might best be described as a belief in the future as articulated in the multi-geographical experiences of the communities she visits; a spiritual and political faith, not necessarily a religious one.  While some communities welcomed her into explicitly religious rituals, others made only political proclamations.  Each in its own way, however, persistently directed her back to her own faith journey for answers.

That is a gift Raboteau has left us, an invitation to reflect back on our own longings for home with faith as our guide.  

David Evan's Bio