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TWO

Ethiopianist Myths of Dissonance and Nostalgia

June 29, 2009, Jerusalem

“Don’t worry, the food here is kosher.” Little did Fantahun know that that was the least of my worries. In fact, the meat’s religious credentials made things worse. As a vegetarian, I decline meat regardless of its ritual status. I don’t even know how to say “vegetarian” in Amharic, and thanks to a communication mishap in Addis Ababa, where I had to make do with a lunch of “fasting macchiato,”¹ I’m loath to just ask for fasting food, roughly the Ethiopian equivalent of vegetarian. To decline expressly prepared kosher meat will certainly offend my hosts, who would presume that I don’t trust their precautions. Virtually every Ethiopian restaurant in Israel (apart from one that has cleverly gone vegan) displays its certificate of religious supervision (te’udat kashrut) flamboyantly. A refusal would be tantamount to a repudiation of the hard-fought battle for Beta Israel’s religious acceptance by the Ashkenazi elite. I have to eat this plate of meat, I realize.

When Fantahun, my massenqo (one-stringed spike fiddle) teacher, invited me to lunch, I assumed that he meant the rather upscale Ethiopian restaurant in south Jerusalem, popular among intellectual types. Instead we veered onto a side street in the Russian Compound and into a private residence. I didn’t really know where I was, but Fantahun said that it was one of his regular haunts. At the threshold stood an Ethiopian woman dressed in street clothes, rather than the white robes I had grown accustomed to at every Ethiopian restaurant from Washington, DC, to Abu Dhabi. After taking an order from Fantahun she disappeared into the back of the house, a platter of beef materializing fifteen minutes later. We talked as we ate but the informal setup made me nervous. I had no official status (Israel doesn’t issue research visas—I was there on a tourist visa), and there was certainly some kind of zoning restriction against a restaurant in a private home. Getting busted wouldn’t do me any favors at passport control. Relax, I thought, as long as nobody’s chewing chat next door,² there’s nothing to worry about.

Alas. We finished lunch and moved to the next room, where a small group of men with bloodshot eyes were making their way through a giant pile of leaves. The chat plant is known in some of Ethiopia’s neighboring countries as khat, and its legal status, as an amphetaminelike stimulant, varies from place to place. It is popular among men in Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, and Yemen. When chewed, it produces a mild head-buzzing, euphoric effect (Anderson, Beckerleg, Hailu, and Klein 2007). Or it makes people violent; female travelers in Addis Ababa have to be especially vigilant when traveling by taxi in the late afternoon. Originating in the Horn of Africa and Yemen, where men consume it socially, chat is prevalent wherever there are Ethiopian, Eritrean, or Somali populations. It has an in-between status in the UK, most Ethiopian-owned convenience stores advertising in the window in Ethiopic script (fidal) that they sell it. But whereas in the UK I would pass such notices without giving them a thought, the sight of a group of intoxicated men in a neighborhood I didn’t know gave me pause. Still, not wanting to insult Fantahun, I clutched the mini-bushel he passed me, halfheartedly chewing a small piece and wondering what its legal status was in Israel.

Such is the level of formality and legality of most Ethiopian-Israeli establishments that provide food and entertainment. These semilegal restaurants are an important part of the social network of Horn migrants, the newer of whom are young, single men who might not have access to kitchen facilities where they live. But such restaurants remain marginal, hidden from main roads and never advertised. This place certainly didn’t have a te’udat kashrut, even if it did serve kosher meat. Visiting with Fantahun was fascinating (since I’ve never been offered chat anywhere that I went alone), but it wasn’t a place where proprietors would grant me an interview to quote (see Weil 1995). I’d consider this a background trip, having to restrict my officially collected data to material offered by citizens with passports whose names I could cite and whose locations I could name without anxiety. There’s a lot to learn in the liminal zone, but most of it can’t be repeated even discreetly. This scene is a stark contrast with my standing weekly visit to Habesh.

Virtually every city with a substantial Ethiopian population has a restaurant called Habesh (or Habesha), including obvious places like Addis Ababa and less likely diaspora enclaves like Seattle. The word “Habesh” means, roughly, Ethiopian; the word “Abyssinia” is an adaptation (Levine 2000: 118), and Eritreans and northern Ethiopians refer to themselves as the Habesha people. Like the restaurant in Tel Aviv that I visited weekly, many iterations worldwide provide live music, facilitated by beer or Ethiopian honey-wine (tejj) and Eskesta dancing. The one in Tel Aviv, which moved to a different location in 2010, had a kosher certification and was adorned with Israeli flags, but apart from that it much resembled comparable iterations around the world. It was adorned with a fair share of formulaic kitsch: the interior resembled a tukul, a tentlike structure from the Ethiopian highlands with wooden pillars and beams holding up a canvas; images of farmers handling coffee beans (buna, a major Ethiopian cash crop) adorned the walls (see Seeman 2015 for an innovative discussion of its moral properties), and waitresses wore white robes. Ethiopian pop spilled out of the speakers at all hours, while the smell of coffee beans wafted across the bar. Decommissioned musical instruments sat in an alcove as decoration. Apart from the Israeli flags, the only visual reminder of the Ethiopian-Israeli population’s unique position in Ethiopia was that the walls were free of the panels that depict scenes from the Kebra Negast, the Ge’ez-language Ethiopian national epic that holds importance for Beta Israel but contains a polemic against the Jews (Levine 2000: 94).³

Today Habesh is located near the bus station, and still boasts its te’udat kashrut. During my fieldwork in 2009, though, it sat anonymously in a seedy commercial center at the corner of Allenby and Kaufman, steps away from the beach. Discernible only to someone who was looking for it, the entrance was obscured by a tangle of neon shop signs (figure 2.1). A burly Russian-speaking security guard and a sign emblazoned with a small Ethiopian flag and the word “Habesh” in Ethiopic script were all that announced it, though the security guard checking your bag might have asked (if you weren’t Ethiopian) whether you were sure you wanted to go in. This was a part of Tel Aviv frequented by tourists, teenagers, and immigrants. Local residents consisted mostly of students, Russian speakers, and pensioners whose durable presence was a source of frustration to property developers. Middle-class professionals had abandoned this part of the center of town for the historic “White City,” the Bauhaus-concentrated UNESCO World Heritage site (Cohen 2003: 11). In other words, the restaurant’s location had about the same reputation as the Azmaris had back in Ethiopia (see Kebede 1975).

Musically, Habesh was similar to a regional folk night in London or Washington (see Shelemay 2006a about the Washington scene) in its ensemble, instrumentation, and melodies, and its controversial incorporation of a drum machine for dancing.⁴ On Thursdays, Menilek (on krar, the six-stringed plucked lyre) and Avi (on massenqo) started playing at 9 p.m. and finished at 3 a.m., joined for several hours by Almaz the dancer. Through the evening, they played for forty-five minutes of each hour, spending their breaks chatting with patrons. The sets often consisted of one extended piece that lasted for the duration, especially later in the night. At the beginning of a song, Menilek started the drum machine and after counting in, played the krar to a 6/8 beat, and then Avi joined him on the massenqo. The melody often began with the same five-note phrase in a minor pentatonic mode like ambassel.⁵ The krar melody often repeated for long periods while Avi improvised. Between Avi’s reserved personality and the scratchy timbre of the massenqo, it likely suited them that Avi sat farther away, behind the extroverted Menilek. Occasionally Menilek and Avi played a folk standard from Gondar, and just as often they played material from Addis Ababa that could accompany dancing. They often played the same piece with multiple variations, Avi’s part making the difference in discerning modes and repertoire.

FIGURE 2.1 Site of Habesh restaurant, 2017 (author photo)

In this chapter I introduce some of the fundamental concepts of Ethiopian musical aesthetics through description of my weekly visits to Habesh. Habesh was a hybrid of an Azmari-bet, a music house where an Azmari performs, and a “cultural restaurant,” a tourist-oriented restaurant that offers folk entertainment. The format was a self-conscious pastiche of Ethiopian culture, offering a snapshot of life in Ethiopia via the music of Addis Ababa, a place most of the patrons hadn’t visited. In the course of this discussion, I examine the ways that Ethiopian-Israeli musicians look to Ethiopian culture to define the terms of their citizenship in Israel, drawing from a set of myths of Abyssinian (Habesha) glory to reframe their contemporary social problems in Israel, from which the home country is seen as an “iconic, almost monolithic Ethiopian entity” (Salamon 1999: 12).

Those myths are well rehearsed across the literature about Ethiopian culture, and well represented in the preeminent work of Donald Levine (1965, 1974) and Edward Ullendorff (1968). They center on the characteristics that render Ethiopia exceptional in Africa in terms of history, religion, and culture, and focus particularly on Amhara culture. Although Ethiopia is a very splintered society with no one dominant culture, most discussions of Ethiopia in a national framework take the Amhara as a starting point. Therefore, scholarship focuses on the Orthodox Church (the world’s second oldest), the Ethiopic writing system (fidal—the only indigenous writing system in Africa), and the independent past (Italy occupied briefly, but Ethiopia was never colonized). This tripartite formula puts the Christian Amhara at the center of Ethiopian culture, distinguishes Ethiopia from its African neighbors, and emerges as something of a scholarly counternarrative for a country that is famous for its heterogeneity.