In her memoir Searching for Zion, Emily Raboteau travels to several continents and countries—including Israel, Jamaica, and Ghana—seeking her own personal Promised Land. While Raboteau, whose mother is white and father is black, may not have been looking to trace her ancestors like Haley, the hope to find some connection to an unknown past rings with the same pang of truth.

Raboteau’s book is at once a memoir and an exercise in researching and reclaiming history. Throughout her travels, she writes candidly of her family’s past—particularly of the murder of her grandfather by a white man in Mississippi in the early 1940s—as well as her resentment over being perceived by others as ethnically ambiguous, leaving her with an intense feeling of displacement. The question Searching for Zion asks is bold and grand in scope: What and where is home, and how do people of color in particular—people who have often been displaced due to slavery, civil unrest, or willing expatriation—go about achieving inner peace?

via Emily Raboteau’s Searching for Zion, reviewed. – Slate Magazine.