Nina Simone & her Daughter
Sad article
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Lisa Simone doesn’t sugarcoat her relationship with her mother, the legendary singer-songwriter and pianist Nina Simone.
“On my 16th birthday, she sent me a card and it said: ‘I curse the day you were born.’ I was with my aunt at the time. I didn’t react. It was my aunt that got angry. I was like: ‘Why are you angry? This is normal.’”
Lisa, also a singer-songwriter and a Broadway star, has spent a lifetime making sense of her mother.
Sometimes she despised the woman who bullied, rubbished, physically abused and neglected her. At other times she adored the woman who could be fun, loving and nurturing.
And she was always in awe of the inspirational artist and activist who represented the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s like nobody else. Now, 90 years after Nina was born and 20 years since she died, Lisa regards herself as keeper of the flame. Next week, she is in London to play a tribute concert, singing songs made famous by her mother.
It is hard to overstate Nina Simone’s influence. She wrote one of the great protest songs [[Mississippi Goddam, about the 1963 murder of the civil rights activist Medgar Evers), one of the great celebratory songs [[To Be Young, Gifted and Black, written in memory of her friend, the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, with lyrics by Weldon Irvine) and one of the great narrative songs [[Four Women). Her interpretations of classics such as Ain’t Got No/I’ve Got Life, My Baby Just Cares For Me, Mr Bojangles and Stars are so definitive we think of them as the originals. Her music segued from ecstasy to despair – just as she did.......
Often Lisa and Nina would sit at the piano, Lisa singing, her mother playing. “Harmonies came very easily to me, and I always sang and danced. Mommy told me she never considered herself a singer. I looked at her like she had two heads. I thought: tell that to the millions of fans who love you.” Nina encouraged her in so many ways. “She had roots, she was building a life, and life was calmer.”
But the calm didn’t last. With success and activism came pressures. “She paid a huge price to be the woman we revere.” And so did Lisa. When she was eight, her parents separated. She moved with Nina to an affluent part of Manhattan, overlooking Central Park.
Materially, they wanted for nothing. But her mother had changed. “She was angry.” She had lost both her husband and manager and chaos ruled. “She was dealing with the pain that goes with a messy divorce, and she lost the business foundation she had relied on and that’s a lot. You’re just so raw.”
Nina began to take her anger out on Lisa. She became violent. Lisa didn’t know what had come over her. “I internalised a lot of things. I was very calm on the outside but on the inside I wasn’t.” Her mother would beg her to cry when she was beating her, but Lisa refused to give her the satisfaction. “She called me Robot. If you let Mommy know you were hurting, she would take advantage of that. I became numb to a lot of things.”
Lisa asked herself what she had done wrong, and provided herself with the answer. “I think my biggest mistake was to grow up … As you begin to ripen, as girls do, that relationship with your mother can shift.
And if your mother is not in a secure position herself, it’s very difficult to watch your daughter start to look like a woman and not feel challenged, like there was a competition. That’s how she felt, so that’s how she treated me, as opposed to a young girl asking questions because she’s curious.”
Did she feel threatened by Lisa’s beauty? “My mother was a very beautiful woman, outside and inside. Period. No matter what she went through, what she carried, how she exhibited it, she was beautiful. My dad was half Black and half white with smaller features, and I inherited those features. A lot of Mommy’s unresolved issues with her features and how she was treated and what she was told as a child would come out on certain days when she was looking at me.”...........
Lisa Simone on loving and fearing her mother Nina: ‘On my 16th, she cursed the day I was born’ | Nina Simone | The Guardian
