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    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing
    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing
    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing
    Ebook124 pages2 hours

    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing

    By Darina Al-Joundi, Mohamed Kacimi and Marjolijn de Jager

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    About this ebook

    The Homeland actress’s “recollections of her unconventional youth in war-torn Beirut are heartbreaking yet humorous . . . in this unique” memoir (Publishers Weekly).
     
    Raised in 1970s Lebanon on Charles Baudelaire, A Clockwork Orange, and fine Bordeaux, Darina Al-Joundi was encouraged by her unconventional father to defy all taboos. She spent her adolescence defying death in Beirut nightclubs as bombs fell across the city. The more oppressive the country became, the more drugs and anonymous sex she had, fueling the resentment directed at her daily by the same men who would spend the night with her.
     
    As the war dies down, she begins to incur the consequences of her lifestyle. On his deathbed, her father’s last wish is for his favorite song, “Sinnerman” by Nina Simone, to be played at his funeral instead of the traditional suras of the Koran. When she does just that, the final act of defiance elicits a catastrophic response from her surviving family members.
     
    In this dramatic true story, Darina Al-Joundi is defiantly passionate about living her life as a liberated woman, even if it means leaving everyone and everything behind in this “beautifully taut and relentlessly unemotional” memoir (Kirkus).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherOpen Road Integrated Media
    Release dateMar 15, 2011
    ISBN9781558616844
    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing

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    • 4/5
      Unsettling doesn't even begin to describe this book. For such a short book, it was a hard read. This book follows the life of Darina Al-Joundi. Born in Beirut in 1968, her life was one of constant chaos. In times of almost constant war, Darina grew up never knowing if she'd live to see the next day. Her family constantly moved around to avoid the danger around then, but often ended up back in Beirut. I can't say that I enjoyed this book per se, but it was a good book. Darina had no identity to speak of. Because of her parentage, she had no claim to citizenship anywhere. She was told to speak one language at home and one at school. With no stability due to the war, her life was one of chaos. Thinking she would die at any moment, she threw herself into drugs and sex with anyone she ran into. Honestly, I thought it was a wonder she survived to tell her story. This was certainly a sad tale. It was also cautionary to some extent. The horrors of extended war are detailed. More than anything though, I felt like Darina really missed out on security and stability while growing up. Without those things, she bounced from one thing to the next trying to find what could make her feel good about herself. This book was harsh, but I think she was brave to be able to tell about everything that happened. I am curious to find out if she has found some peace living her life on her terms now. I hope she has. Book won in online contest.

    Book preview

    The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing - Darina Al-Joundi

    1

    STOP WITH THAT WRETCHED KORAN!

    I don’t know why I screamed. But I had to scream so that I wouldn’t break the promise I had made to my father not to have the Koran read at his funeral.

    My father died the day he knew that he had no further stories to tell me. I stand before his remains. In the middle of the large room he is naked beneath a simple white shroud. Lying on his back, his hands are folded over his genitals. I look at him. He looks so serene. It is the first time in my life that I feel he is at peace. I am not sorry he is dead. I’ve known for a long time that he was going to die because he had told me everything. Through the open window I see the houses of my village, Arnoun, which they used to call the Château de Beaufort. The bombed-out houses are still smoking. After a twenty-year occupation, the Israeli army has just evacuated southern Lebanon. I see the surrounding hills, dark with people. They have come from Tyr, Sidon, Damascus, Aleppo, Beirut, and Amman to attend my father’s funeral. I caress his face: his skin is like a baby’s, not even cold. It is January. It’s raining. I can smell the rain as it surfaces from the red soil of southern Lebanon. In the distance I see the plains of Galilee, and high up there I watch the snow falling slowly on the peaks of Mount Hermon. The door opens. Women in black appear. They are weeping and moaning. They throw themselves on my father. They kiss his face. They kiss his hands. They kiss his feet so fervently! I whisper in my father’s ear, You bastard, one can always rely on you.

    Suddenly I heard a strange voice that ripped through me. An intolerable cry that split my skull, pierced my skin: someone was wailing verses from the Koran. I flung open the door to the next room. It was filled with women in black weeping around a cassette player broadcasting prayers. I stepped over and on them, snatched the cassette player, and shut it off. The women shouted out in horror. My mother and my sisters tried to grab hold of me, shouting, Stop that! You’re mad! Come back, this is not the time ...

    I ran to hide in my father’s room and double-locked the heavy oak door. I heard the men hollering, You crazy woman, give back the Koran or we’ll kill you. Open up, you bitch, open up! One doesn’t cut off the voice of God. Open up, you bitch, if you so much as touch God’s Book you’re dead.

    From behind the door I yelled back, "This God is not my father’s God! My father never had a God. He made me swear, ‘Daughter of mine, watch out that those dogs don’t use the Koran the day I die. Daughter of mine, I beg you, I would like some jazz at my death, and even some hip-hop, but definitely no Koran.’ I’ll be glad to play Nina Simone for him, Miles Davis, Fairouz, and even Mireille Mathieu, but no Koran. Do you hear me, I’ll play Last Tango in Paris for him instead of your prayers. He loved La Coupole and butter, Papa did. He always used slightly salted Fleurier. You won’t bury him like this. You won’t get it back. I’ll never open up for you."

    I took out the cassette of the Koran and replaced it with Nina Simone’s Save Me. The pounding on the door became even louder. And I was dancing, alone, in front of my father. I was speaking to him, loudly, as if I wanted to awaken him from his death, Happy now? You got your Nina Simone, you got your jazz. I spared you from the Koran, didn’t I? And now what am I going to do? Who will protect me from these monsters? You were the one who taught me, ‘Watch out, my girl, all the men in this country are monstrous to women. They’re obsessed with appearances, they’re tethered to the customs, they’re eroded by God, they’re gobbled up by their mothers, they’re agitated about money, they spend their lives offering their asses to God on a platter, they open their flies the way you arm a submachine gun, they turn their sex organs loose on women the way you turn a pit bull loose. They’re dogs!’

    Just now, one of your former mistresses wanted to kiss your hands. I suggested that she kiss your cock instead. You never know, she might have been able to resuscitate you. She could have played Jesus to your Lazarus.

    2

    AS A CHILD I USED TO BITE EVERYONE. MY sister Nayla still has my tooth marks on her body. I hated dressing like a girl. I wore my hair cut very short. I had the face of a little thug. The villagers called me little Hassan, they were convinced I was a boy. I despised washing myself because it was so cold. I was dirty because I chased after grasshoppers that I’d put in matchboxes after first breaking their legs. I made them into salads that I served to the children of the village of Arnoun.

    Our house was built of stones from the Château de Beaufort, an eleventh-century fortress constructed by the crusaders. It controlled the Palestine road. The house stood apart from the rest of the village, the road leading there lined with linden trees and weeping willows. The soil of the surrounding fields is bloodred, covered with huge sunflowers and chunks of white clay that look like sculptures of a mythical bestiary.

    My father was an odd bird. He was born in 1933 in Salamiyeh, a town in northern Syria where poets, writers, and Communists lived. Most of its inhabitants are Ismailites, a Neoplatonic sect for whom reason takes precedence over faith. The Ismailites have a temple where they pray to Aristotle and Plato instead of Jesus and Mohammed.

    In 1958, when he was twenty-five, my father went into exile in Lebanon where he taught literature and philosophy, first in Tyr, then in Beirut. During his lifetime he never lost his Salamiyeh accent. He always wore an abaya and open leather sandals that his mother sent him, together with a box of cakes, from Syria each year on the day of the Eid. He had met my mother in Beirut. Her pregnancy soon followed and they were forced to marry to avoid a scandal.

    My mother was one of the great names in Lebanese radio. She came from a large family of well-educated landowners, with a father who was an officer in the gendarmerie. He had served in the army of Sharif Hussein of Jordan, who had entrusted his last flag to him. My grandfather kept it in the tall armoire in his room. On it the Sharif had written, This flag will go to the one who will liberate Jerusalem one day. As children we believed that Palestine was a fairy tale.

    Since my grandfather never finished anything he began, the bathroom had remained roofless. I took my showers in the sun or under the star-studded sky. In the fields there was a basin in which rainwater was collected. No one in the South had any running water.

    My grandmother came from a family of landowners from Ghandouriyeh. She had property on the banks of the Litani, where we spent our vacations. She had never worn a veil. At that time there wasn’t a woman anywhere in the South who wore one and no one celebrated Ramadan.

    At dusk I would often visit the ruins of the Château de Beaufort with my father. He insisted that the place was haunted by a knight looking for his mistress, who was dressed in a voluminous blue gown. I believed him so completely that I could hear the lovers kiss in the dark.

    At the time, my father had a blue Simca, worked at the newspaper Le Destour in Beirut, and taught at the orthodox school. He loved drinking, listening to music, and surrounding himself with women. He was extremely attached to Arnoun, which reminded him of Salamiyeh, the village where he was born. We used to get up early. Khadidja the housekeeper would knock on the door at dawn. She’d make pancakes with a fine batter, sugar, and butter. I’d take the pot to go get milk at the neighbor’s house, and when I returned the table would be covered with olives, farmer cheese, tomatoes that smelled like summer, cucumbers, and above all baskets of prickly pears that used to give me incredible constipation.

    We were three sisters but Rana, the eldest, was very distant from us from the start. She wrote poems and was very close to grandfather whose side she never left. I was too mean and my sister Nayla was too sweet. I used to stuff peas up her nostrils, and serve her fruit full of worms. She trusted me. She swallowed it all with her eyes closed.

    Rather than lecturing me my father was delighted with my foolish actions. He had a barbaric enthusiasm for all my mischief. I think that from our childhood on he refused to play the father role, so he could be party to our mistakes, our transgressions, and our success. To teach us Arabic he would sing us songs from Salamiyeh at six o’clock in the morning; he loved for us to get up early. Even on the john he would respond to us in poetry. He had

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