Al-Joundi Darina - The Day Nina Simone Stopped Singing

Table of Contents

FOREWORD

IN JUNE 2006, I WAS ORGANIZING AN EVENT AROUND the issue of Beirut in a theater in Paris. At the end of the performance a shy young woman, frightened even, and dressed in black, approached, handed me a manuscript, and then disappeared without saying a word. I read it that same evening. It was an open letter to her father who had dreamed of the greatest of freedoms for his daughter while she, precisely because of this freedom, would come to know the worst servility. The text was circumspect, metaphoric. I phoned her to find out whether she was prepared to take it any further, to disclose everything fully. She welcomed the opportunity with extraordinary openness. She told me the story of her childhood, her wars, her drug habit, and her love affairs without any self-censorship. She talked, I wrote. This encounter gave birth to a deep friendship and a play that I submitted to Alain Timar, the director of the Thtre des Halles in Avignon. The following day, he took the TGV to Paris to propose to her that it be put on at the Festival of Avignon where he would be happy to welcome her. She had been an actress since the age of eight but had never performed in France. Her exile from Lebanon had cut her off from the stage. She was so eager to perform. From the third day on the public was already fighting to see her. Irreverent, beautiful, passionate, and liberated, she was worth her weight in gold in the Chapelle Sainte-Claire.

The entire national press reported on her performance. Laure Adler and Fabienne Pascaud wrote that she was the revelation of the 2007 festival. The fairy tale continued. Thierry Fabre, who had seen the show, asked us to write an account of it. Back in Paris, Darina described her life to me day after day, sometimes in Arabic, sometimes in French, taking it year by year, and I wrote. In the end, I had hundreds of sheets of paper. I needed to piece it together without ever losing the music of her oral story, to make it into a fiction in which everything is true. Darinas biography recounts the lunacy of Lebanons history as well, that same Lebanon that rejoices in times of war and falls apart in times of peace, in the same way that it tells of the vulnerability of womens freedom, which in the eyes of men shall forever remain a foreign language.

MOHAMED KACIMI

I dont know why I screamed. But I had to scream so that I wouldnt 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. Ive 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 Chteau 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 fathers funeral. I caress his face: his skin is like a babys, not even cold. It is January. Its 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 fathers 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! Youre mad! Come back, this is not the time ...

I ran to hide in my fathers room and double-locked the heavy oak door. I heard the men hollering, You crazy woman, give back the Koran or well kill you. Open up, you bitch, open up! One doesnt cut off the voice of God. Open up, you bitch, if you so much as touch Gods Book youre dead.

From behind the door I yelled back, This God is not my fathers God! My father never had a God. He made me swear, Daughter of mine, watch out that those dogs dont 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. Ill be glad to play Nina Simone for him, Miles Davis, Fairouz, and even Mireille Mathieu, but no Koran. Do you hear me, Ill 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 wont bury him like this. You wont get it back. Ill never open up for you.

I took out the cassette of the Koran and replaced it with Nina Simones 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, didnt 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. Theyre obsessed with appearances, theyre tethered to the customs, theyre eroded by God, theyre gobbled up by their mothers, theyre 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. Theyre 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.

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 Id 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 Chteau 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.