Nina Simone liked to repeat to herself a phrase that he used to say his friend, the writer James Baldwin: “This is the world that you’ve created, Nina. Now you have to live with it.” When the singer he felt sadness, he would look at the reflection of the author of Go and tell it on the mountain, which, like her, was one of the greatest scourges against racism in the united States in the second half of the TWENTIETH century. High and ungainly, with its aura of pharaoh thousand-year-old Simone (Tryon, North Carolina, 1933-Carry-le-Rouet, France, 2003) confessed in his memoirs an insecure person, lack of love and in a continuous fight against herself, but, especially, against the world that had lived, marked by fame, and the racial segregation in his country.
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The editorial Books of the Kultrum edit in Spanish the autobiography of the diva with the title of Victim of my spell, published in 1991 in English under the name I Put A Spell On You. The translation is the responsibility of Eduardo Hojman. Despite the sincerity that seem to give off the words of Simone in the review he makes of his life, it is important to note a definitive fact with respect to this book: singer, published his memoirs shortly before to know that she suffered from bipolar disorder. Then, the first pianist in black playing at the Carnegie Hall, in Manhattan, was not aware of the disease that fueled a good part of his indomitable character, and volcanic. So much so that it appeared in the pages of events, beyond his problems with the treasury in the U.S., for shooting two young fans that were picking in your garden. In this way, their strong depressions and outbursts of anger were linked to this psychological disturbance, as they have in other biographies and in the documentary What happened, Miss Simone?, led by director Liz Garbus in 2015.
there are Hardly any traces of his disorder in the almost 300 pages of the Victim of my spell. Simply, it seems when Simone tells a crazy transient who suffers before a concert and blamed the exhaustion Tempobet for so many years in a row of tours and recordings. “She was rich and famous, but it was not free,” he writes. “At times I thought my entire life had been a search for a place she belonged, truly,” he reflects. On the sidelines of his bipolarity, always longed to find that place. Says music writer Dave Marsh in the prologue of the Victim of my spell: “For Nina Simone, the art was closely related to the desire to live as a free person”. A statement that can be seen in the development of their professional career, which ended far away from US, from the seventies. Came to live in Barbados, Liberia, Switzerland, England and France, where he died in 2003 while sleeping in a resort town near Marseille.
The desire for freedom was the engine of the world that she herself created with talent and tenacity. With a happy childhood in North Carolina, Simone dropped everything for her music career since 11 years, he was instructed by a white teacher of classical music. So, he left aged 17 to Philadelphia to form and renounced the great love of his life, a boy named Edney, with whom he lost his virginity. Years later, that has now a professional singer, he wanted to return to retrieve it, but it was impossible. Rejected him, but she never forgot it. Since then, he’s always had a high concept of love. Also left behind his mother, a pastor, a religious who never accepted the music as “worldly” to which he was devoted to his daughter when, rejected at the conservatories by the color of their skin, he played in clubs of Atlantic City. “Mom was a fanatic,” says Simone, who pursued the death of his sick father, from which he never fired it after an argument.
In his world, there was also an unwavering commitment to their values. Went from singer desamores to musical leader of the struggle against racial discrimination, leading the March from Selma in march of 1965. Inspired the activist Stokely Carmichael, who fell in love with, but a previous event was decisive: the death of four black girls in 1963, in a bomb attack at a school in Birmingham (Alabama). The hatred invaded. “I wanted to go out to the street and kill someone. I did not know who, but someone who objected to my people to gain justice for the first time in three centuries.” Came to pick up a gun, but in the end he wrote Mississippi Goddam, whose letter reads: “you are Not forced to live next to me, but give me only equality”.
With virulence similar to that were renegating their country and sympathized with the armed struggle, complaining about the music industry from the scammed with your first contract. Did not know how to fight “the world is dishonest and cruel” of the business, but I tried looking for independence from big companies. For when I was living in France, knowing the U.S. was no longer his home, he wrote: “I meant the same that defended the old: that the music industry is full of crooks, that the US is a racist country and that 20 years later he was still punishing the black citizens who had been involved in the movement.” The world of Nina Simone was always a world in struggle. An ongoing struggle, also against itself.
