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She’s Latin America’s hottest singer with fans around the world. But in her native Colombia Shakira is as well known for her work with the country’s poorest children. Euan Ferguson meets a popstar with real attitude
Something very strange happens, in the company of Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoli, to cynicism. After a while, even the blandest of statements has you nodding away, enthralled – not that there are too many, but before we get on to the sociopathy of the conquistadores or the sex lives of nuns, there has to be, almost by default, some stuff about “challenges” and “evolving”. It’s as if you heard a Miss World contestant blapping away about saving lost puppies and wishing for world peace and thought, simply, “Oh, that’s good then. The puppies are safe. And no more wars.”
Mainly, the power comes from the fact that I am very soon thinking about far deeper things than one might expect, especially if one was coming to Shakira on the music and looks alone. Thinking, arguing, about aspects of pre-teen education, and realising that she not only knows what she’s talking about, but puts her money where her mouth is. It suddenly strikes me that she’s Madonna gone right. She’s not arrogant or demanding, she can sing, can actually dance, writes her own music, does good things for children without always having to pick them up and “take them home with her”. Shakira doesn’t just talk about it: she gets things done. In the past few years she has built five children’s schools in her native Colombia. She sits through interminable meetings with squabbling Latin American politicians, trying to charm and nuance her way into firm commitments to education for 0 to 6-year-olds. Both Barack Obama and Gordon Brown have called her for advice, and they weren’t cosmetic calls, and she’s now busy talking to Warren Buffet’s son, Howard, about future programmes. For perhaps the first time ever, I find myself becoming interested in pop stars who do – well, this is honestly not “charidee”, it’s the real thing. She is seen as something of a saint in her own country. There are statues to her. Writhing teens love her for putting Latin American dance-music around the world: nuns revere her for building schools for orphans.
It would be wilfully disingenuous to deny, of course, that there are other reasons to like her. I mean… 4ft 11in tall (though nearer five six in tonight’s heels), 32 years old, svelte and lithe and impossibly smiley and, oh, she’s also unmarried and worth an estimated €26m… what’s not to adore? But it’s not just me, by which I mean it’s not just men. “Bloody hell I love her,” texts a female friend when hearing that I’m meeting her. “Even if she is a freak by having precisely double the number of vertebrae of ‘normal’ women.”
And how, you might wonder, as I did, did she reconcile her two worlds? The video for her latest single, “She-Wolf”, has Shakira licking the bars of cages, near naked. Her hips do quite impossible things, and, yes, her vertebrae do indeed go all the way down to her bottom. Gabriel Garcia Marquez has written, in a prescient essay on the star, of her “innocent sensuality”, and that seems a fair way of putting it: she exudes, in person, a gentler megagirl-next-door allure rather than rampant bar-clawing pheromones. But, still, the video – with 35m “hits” already on YouTube – is, it’s quite fair to say, raunch personified. How does that go down in the convents of Barranquilla?
“Not too long ago,” she replies, starting to giggle, hiding her laughter with her hand, “my mum ran into one nun at home, who’d known me, and the nun told her, ‘Oh my God, I watched the “She-Wolf” video, and Shakira looks phenomenal in it! I love how she looks, how she does the splits, and how flexible her legs are.’ This was an 80-year-old nun. Times are changing.”
They are, indeed: but for her, now, surely they needn’t, not too much. She really must have it all, and could put her tiny feet up, a little. Lives in the Bahamas, with her boyfriend of nine years, Antonio de la Rúa, son of the former Argentinian president, Fernando de la Rúa – they’ve been engaged seemingly endlessly, enthralling the gossip-sheets of Latin America with perennial on/off speculation, but she recently said she didn’t really want marriage, just permanent togetherness. She travels to global conferences on child development and early education: and when she goes back to Barranquilla, the Caribbean port town where she was born, she is accorded near-divine status, and this new album has already been critically acclaimed across the known and most of the unknown world. So why does she still do it, touring and the rest? Why are we sitting here, in the drab mazes of ITV’s Bankside studios, after she’s just done a full two hours on the Paul O’Grady Show, being lusted after by, it would seem, both Jo Brand and David Walliams? “That’s a good question. Ha!” My heart sinks, a little: flattering the interviewer is often a prelude to inanities. But, it turns out, she really does think it a good question – maybe she’s just glad I haven’t yet asked her about her fiancee, or her mad lyrics – and wants to think about the answer. She does this a lot, in our 40 minutes: lapses into complete concentrating silence, her brown eyes staring at the floor, hands clasped together before her, thinking, translating, trying to answer honestly.
“I wonder why. People get jaded in every profession, but for some reason I feel as passionate as when I was 13 years old and just released my first album, I feel the same amount of adrenalin in my blood, and the same amount of curiosity as well. Curiosity about why I’m different.” Which was going to be my next question anyway: what made her dig out this phenomenal career for herself, and then stick at it, and then plough the huge riches back into her home town: what made her special?
“Ah. Hmm. I guess it has a lot to do with me wanting to make my mum happy and my dad proud. It became a compulsion at about the age of eight. My dad had a financial crisis. He went through bankruptcy. And there’s a story, I think I’ve said it before, but it’s still true, about him taking me to the park.” Her father William, a Lebanese-born jeweller with eight children from his first marriage – Shakira (which means “thankful” in Arabic) is the only child of his second wife Nidya – lost his business in 1985. He sent Shakira and her mother to live in Los Angeles while he sorted out his affairs, and on their return the youngster was shocked at the changes to what had been a pleasant middle-class life.
“Looking back now, it sounds like such a small event, but you have to remember – I was seven, eight at the time. And came back to find no furniture. No car. We never had a car from then on, until I could buy one. The TV was now a tiny one, black and white.” Her father took her to a local park to show her that, though circumstances had changed, she wasn’t the poorest child in Barranquilla. “And there were all the kids sniffing glue, barefoot, just trying to survive. My parents wanted to show me a different reality, give me some perspective. When this happened, it left a mark in my impressionable mind forever – it was a turning point. After that visit to the park I made myself a promise to succeed in life. To vindicate my parents, yes. But also to do something for those kids who were orphans. If I ever succeeded, accomplished my goals in life, I wanted to somehow change their life.”
She had already begun trying to be creative – her father had bought her a typewriter before she was five, on which she wrote early poetry, and even after the bankruptcy he “went through hoops”, she now says, to continue a half-decent education, begging the nuns at the Colegio La Ensenañza to take her back. She was soon singing and belly-dancing all around the area, winning a little contest here, a little one there, even though her music teacher said her vibrato was too strong and that she sounded “like a goat”: and by her mid-teens, through a supportive contact, met Sony Colombia executive Ciro Vargas and given him an impromptu audition in a hotel lobby.
She was signed for three albums, and recorded Magia when only 13, then the second in 1993. Both were fairly successful, particularly in her local area, but neither set the heather on fire further afield. Then, in 1996, after she had insisted on full creative and production control, and allowing a whole raft of her other influences – everything from the Pretenders and Led Zeppelin to the likes of Leonard Cohen and Walt Whitman – to flavour the Latin sound, Pies Descalzos (Barefoot) was released. It debuted at number one in the album charts in eight countries. And it led, not that long after, to her first “crossover” (with some lyrics in English) album, which broke through hugely into America. And then, in 2006 “Hips Don’t Lie”, not only her second US number one (and number one in another 55 countries) but also, to date, the biggest-selling single worldwide this century. Anyone under 35 has danced to it. Anyone under about 45 has probably heard it, or would recognise the brass, and co-composer Wyclef Jean’s cries of “Shakira! Shakira!”. Her name was even in the lyrics: she’d gone global.
“You asked,” she tugs me back to my opening, still thinking about it. “You asked why I still do it, why I don’t just stop, and that’s interesting because it’s a matter I used to cover in my sessions with my analyst. After Laundry Service, which was my crossover album, I had already toured the world. And I sat down with my analyst one day, I’ve been seeing him for about eight years, and – not to display the privacy of my sessions but I think I can talk openly now – we were trying to find the motivation for me to continue. Obviously some of the initial drive had been a subconscious motivation to bring my parents joy. Both had had a difficult life, as is life for anyone who has gone through loss, and mourning.” One of her five half-brothers was killed in a motor-cycle crash, around the time of the bankruptcy. “So I wanted to fill the void in their own lives. They have a happy life together but they’ve had difficult times. Then, later, I wanted to make my own people proud, my home town, my country, this country that has gone through so many difficulties in these past 40 years: and I wanted to keep that promise of making a difference.
“There were so many motivations, but they were all external. And after a while maybe I started to realise that I also counted. And now it’s all for me. I guess that’s why I’m still working, because this time I get to do it for me!”
Did she ever feel that the urge to please her parents came from competition against her half-siblings, a need to prove she was loved as much? “I understand what you’re getting at, but no. I was the baby, you know, and it meant I was always my father’s little girl. And I still am in some ways. And, yes, I do have something of an Oedipus complex, which I am probably still trying to work through.
“I adore my dad, he’s a 78-year-old man and my inspiration. But now that I feel more like a woman today I understand my mother’s struggle. And also,” her voice lowers, knowingly, “the advantages of being a woman.”
Shakira struggles for a while, with many giggles, to expand on how she is “becoming a woman” and, though she doesn’t go quite so far as to say this, it’s hard not to feel the subtext is that, for all the sexiness of the videos, the earlier ones were to an extent a teenage girl (educated by, and often performing in front of nuns) dressing up and playing at it, flaunting it because she could, rather than feeling it, and things have only recently begun to change.
“Every day now I discover something new. Go through phases in which I feel much more in touch with my feminine side, in ways I never thought possible. I’m letting the woman inside of me speak, the desires of this woman, speak as loud as they can.”
What, then, if she feels this, does she think the nuns feel? We’re back to the old Latin American dichotomy, bed-breaking raunch versus thin-lipped Catholicism. Do all women have the same desires inside them? Did nuns have the same sexuality inside them as other women?
“Of course, yes. I do think libido is the engine of the world. Forward or backwards. For good or ill. Sometimes when we repress our libido we regress. When we were in the Dark Ages, it was a question of humanity somehow managing to forget about itself. We put God in the centre of society, and people forgot about their own nature and desires. There was a huge deal of repression.
“Until the renaissance, when people could start to… breathe, a little more. Ideas started, or rather resumed. And if this nun I mentioned, the 80-year-old who saw my video, if she was compelled to say something like that, then the rest of us are in a much better place today, right?” Are we really? Was she convinced the world was constantly getting better? I am asking someone who’s not just seen a good bit of the world, and presumably fought off many of its paws, but also sat and listened to self-serving arguments for inaction – and who has also studied the History of Western Civilisation since 2007 (at first anonymously, to avoid being recognised), at UCLA.
“I think that things have gotten much better than a few centuries ago. After the industrial revolution a middle class emerged, and new ideas, too, and it has kept mainly moving forward. Now America has a black president and discrimination and racism are declining every day. I know that youngsters want to find something in common with each other, and feel closer to each other ideologically through bridges such as the internet.
“But we are only now just starting to realise certain truths that we had not… entertained before. For example, poverty: it’s possible to eradicate it. It’s possible to resolve conflict. It’s possible to plan better if we now start feeding and protecting and stimulating children between 0 and 6 years old; and if presidents all over the world start to put education at the centre of their agendas.” But why, then, not to knock her fervent hope, but why had we been so godawful to each other for so long, and in so many ways still are?
“Because we’re animals as well, and we’re territorial, and we are more often than not put in survival mode, and it becomes the law of the jungle. We follow it when we see our own kind endangered; it’s part of natural selection.” Why in particular, I wondered, did Latin America seem to find it so hard to haul more of itself out of the Third World, out of its drugs and corruption and cyclical poverty? “Well, there are pretty fundamental sociological reasons, historically. Part of it is to do with the fact that when the English came, they travelled with their families, and they settled along with their families. Worked the land, to get their own goods. And, yes, granted, they pretty much exterminated most of the Indian population, but they didn’t subjugate them, make them submit. But when the Spanish came, many of them were on the run, they were criminals, put on this very risky voyage. Without their families. And so they raped and slaved and subjugated, and then tried to convert them. And that has certainly left a trauma mindset on the whole of the continent. The leftovers of colonialism… we’re still eating them.”
Thirty-five million children in Latin America receive no access to education of any kind. “A lot of families earn less than $2 a day,” Shakira says, “and they think that’s normal. Poverty traps them, and they can see no way to break the cycle. Education is the only way forward in Latin America and developing countries in general.”
Shakira’s Pies Descalzos [Bare Feet] Foundation, which she started at 19, has so far provided education and jobs for over 30,000 Colombians. Wider Latin America now has 54 million children aged 5 and under, 32 million of whom live in poverty: this she has more recently attempted to address by co-founding Falas (Fundacion América Latina en Acción Solidaria), a broad coalition of artists, writers and musicians attempting to kick-start similar, wider projects over the continent. “It’s the only way out of this awful set of circumstances, where if people are born poor then they die poor, and accept it. I never thought it was fair for an 8-year-old child not to be able to afford shoes, or to wander the streets having to beg for money. To know that child’s joy would end soon, when they realised there was no future. In Colombia, in Latin America, the kids are still very smiley, enjoy music, have very high spirits. And yet you know that society is one day soon going to crush them and any dreams like… cockroaches.”
I seldom find difference with the tungsten-sharp opinions of the friend who texted me earlier, but I think she’s wrong here. Shakira isn’t nutty, far from it. I have seldom met someone, especially in the music world, so sane: I suspect some of the “nutty” thing comes from faintly odd lyrics. The oft-quoted “Lucky that my breasts are small and humble/ So you don’t confuse them with mountains”, and now, from this new album, “I’m feeling kind of abused like a coffee machine in an office” still strike me as far from the worst or stupidest lyrics of all time, and particularly not from someone who wrote her crossover album, as she’s explained, with a dictionary in one hand and thesaurus in the other. And they even make you think, a little.
Shakira even apologises for talking too much, when I was about to do the same for keeping her going after her two-hour TV stint: there’s a plane to catch within the hour, to Berlin, to sing at the reunification celebrations. “No, this is good, different from TV. You know what TV’s like, you have to be super-brief, no time to dig into thoughts. I haven’t spoken this much in a while.” All I have time left to ask is about looks. Does she think, does she accept, it might all have been different if she had been… ugly? And was that fair? She is lengthily silent again, fumbles a bit with thanks for the compliment, which is the only piece of disingenuity I’ve seen from her. “Well, some of my favourite singers in the world weren’t precisely the ideal beauties. Pavarotti wasn’t in exactly the best shape. But, you’re right, he was a man, so he could get away with it. But, look, beauty is a good ingredient obviously. If you use it wisely. In the whole recipe. But it shouldn’t be the only dish you serve. Flavour is important. Flavour, and comfort. Beauty, when it’s one-dimensional, it gets old quickly.”
What will she be like when old: when, say, 78? “Wrinkled. I’ll be wrinkled, definitely. Still dancing? Don’t know. I hope I can at least be flexible. So I want to be 70, 80, and at least move… lightly, and feel young. My dad is a good example. He’s 78 but says he feels like he’s 40. And looks like he’s 60.
“And I’d like to know that when I’m 78 I won’t be alone. I don’t care about how I will be remembered. Human beings in general have a very short memory. They’ll remember me for maybe six months, a year, maybe 10 or 20 if I’ve done something really outstanding. But what is that in the big scale of the universe? No, I just want to grow old with a man who takes care of me, and I want to eventually have kids, and want them to be good children to me. Just want to be treated nice and have respect.”
She leans into my farewell handshake to proffer instead a double-kiss, and adds: “Till next time I see you then. I’ll look forward to it.” Extraordinarily, I slightly believe she slightly means it.★
She-Wolf is out now. The single “Did it again” is released 14 December
