SHAKIRA Shopping at Home Depot with Her Brother in Miami
SHAKIRA Shopping at Home Depot with Her Brother in Miami
Shakira Isabel Mebarak Ripoll was born on 2 February 1977 in Barranquilla, Colombia. She is the only child of William Mebarak Chadid and Nidia Ripoll Torrado. She is of Spanish and Lebanese descent.[12][13] Her father William was born in New York City to a family from Lebanon. When he was five, his family moved to Colombia.[14] Her mother’s side has two Spanish surnames, Ripoll and Torrado, the former of which is Catalan and originates from four brothers who immigrated from Catalonia to coastal Colombia in the 19th century.[15] She has also stated that she has distant Italian roots through an ancestor with the surname “Pisciotti”.[16] She was raised Catholic and attended Catholic schools.[17] She has eight older half-siblings from her father’s previous marriage.[18] Shakira spent much of her youth in Barranquilla, a city located on the northern Caribbean coast of Colombia.
Shakira wrote her first poem, тιтled “La rosa de cristal” (‘The Crystal Rose’), when she was only four years old.[19] As she was growing up, she was fascinated watching her father writing stories on a typewriter,[19] and asked for one as a Christmas gift. She got that typewriter at age seven,[19] and has continued writing poetry since then. These poems eventually evolved into songs. When Shakira was two years old, an older half-brother was killed in a motorcycle accident; six years later, at age eight, Shakira wrote her first song, тιтled “Tus gafas oscuras” (‘Your dark glᴀsses’), which was inspired by her father, who for years wore dark glᴀsses to hide his grief.[20]
When Shakira was four, her father took her to a local Middle Eastern restaurant, where Shakira first heard the doumbek, a traditional drum used in Middle-Eastern music and which typically accompanied belly dancing.[21] She started dancing on the table, and the experience made her realize that she wanted to be a performer. She enjoyed singing for schoolmates and teachers (and even the nuns) at her Catholic school, but in second grade, she was rejected for the school choir because her vibrato was too strong. The music teacher told her that she sounded “like a goat”.[21][22] At school, she was often sent out of the class because of her hyperactivity.[23] She says she had also been known as “the belly dancer girl”, as she would demonstrate every Friday at school a number she had learned.[21] “That’s how I discovered my pᴀssion for live performance,” she says.[24][18] To instill graтιтude in Shakira for her upbringing, her father took her to a local park to see orphans who lived there. The images stayed with her, and she said to herself: “One day I’m going to help these kids when I become a famous artist.”[18]
