katrintheresa on Nostr: I’ve been a Shakira fan for a long time. “The only daughter of a jeweller in ...

I’ve been a Shakira fan for a long time. “The only daughter of a jeweller in Barranquilla, Colombia, William Mebarak, and his wife, Nydia Ripoll, Shakira was born into an artistic family of Arab descent. Her precocity meant that she packed as much into her early years as most people manage in decades. At 17 months, she was reciting the alphabet; at three, she had learned to count; at four, she was belly-dancing at her Barranquilla convent school, where in the 1930s a sybaritic staff member had wanted to erect a monument to the cult of Shirley Temple. By the time she was seven, Shakira had composed her first song. When she was eight, she began writing poems, and at 10, she had written and composed original songs. Around the same time, she signed her first contract, entertaining workers at the El Cerrejon coal mines on the Atlantic coast. She hadn't even started secondary school when a record company signed her.” https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2002/jun/08/shopping.colombia