By Nathan Smith
MEMOIR
Matriarch: A Memoir
Tina Knowles (with Kevin Carr O’Leary)
John Murray Press, $34.99
When Tina Knowles was five years old, she once sat with a child-like defiance in the whites-only section of the bus.
The mother to superstar singer Beyoncé was mistaken as white and allowed to remain there, owing to her fairer complexion. When her dark-skinned sister went to pull Knowles back to the segregated section, a white woman intervened, thinking Knowles was a white child “worthy of her protection”. Once the woman discovered Knowles was black, she gave a “snarl” as if the little girl had “sold her something I did not own”.
Sobering stories of racism, social injustice and police brutality in America form the bedrock of Knowles’s earnest, if sometimes guarded, memoir Matriarch. The book reveals some admissions from the mother of Beyoncé and Solange, but gives scant detail on two celebrity daughters famously guarded about their private lives.
The 71-year-old was one of seven children, each one accidentally given a different version of their surname. (The name “Beyoncé” is Knowles’ recorded surname and the moniker she gave her firstborn.) Knowles’ mother once tried to correct the record but was told by a white city clerk she should be thankful that she was even getting a birth certificate.
Tina Knowles with Beyonce and her granddaughters Rumi and Blue Ivy in Beyonce’s music video Brown Skin Girl.
It’s one interaction emblematic of the frequent harm the family suffers for being African-American. One brother is later beaten nearly to death by a police officer in a case of mistaken identity. Knowles is strip-searched and arrested for a minor traffic infringement. Brutal episodes like these are “indicative of what families like ours endured and continue to endure all over”, Knowles writes.
Decades later, racial prejudice resurfaces in the music industry’s treatment of Beyoncé and her bandmates in the R&B ensemble Destiny’s Child. As the girl group climbed the charts, Knowles was told to stop sewing their outfits as the clothes were “too black”. The aesthetic, which drew on Motown’s look of glamour and opulence, didn’t align with the popular “white” girlhood fashion of crop-tops and denim jeans.
For those expecting major revelations in Matriarch, know that this memoir is less interested in exposing Beyoncé’s rarefied world and more preoccupied with meditating on black motherhood. Knowles reflects on the power African-American mothers bring to those in their care, like Knowles offered to “Uncle Johnny”, a gay friend whom she helped shield from a homophobic world: “It was my honour to be his protector,” she writes. (Beyoncé would dedicate her album Renaissance to him.)
Knowles proves evasive in allowing us access to the more alluring parts of her world, namely the opaque lives of her two children. There is an acknowledgement of the infidelity of their father, but little detail on Beyoncé’s own journey to motherhood, save for a brief retelling of the singer’s initial resistance in 2011 to publicly acknowledge her pregnancy.
Credit must be given to Knowles’ co-writer, who keeps the prose crisp and clear-eyed while also extracting evocative metaphors in her many painful memories. These retold stories build a personal history grappling with racial inequality, searching for self-love and the desire to form a lasting family legacy.
Like any good mother, Knowles says she protects her children at all costs – an act she surely does here with this memoir.
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