Now touring Ireland with her unflinchingly personal one-woman show, Karen Underwood - the ‘Chicago Diva’ - tells Jenny Hauser how discovering her talent for singing helped her throw off the shackles of a strict upbringing
Karen Underwood has a story to tell. For the last six months, this Chicago-born African-American has laid bare her innermost thoughts, feelings and personal history on stage in her one-woman show The Nina in Me.
The ‘Chicago Diva’ – as she has come to be known in her adopted home, Cork – uses the songs of Nina Simone as a vehicle to tell her own story. Equipped with a strong, beautiful voice that reverberates not only through the theatre but also through one’s heart and soul, it is her honesty and openness about her life that sends shivers down the spine.
When she first arrived in Ireland in 1997, following her now ex-husband, she was struggling with her identity due to a fiercely religious upbringing. But the move proved to be the catalyst for Underwood’s complete transformation, as she grabbed the chance to shed a skin that never quite seemed to fit.
“When I came to Ireland I was basically a self-imposed prisoner of the church. I used religion to regulate my behaviour,” she says with a broad Chicago accent. “Ireland was a distraction for me, because it was new and exciting and it was something to explore. It gave me an opportunity to sort of work on my family, away from America.”
Feeling trapped in an unfulfilling marriage, she struggled with her religious life that laid down rules which she found increasingly difficult to follow. Outside America and away from the influence of her community and church, she plucked up the courage to defy the rules that she had internalised.
Underwood always had the talent to sing, but as a teenager she abandoned her musical aspirations, hearing loud and clear her church’s overbearing message that secular music is a source of evil. Terrified of her vocal talent, she turned her back on it.
“I wasn’t really encouraged to sing by my mother, not because she didn’t think I could do it but she was afraid of the influences that the entertainment industry would have on my life,” she explains. “So I held back and I went the academic route and became a very studious person, aiming to get an education and degrees. [My mother] didn’t necessarily hold me back, I loved her to bits but she loved me, she protected me from that whole thing.”
Years later, after the obligatory sing-along at a house party one night, her talents could no longer be hidden. A resulting jam session with a soul band, The Flying Monkeys, sealed her fate and her musical career was well underway. Support and encouragement – not least from the woman she fell in love with shortly after her arrival – came raining down on her. “She was telling me that I need to use my talent – if I wasn’t going to use it, I would lose it.”
With this supportive push and her mother’s words echoing through her head, telling her to keep getting up and fighting, Underwood mustered the strength to turn her life around. The woman who had once been terrified of following her instincts began to take a back seat and the real person that had been hiding stepped up to the plate.
No doubt, the overwhelming feeling that she was “dying emotionally” pushed her onward to put her life together in a way that fit her more comfortably. In a fight for emotional survival she went back to her roots, to discover a new path for herself. “I was tired of existing and I wanted to live,” she says, “and I started looking for ways to live.”
Feeding only off her own strength and the support of some close friends, she fought an “uphill battle” to regain herself. The journey was a bumpy one, and not without its obstacles.
“I did it all without the support of my husband,” she says. “He never turned up at one single gig that I ever had. He just couldn’t, his religion would not allow him to do that.”
Despite this, her career was on a roll. “I was getting a lot of positive feedback from the audiences that I was entertaining all across Ireland. I didn’t care about money. I just cared about doing something that I was good at.”
Listening to Underwood’s story, it is hard to believe that she was once timid and afraid. The words bubble out of her with such resonance and speed, as if the floodgates had been opened. Far from reserved and shy, she brings emotions and personal experiences onto the stage that many of us would be mortified to even tell our nearest and dearest, and despite the apparent struggle and pain, she is refreshingly uplifting.
For her the show is “like a healing, it’s like well needed medicine really.” Her personal gain from disclosing so much of her life is the liberation from shame and guilt. It helps her reconcile all the parts to her personality that once lay scattered and to validate them, while also being entertaining. It is about “dealing with racial issues and dealing with sexual issues and religion and the oppression we can allow ourselves [to get into], if we step in those boxes.”
Her personal journey has changed her understanding of spirituality, and by her own admission she remains a deeply spiritual person. Recalling her early experiences of religion, she says: “I certainly had no lesbian sort of icons or role models in my community growing up, nor in America and I thought, ‘No, this can’t be happening to me, I can’t be having to struggle.'
“I was trying to split myself in two, in order to be a spiritual person and a sexual person. I couldn’t sort of make the two come together because of the church’s stand against homosexuality and the very rigid attitude towards homosexuality in the black church.”
Married for many years, it was the church’s stance on matrimony that caused her further headaches. But ironically, it was in Catholic Ireland that Underwood liberated herself from the rigid ideas of her church. Away from her familiar surroundings, the forces that had held her back seemed less ominous and her new partner’s loving support gave her the strength to explore who she truly was.
Indeed, it was also in Ireland that she transcended the racial boundaries that had been so engrained in her from early childhood. She discarded the black-and-white view of the world, in favour of one where skin colour was immaterial.
“I had no sense of trust in the ability for white and blacks to have genuine friendships. I just thought it was all superficial,” she admits. “You could work with them but you could not be friends with them.”
But it was an Irish-American friend in the US who proved her wrong. After what Underwood calls “a five-year trial period”, her misconceptions about the ‘white’ experience were broken down. And since then, living in Ireland has trashed such notions once and for all.
Underwood recalls: “When my friend moved to Minnesota she invited me [to visit], and I had to overcome a lot of internalised, racist fears that I had myself. I didn’t think that I would be able to use her cups, you know, and I was able to use her cups. Then I didn’t think I would be able to use her shower and she said, ‘Oh use that shower’ and I said, ‘That’s your shower.' And she said, ‘But of course, what are you doing?’
“I breathed a sigh of relief that it was possible for her to love me as a friend and that built the bridge for me to come to Ireland. She actually helped to remove that big black chip off my shoulder.”
Underwood surprisingly equates Irish culture to the black American experience. “I think the position you have had in Europe and the position that blacks have had in America are very similar.”
As a mother of three children, she says that she is well and truly that – a mother. And her maternal instincts even go beyond her own family, as Underwood also works with children with autism. It’s something she does not like to refer to as a job, but a joy. Having found a niche for herself in her community, she helps children under the age of five to develop their language and social skills “so that they can be mainstreamed”.
After years of studying in the field of autism and alternative therapies, and always listening to her mother’s words, urging her on to educate herself so that she can be her own woman, she had a bulk of qualifications that enabled her to become self-employed in the field.
But as much as Underwood’s life reads as a success story, she has only reached a happier place now through nothing if not determination and a strong fighting spirit.
“I kept being knocked down, about six or seven times, by the Government. Every time I would apply for – let’s say – a visa, I was denied, or an application for this or that and I was denied, and then I just said, ‘No, I gotta keep trying, I just have to keep getting up. People can only walk on me if I lie down and let ’em.’”
So she got up and dusted herself off, thinking: “Maybe Ireland doesn’t have a place for me in this way, but I can do it another way, so I took another avenue and now I’m working, you know. I’m self-employed”, she says with apparent pride.
With her qualifications, her experiences in life, and her voice, she sat down and began to piece it all together like a jigsaw puzzle. As a result, her days are split into carrying out her joy in the mornings, rehearsing in the afternoons and entertaining at night.
Looking into the future, her sunny disposition continues to shine through despite the prevailing doom and gloom of the recession. “I came to the Celtic Tiger, now it’s the Celtic Kitten, but I think we’re gonna be okay. I think all of us are gonna be okay, if we give a little bit more than we used to give and love a little bit more as we can.
“I also think it’s up to us non-Irish nationals to contribute to society and to remove those stereotypes that all immigrants are here to take something. You know, I try to live as an example of someone who has something to offer to Irish society, in terms of educating Irish children and entertaining Irish adults.” n
Karen Underwood is currently on tour around Ireland performing The Nina in Me at the following venues: Garter Lane Theatre, Waterford on Sat 7 February (www.garterlane.ie); Upstairs @ Dolan’s, Limerick on Sat 21 February (www.dolanspub.com); Town Hall Theatre, Galway on Thu 5 March (www.tht.ie); glór, Ennis on Fri 20 March (www.glor.ie); Siamsa Tire Theatre, Tralee on Sat 21 March (www.siamsatire.com); Briery Gap Cultural Centre, Macroom on Sat 2 May (www.brierygap.com); Friars Gate Theatre, Kilmallock on Fri 8 May (www.friarsgate.ie); The Source Arts Centre, Thurles on Sat 13 June (www.thesourceartscentre.ie)
