‘Transmitting self-esteem’: Tina Knowles provides a ‘vivid peek behind the scenes’ of her family’s life
An inspirational memoir by Beyoncé and Solange’s mum works best as a portrait of a redoubtable woman shaped by poverty, family and necessity
Matriarch: A Memoir
Tina Knowles
Dialogue, £25, pp432
In 2016, an incendiary track by Beyoncé summarised her heritage. “My daddy Alabama,” she sang on “Formation”, a song about Black southern pride, “Momma Louisiana, you mix that Negro with that Creole, make a Texas bama” – the last word being slang for a hick.
Around the same time, her sister, Solange Knowles, included an interlude on her landmark album A Seat at the Table in which their mother, Tina, discussed her own lived sense of Black pride.
“Ms Tina” has long been a key figure in both stars’ origin stories; Matriarch – her memoir – fleshes out these musical vignettes into a widescreen documentary.
It is a vivid peek behind the scenes in one of the most famous families in the US and an analysis of a life lived through the prism of history – and, inescapably, racial inequity.
Hustle, faith and self-actualisation emerge as the main themes; making lemonade out of life’s citrus fruit is a constant background slosh. It is a very female account.
One of the newsier bombshells is Knowles’s account of Beyoncé’s miscarriages before her daughter, Blue Ivy, was born in 2012 and her fury at the conspiracy theories to “explain” Bey’s bump, or lack thereof.
Queerness is not far off centre stage. Beyoncé’s 2022 album, Renaissance paid loving tribute to her late uncle Johnny, technically her mother’s nephew, and her best friend. He is revealed here as a live-in nanny, costumier and loving presence when the Knowles girls were young.
Johnny Rittenhouse was plugged into house music and drag culture, strands of Black queerness that filtered into Beyoncé’s aesthetic as the singer morphed from solo R&B star into a more radical and nuanced voice.
A photograph featuring her siblings Larry, Butch, Skip and Florence
Many will pick up this book because of the stardust with which it is sprinkled. But this is a substantial overview of how a woman born poor in Louisiana was shaped by family, events and necessity.
Knowles’s grandmother had been enslaved; Tina belatedly discovers as a child that her father, Lumis, whose first language was Creole, is illiterate.
There is a family tree, because it is complicated.
Theirs is a life of making something out of nothing, with an elastic concept of family at its core; the reality of exploitation and harassment by authority, ever-present.
Knowles reckons she may have ADHD; the nuns who educated their headstrong charge in Galveston were cruel. She struggles for years to understand how her pious, fearful mother, Agnes, did not defend her.
Agnes was a seamstress, as was her eldest daughter, Knowles’s sister, Selena. Johnny, too, when the family figured he would be less of a target for homophobic abuse if he could dress his would-be tormentors. Tina becomes one eventually – initially for Girls Tyme, Beyoncé’s first group, then Destiny’s Child, after building a beauty salon business. (The pictures of the young Badass Tenie B, all afro and outlandish outfits, are amazing.)
Knowles and her ex-husband, Mathew, have often been portrayed as ambitious stage parents, but the picture she paints is more of a protective, self-motivated and DIY family firm, keeping budgets frugal to keep out of debt to the label.
Written in the wake of Knowles’s second divorce and a cancer diagnosis (she is in remission), Matriarch dwells on the long line of resourceful women who made her and on the mothering of daughters, and other children who come along through non-genetic means: the author counts her niece Angie and Destiny’s Child member Kelly Rowland as offspring.
There are frequent mentions of lemonade, but absolutely nothing at all on Lemonade, the album, in which Beyoncé examined her husband Jay-Z’s infidelities in the light of Mathew’s chronic cheating on Tina.
The deeper lesson Knowles wants to transmit is self-esteem. Taught from infancy that her value lay in her sacrifice and usefulness, she reflects in late life that her worth is inherent – not a product of how many sequins she can sew on to handmade costumes overnight.
Order Matriarch at observershop.co.uk to receive a special 20% launch offer. Delivery charges may apply
Photographs: Blair Caldwell/Tina Knowles
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