Published in 2007, with more controversial books to follow, author Kola Boof, the woman born Naima Bint Harith, and her family received death threats and at one point had to go into government protection, because of her honesty about the brutality that she suffered and her connection to wealthy, powerful, and dangerous men which included terrorist Osama Bin Laden. She brings us to an Africa few Westerners can really try on, one in which racism (not limited to Black versus White) and Arab-Muslim tensions are hand in hand. She is a womanist, a political activist, a mother, a writer and poet. And if you read her book, you might not be the same. Devastating would be too light a word.
An important aspect to her story is that she was as a child infibulated. This means that her vagina was sewn to keep it small and tight. She says still having her clitoris helped her want to live. But normal sex is impossible for her. She needs an especially patient and gentle lover and Bin Laden was certainly not one of the men who cared if he hurt her. A future post will be about this practice, also called female circumcision, which is seen as a right of passage by some people on this earth, but which is seen as the ultimate control over women by many. Those of you who have pain with intercourse might relate to the frustration she felt with sex.
Through these posts, we become familiar with - and advocate - informed choice. Yet so many women who have become mistresses have done so because they had little to no choice. Kola Boof was a mistress to other men before she met Osama Bin Laden and had no choice.
She was seduced and molested as an underage girl, she won a beauty contest and accepted being kept by a White Jewish American man for several years, and as an actress and model hoping to break into the business in Africa, because Hollywood is not enthusiastic about dark skinned women of African heritage, she became the mistress of another man. She encountered women from France, from Turkey, from Italy, from all over, who were competing to be the favorite in harems of ultra-rich men like Osama - who she called Somi. Her story begs us to consider how much choice she had and how much choice anyone has.
Naima, as she called herself then, was dining out on a date in 1996 in Morocco. when Osama Bin Laden saw her and commanded her to be his. What followed was six months of enduring and complying with his physically, emotionally, and psychologically sadistic behavior because she was afraid to be murdered. She met Satan.
As a model and actress she was considered exotic because of her upbringing in the United States, yet was born to a mixed race couple who had been murdered over an incident in which her lesbian aunt was beaten. She was just a girl as she heard the screams and saw the bodies left on the grass and so being murdered was a very real possibility to her. Rescued by a British couple, placed unsuccessfully with Arabic speakers in England who put her clothes out because she was too intelligent for a girl, she was then adopted by a Black family in the D.C. area who had four of their birth children and three other adoptees to love and care for. She says she did not know how lucky she was to have a father who wanted her.
Though the first man she was mistress to - the White Jewish man - encouraged her writing and literary knowledge and encouraged her to identify herself as a writer, it was her connection to the terrorist that made her interesting to publishers. She waited out contracts with some because she knew she was not a bimbo. In her case the personal became political. She is an outspoken advocate for the dark skinned - African heritage woman all over the world and in The United States where she feels that rap music erased the progress of the 1960's and 1970's for Black Americans.
I hope I can do her justice in this review. For she is formidable.
And I hope you will stick with me as I post about Kola Boof this month and the men she was kept by.
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1 comment:
I did not know this... amazing woman who went through this. But I feel her story has been censored as no one has mentioned her story. Thank you for posting.
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