KOLA's CHILDHOOD EFFECTED HER WHOLE LIFE

Kola Boof came to the United States to be adopted by a loving and intact family at the age of 8 with the name Naima Bint Harith. She had been rescued by a British couple after her parents were murdered. Her father was a light skinned Arab-Egyptian archaeologist named Harith Ben Farouk.  Her mother "mommy sweet" was Jiddi, a woman of a dark black African ethnic group. The family she had been placed with in England rejected her for being too intelligent for a girl. (!) She feels her dark color was part of that rejection. The family in the U.S. had seven other children, 3 others had been adopted. She went through some cultural shocks and so did they. When it was discovered that she was one of about 100 million African women (2007 stats) who had been subject to Female Genital Mutilation, which permanently restricts the size of a woman's vagina and will subject her to potentially painful intercourse for the rest of her life, her family was shocked. When she became an adult, they suggested she have surgery to repair but she refused.

Quote, "I think it's a misogynist ritual and an abomination against the God in women."  (Page 94)

Despite being raised in a family that wanted her - with a father - at 14 years old she was seduced by a reading skills instructor who she lost her virginity to at 17 - She thought it was love. It was a molestation and child rape. The relationship she thought was love went on for some time. He was discovered to have been doing the same with other underage teens. This lead to scandal. 

The teenage Naima was in many ways just a girl, one who loved the music of Olivia Newton-John and became a Madonna fan.  (She hates hip hop, calling it The Hip Hop Holocaust, saying it has ruined the progress of the Black Community, particularly for Black Women.)  Her ideas about what her adult life would become were unformed. She was also indulging herself in reading some excellent authors such as Alice Walker, Sylvia Plath, and Mark Twain. She never went to college but she began to write. To think of herself as a writer.

She and a girlfriend ran away from home rather than deal with the aftermath of her seduction and trial of her seducer and nilly willy got off the Greyhound bus in Lake Fairfax, Virginia.  It was a very small town that had a beauty contest.  The White men who judged it chose her to be Miss Fire Safety, August 1988.  The contest lead to her first experience of being a Mistress - a kept woman of a Jewish man.

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Primary reference for this post is Kola Boof's memoir.