Book Review: Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof
by Kola Boof
Publication Date: Feb 01, 2006
List Price: $25.00
Format: Hardcover, 441 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780971201989
Imprint: Door of Kush
Publisher: Door of Kush
Parent Company: Door of Kush
Borrow from Library
Read a Description of Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof
Book Reviewed by Chris Stevenson
"There are more pyramids in the Sudan than there are in Egypt, that's a statistical fact... and today there are still 2-3 million Black Egyptians...its terrible because in Egypt they blew our fathers' noses off of the Sphinx, they desecrated all of our stuff over there, but we know we're not Arab-White though. I mean the Black Egyptians over there will tell you that this is a lie, but they're now on the botton because of the intermarriage law that Cleopatra inacted from Ceasar where it was illegal for an Egyptian to marry an Egyptian. They had to marry a Roman, a Phillistine, the sea people, until they were mixed so much until they no longer know they're identity, and that's the trick.
The Whole North Africa has been bastardized, the Moors were bread out of being by teaching them they were inferior. People love Othello, Black people like to look up to that, that is the destruction of your people. The Moors no longer exist, it would be different if they were still here, but they are teaching you to self-destruct.
Why don't they make a movie about a great Black King who fought against slavery? There are many, but they won't ever do that story. They won't show you the story of Katanga, because Katanga stood with his Black wife, and he defeated the British, and they were not able to conquer him, and then he defeated the Dutch. And so they're never gonna make a movie about that because at the end he and his Black wife and his Black kids are intact, they're still Black, and they're still in power. They don't want that image, they want to give you a Black man giving his heart and soul to a White woman."’Excert of Kola Boof-On the original Egyptians, the Blue/Black Egyptians in a 2/13/06 radio interview on Buffalo's Pat Freeman Show ("the Message"), AM 1080 WUFO.
I don't think that even the reputed slave-owner-advisor Mr. Lynch himself could
have crafted a more macabre scenario for the little African girl named Naima
Bint Harith, but the resulting mental orbital cycle that would fully manifest
itself in her teenage and young adult years, did not break her as some have
hoped. It only served to make her stronger. The sole reason for that was the
words given to her by her late parents, that would eventually become as
effective as military briefings, because though not many youths (7-years-old)
would remember why or understand why-if they were witness to their parents
murder at such a young age-Kola understood perfectly. And only with the aid and
love of her eventual African American family the Johnson's, and the father of
her sons, was she able to overcome the demons that haunted her, until she broke
her programming. Perhaps if you read her autobiography "Diary of a Lost Girl,"
you'll view yourself differently in relation to the world around you, or maybe
you'll just be entertained. But don't call it escapism, call it retention-ism.
When I mention programming I know I just lost some of you. When people program
you, they set out to make you something other than what you actually are.
Because the mere idea of what you are threatens them. When Kola/Naima was very
young, local authorities began keeping an eye on her family. Her father was
somewhat of a subversive you see, "I still don't have definate command of some
of the intricate details of Pappuh's (her name for her father. "Pappuh" or "Pappuh
Mahdi" was Harith Bin Farouk, an Arab Egyptian archeologist) problems with
varied officials in Sudan... our trouble started when the Mayor's office wrote a
note to Pappuh threatening to take our house away if he didn't shut up about
something... Pappuh began to complain that he needed to earn more money to
'finance his opinions.'" That "something" they wanted Harry to shut up about was
probably the emerging Sudanese slave trade that he was noticing, and how some of
his friends in his community that he came up with, was involving themselves in
this despicable practice.
Kola's father wasn't a Black man, he was a White (by African standards) Arab
Muslim. His archeological knowledge meant that he knew the truth about the
original Africans, the very dark skinned Black Africans, especially the Black
Sudanese. He knew they were the builders of great cities and technologies, and
cultures way before Whites and Arabs were known to exist. And he dug that
culture up, and pushed it into his only daughter's head. He was also close to
other Arab human rights activists, and Black southern Sudanese: "I was with
Pappuh Mahdi when he and Uncle Atmu and about twelve of their other 'human
rights' colleagues (all Arab Muslim men), went to the man's house to confront
him about it and got cursed and called abeed-shafa (basically nigger lovers)
before the city police officials arrived to threaten Mahdi Pappuh and the group
with arrest if they didn't leave this good, clean upper class Arab neighborhood
in peace. We saw the slaves though, two boys, around ten or eleven and Blacker
than crude oil (the Dinka being the Blackest people on earth, as well as some of
the most beautiful), were chained on either side of the back door of Abu Fayid
Ali's house and a little girl of about six (who looked to be their sister) stood
inside the house, staring at us through the windows as though her greatest
prayer was that either death would take her or that we would. Her tightly closed
mouth spoke of unspeakable horrors... In Sudan the law is religious, its by
Shariah, but very often Islamic Scholars are not involved and the stupidest men
rule via their personal prejudices and ignorance."
It wasn't long before Kola's father began being branded a traitor by his Arab
contemporaries. He was probably already under suspicion from the time he married
Kola's Blue-Black mother, known back then as "Princess Jiddi" the daughter of an
Oromo tribal Chief. Harry wanted to be Black, he wanted his skin color to match
his nappy hair ("the Proof" as Kola calls it), the higher social status he
benefitted from as an Arab made no difference to him. Eventually his torment led
to heroin addiction, but it would soon end. When Kola's parents were executed at
the same time during the middle of the night she went out to be near them during
the long hours their bodies lay on the dirt in the backyard until someone
discovered them in the afternoon. Whereas at one time her family taught her that
God was a Black man, after her parents death, and the refusal of her father's
Arab family to adopt her because they felt she was too dark (not to mention
being rejected by her father's other family, an Ethiopian woman who gave Harry
two sons), she began to wonder if God hated her. But there were others who would
eventually guide her to a new family, and a new way of life: "It was slavery in
modern day Sudan that caused me to come to the United States and be adopted and
raised by the strangest Africans I've ever met... 'the Black Americans.'"
It was more than just memories that crossed the ocean to the US with Kola, it
was 1979, a part of Africa would travel with her that she in part, decided to
never let go of, and it had to do with the genital mutilation that she
experienced. In her case it was twofold, because it had to do with circumcision
and infibulation that many young African girls have gone through (100 million).
This is a sick, brain damaged practice that I strongly feel is tied directly to
the African Black man's insecurity. The fact that they can give you no other
explanation for it other than it being a "tradition" betrays nothing more than
the stubborness, and raw stupidity that has kept Africa several giant steps
behind the rest of humanity. You notice there is no real pressure from the White
man to eradicate this "tradition" don't you? No, they let them think they are in
control of something. Infibulate your oil, your diamonds, your resources
instead.
The Johnsons were/are the strong Black traditional family that Kola needed. Her
new father, Marvin was both a veteran of the military, and the Civil Rights
movement. But he couldn't shield Kola or her new siblings from the anti-Black
brainwashing that America's entertainment, educational, and news outlets both
cleverly advertised and denied. But you'll see how her evolving racial mental
toughness prepares her for survival, and her ordeals with Osama bin Laden, the
South Sudan Militia, and those infamous psycho-racist terrorists; the major
American White media. There is no middle ground with this woman, this Blue-Black
Butterfly is an emerging modern day warrior queen and ’Diary of a Lost Girl’ is
harmoniously written by one of black literature's most gifted and important new
writers. Order it on Amazon.com (http://aalbc.com/authors/kola_boof.htm scroll
down to books).
Stevenson is a columnist for the Buffalo Criterion. His column Pointblank
can be read at www.voiceoffreedom.com,
email comments to Stevenson at pointblankDTA at yahoo.com
Related Links
Diary of a Lost Girl Reviewed by Kam Williams
http://aalbc.com/reviews/diary2.htm
Interview with Kola Boof
http://aalbc.com/reviews/kola_boof.htm
Book Review: Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof
by Kola Boof
Publication Date: Feb 01, 2006
List Price: $25.00
Format: Hardcover, 441 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9780971201989
Imprint: Door of Kush
Publisher: Door of Kush
Parent Company: Door of Kush
Borrow from Library
Read a Description of Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof
Book Reviewed by Kam Williams
Reviewed by Kam WIlliams
’The Hip Hop Holocaust would signal the birth of a new ideology amongst American blacks, a new cultural ethic that would eventually migrate to blacks all over the world’a cultural ethic that now openly embraced and promoted materialism, misogyny, disloyalty and anarchy. Whereas the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements had unified black people worldwide and brought about independence and nation-building in Africa, and a huge renaissance in self-love, unity and empowerment’ ’ the Hip Hop Holocaust destroyed all that.
This was the music that eventually renamed the mothers of the men who performed it’’bitches' and ’hos' ’ and made it fashionable to be colorist (against black women) and self-centered (bling-bling). I call it a ’holocaust’ because it effectively killed the core community in Black America and completely bamboozled the black youth and separated them from their true worth’ no one was willing to stand up to the Hip Hop anarchists.
I was there, a new American and a black child in 1980’ What others praise as a revolutionary new expression of the ’black man’s' experience in America’ I regard, in retrospect, as a poison against the people.’
’Excerpted from Chapter Six, ’The Stuff That Dreams Are Made of’
For some reason, it often takes an expatriate to make a seminal contribution to
a culture. Such is the case with Kola Boof, whose heartbreaking and
brutally-honest autobiography, Diary of a Lost Girl, might be the most brilliant
deconstruction of the plight of present-day African-Americans yet written.
The title of this alternately thought-provoking and moving memoir was ostensibly inspired by Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, the literary classic which chronicled the last days of a Dutch teenager trying to maintain her sanity, humanity and a sense of optimism while making sense of the Holocaust as Nazism enveloped Europe.
Well, Ms. Boof, whose real name is Naima Bint Harith, has written an equally-evocative account of her own harrowing tale of survival. Born in The Sudan in March of 1972, she was orphaned at the age of seven after her parents were murdered for speaking out against the government's involvement in the revival of the slave trade. After being abandoned by her grandmother for being too dark before finding temporary political asylum in Great Britain, she arrived in the United States a year later a ’trembling, frightened wreck.’ She was adopted by a kindly African-American couple with a big family which lived in a nice house in a residential section of Washington, DC.
Sadly, the host of woes of Biblical proportions being visited upon the unfortunate little immigrant just continued. Tested more than Job, besides hearing her mother and father die, Kola suffered circumcision, a heart attack, betrayal by a bisexual boyfriend, molestation, statutory rape, discrimination, ostracism and accusations of being a witch, all before getting out of her teens.
It is important to note English is not her native language, so she had the additional burden of learning to communicate in a new tongue. But of all the challenges she would face in America, it appears that none would prove to be as difficult as dealing with the self-hatred and second-class status she found among blacks.
Speaking frankly about such taboo subjects as the color-coded caste system among African-Americans, she bemoans how brothers ’judge the worth of black women by (a) how light-skinned they are, (b) how Euro-slender they are, and (c) the texture of their hair.’ But she doesn't let sisters off easy either, indicting them for trying to adapt to a European standard of beauty and thereby ’becoming walking billboards for the general society's message that whiteness is superior.’
Kola Boof is never one to mince words; thus, her iconoclastic ideas aren’t for everyone. ’You should not come into this book expecting to like Kola Boof,’ she warns. ’My purpose as a literary artist is not to be liked, but to be understood’regardless of whether I'm right or wrong’ I spent my whole life being dictated to by American media and nigger media about what to believe and think’and so now it's my turn, as an African woman and womb-bearer, to do the dictating. If you don't appreciate my candor’then write your own goddamned book; this one is mines.’
Reserving perhaps her harshest words for Islam, which she repeatedly criticizes as anti-female, the Kola claims to be in hiding due to death threats. If true, this development is no surprise, given the serious accusations leveled on these pages, and the fatwas issued by Muslim fundamentalists in reaction to such relatively-mild detractors as Salman Rushdie.
When not excoriating Islam, with a refreshingly unguarded honesty Boof
recalls her assorted sexual and romantic liaisons ranging from Osama bin Laden,
at one extreme, to a married Jewish businessman, at the other, with a rainbow
coalition of lovers betwixt and between, with a stated preference for black men.
In sum, Diary of a Lost Girl is an admirable addition to the genre of
African-American autobiography. For warts and all, it represents the unalloyed
emotions of an intelligent, defiant, controversial, frequently profane and proud
black woman, a survivor who somehow overcame one of the worst childhoods
imaginable to share an abundance of intriguing, if debatable insights about her
adopted homeland.
’’’’’’’’’’’’
Postscript: While the Internet is abuzz with rumors and speculation surrounding
Kola Boof, for purposes of this review this critic simply assessed Diary of a
Lost Girl on its own merits, without entertaining extraneous issues raised
elsewhere.
Related Links
Diary of a Lost Girl Reviewed by Chris Stevenson of The Buffalo Criterion
http://aalbc.com/reviews/diary.htm
Interview with Kola Boof
http://aalbc.com/reviews/kola_boof.htm