kola boof

[Memoir]

His Prerogative

Posted on Tuesday, August 22, 2006. From Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof, published last February by Door of Kush Books. Boof has written for the NBC daytime drama Days of Our Lives. In 2003, when she was interviewed on Fox News by Rita Cosby, the network reported that Boof had lived for several months in 1996 on an estate in Morocco with Osama bin Laden. Originally from Harper's Magazine, September 2006.

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People are animals. They fuck, pray, and make bombs. The Dinka women of Sudan say the devil is the most beautiful man you will ever lay your eyes on. I never took these words seriously until I encountered my now infamous ex-lover, Osama bin Laden.

Soon after installing me in his estate in Marrakesh, Osama started to abuse me. His hand would be resting on my hair, his eyes glued to the pages of his Muhammad Qutub books while I read Galway Kinnell. We would be lying there in bed and he'd say, “African women are only good for a man's lower pleasures. What need do you have for a womb?” I would feel insulted—not just to the heart, but to the soul. Then I'd go back to Galway Kinnell's bone-white stanzas—only I wouldn't be able to make out the words for the tears in my eyes.

He would humiliate me by making me dance naked. It was such a strange thing, because for the most part he believed music was evil. If a guest at the estate played music, he would cover his ears until the “poison” was silenced. But other times he would become this devout party boy who wanted to hear Van Halen or some B-52's. To this day I hear the song “Rock Lobster” in my sleep. I would be jerking around like a white girl—“Dance like a Caucasoid girl!” he would say—and his eyes would track me from one side of the terrace to the other. “Your ass is too big, show me the front,” he said. Osama, you understand, did not know the difference between being vicious and being tender.

The first night I met him, at a restaurant, I ran out the door, gripped by terror, and drove home. Relieved that his henchmen hadn't followed me, I ran a bath, lounged in the cold bathwater, then changed into a flowing silk robe. There was a bang on the door, and I could hear shouting: “Hey, black girl!” When I opened the door, there was Osama bin Laden and his seven-man posse. A cold bolt of lightning went through me.

But Osama was trying to be charming, despite the fear in my eyes. “Why did you run? I just think you're lovely and I find you intriguing. I wanted to be your friend.” I can't deny what a good-looking man he was—over six feet with a zesty salmon-orange complexion and very sexy Negro-like facial features, forged by generations of desert sun. I remember thinking he had the most beautiful lips and being overwhelmed by the largeness of his hand when he took mine (to kiss it). Osama's men laughed, and Osama's eyes kept falling on my cleavage. I knew no matter how many Barbara Stanwyck movies I had devoured as a teen, I was powerless, and men can be merciless when women have no power.

“From now on you may see no man but me,” he said. I wanted to throw up.

* * *

He stepped into my room and told his men to wait outside. We were chest to chest, his eyes looking down at me as he closed the door behind him. A hundred ideas went through my head. Maybe I should get on my knees and beg for mercy, but that was too wimpy. At last, I thought my only escape from death was to seduce him. He wanted to fuck me: that was the only good card in the deck. So I stretched up and kissed Osama very softly on the mouth. I undid my robe and let it slip down to the floor.

“Put your clothing back on,” he told me. “I don't want to see this acting. I want to see the real you. Serve me something to eat.”

I made a pot of tea and served him chunky crab salad on pita crackers and thickened tofu with dates in it. His lust was thick. He smoked a little marijuana from a gold hookah, sipping his tea and instructing me that I was always to keep hot tea for his “kif-canbo,” to ease the burn in his chest.

“Why do you wear your hair braided?” he asked.

“Because my braids are beautiful,” I replied.

Osama said only monkeys braid their hair. He told me that the singer Whitney Houston was the most beautiful woman he'd ever seen and that she never wore her hair braided. “I want you to fix your hair like hers from now on,” he said. “I can't put my fingers through it when it's braided.”

He asked me to hit the hookah, but I explained to him that I had a weak system and couldn't handle drugs. Luckily, he didn't insist. He talked about America. He laughed and rambled on about his favorite TV shows: The Wonder Years, Miami Vice, and MacGyver. He said the U.S. government was made up of “fanatical crusaders” and that he'd once worked as a mind reader and trained secret agents for the CIA. He even said that he'd had a white, blonde girlfriend back in some state I'd never heard of. He talked about his mother, describing her as something of a feminist. I was bored, but I listened.

Osama kept coming back to Whitney Houston. He asked if I knew her personally when I lived in America. I told him I didn't. He said that he had a paramount desire for Whitney Houston, and although he claimed music was evil, he spoke of someday spending vast amounts of money to go to America and try to arrange a meeting with the superstar. It didn't seem impossible to me. He said he wanted to give Whitney Houston a mansion that he owned in a suburb of Khartoum. He explained to me that to possess Whitney he would be willing to break his color rule and make her one of his wives. I tried to hide my outrage at his racist remarks, but it would come to pass that for the entire time that I would be trapped in his palm, Whitney Houston's was the one name that would be mentioned constantly. How beautiful she is, what a nice smile she has, how truly Islamic she is but is just brainwashed by American culture and her husband—Bobby Brown, whom Osama talked about having killed, as if it were normal to have women's husbands killed. In his briefcase I would come across photographs of the star, as well as copies of Playboy, but nobody in the West believes me when I tell them this. It's like they have this totally bogus image of Osama bin Laden. Anyway, it would soon come to the point where I was sick of hearing Whitney Houston's name.

Later, after he came back from the bathroom, Osama smoked some more marijuana and talked about his children. He said that he'd missed an appointment with his “doctor”—Ayman al-Zawahiri—just to do me.

This is His Prerogative, a reading, originally from September 2006, published Tuesday, August 22, 2006. It is part of Lifestyle, which is part of Readings, which is part of Harpers.org.