Issue Four
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When one begins to read Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobiography of Kola Boof, he or she should be ready to be shaken.
There are two ways one can read it: As fact or as fiction. Her story is certainly extraordinary, however, its extraordinariness relies less on fact and more on what she renders in the book. There is much to be gleaned from Diary of a Lost Girl whether you think it factual or not.
As nonfiction, it is the story of how Naima bint Harith became the writer Kola Boof. It is the dispeller of much of the mystery that has surrounded the name of Kola Boof thus far. Readers won't come away from this memoir with many questions. Kola wears her opinions on her sleeves, a dangerous thing to do these days.
As fiction, Diary of a Lost Girl loses no steam. “The assimilation of the Black American was in its beginning stages and the bling bling self-destruction of the Hip-Hop Holocaust had taken over the black world, defiling all of us, so I had to invent images of myself and tell stories about our people in such a way that I could challenge and bring introspective criticism of black complacency as it related to Black Americans,” she writes. This passage, almost asks the reader to read the book as fiction. It's almost as if she is saying, “If you find my story too difficult to believe, read it as a novel. I don't care how you read it, as long as you read it.”The story she tells is wholly unique. Kola does not just discuss issues, she screams them. As I was reading, I wondered if this was why the book's font was in bold print. Nowhere else in recent literature is Osama bin Laden depicted as such a… human being. After reading Kola's memoir, no longer will he be the Darth Vader of America's worst nightmares. Boof writes him as an intense, violent, highly intelligent man that any woman in her right mind would want to avoid at all costs.
Nevertheless, there are moments where her story feels overblown and padded. These sections are brief and not significant to the core of the story. For example, in 2002, Kola claims to have been attacked by three gunmen outside the city of Los Angeles. She says that the gunmen were driving a mini-van and shouting in Arabic, “Traitors of Allah die!”
This account feels like a cliché Hollywood movie, especially the part where Kola fires back, shooting out the back tires of the gunmen's vehicle. The book also suffers from segments that are written using the tone of erotica. There are certain words and phrases (such as describing her vagina at the age of 15 as a “firm little girl's peach” and a man's body as “hot flesh” during a particularly disturbing rape scene) that are used to describe sexual encounters that give the prose an aura of erotica that the book doesn't benefit from. The story itself is compelling enough without the added “sugar.”
Both the poet/writer Kola Boof and the lost girl named Naima Bint Harith are exciting characters. By the end of the book, you may love or hate her. But one thing is for sure, you won't forget her.
