The Bin Laden That I Knew

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THE BIN LADEN I KNEW
An Essay by Kola Boof

*Originally published September 11th, 2006 by Keith Boykin, a former Aide to President Bill Clinton.

As a gossipy snippet from my autobiography was taken apart and “restructured” for maximum sensationalism in Harper’s Magazine two weeks ago, and as my name made international headlines and the media began embracing and ripping me apart, it suddenly dawned on me how unlikely it is that the Americans will ever capture Osama Bin Laden—and that the reason for this is—they can only think, dream and analyze in English.                                              
                                                                               
I’ll get to the Osama Bin Laden that I knew and lived with in a moment, and as well, I will address head on my many critics, such as Peter Bergen, who’ve claimed that I’m making all this up—but first I want to share with you that as my story broke, ignorant white women on the internet demanded: “Who would name their daughter KOLA BOOF!?”; black women charged: “Oh god—another SuperHead making sistas look bad and trying to make a buck!”; a black man announced: “With all the fine bitches in Morocco, why would Osama choose her?” (oblivious to the fact that there are virtually no beautiful women in Morocco who can speak Arabic, English, are tall enough to compliment Osama’s 6’7 frame, can shoot a rabbit with more precision than Osama, and of most importance to Osama, are vaginally infibulated all in one), and though I’m about as liberal as Democrats come, and more in the mindset of Malcolm X than Condoleeza Rice, there arose the usual chorus of Martin Luther King-quoting white journalists and sexist black nationalists to assign me “agent for the CIA”, “lying nut job” and “Bush’s new whore”. 
                                                                                                 
Making matters that much worse, was the American media’s continued insistence on creating their own fictional KOLA BOOF—instead of falsely branding me a prostitute who doesn’t really exist (as the N.Y. Times did in 2002), they this time dubbed me a former “sex slave”—something they’d never dare call Patty Hearst (a rich white woman who also had sex with her captors after being held captive)—and not only did they falsely report that I was the one who dubbed myself a “sex slave”, but they became outraged and resentful when I refused to be called by such a degrading and problematic slur.  One Producer at a top network late night comedy show actually quipped, “We’re making this bitch a star and she’s complaining about what we call her!”                                                                                 
                                                                                            
Like water on the brain, the preconceived notions about what Osama Bin Laden would be like, and what one of his “mistresses” would be like, trickled resisting heat, and in the true fashion of a people bred on the protocol of Hollywood, blue-eyed journalism and Hip Hop Colorism, they began to re-assign and re-cast Osama and I in their own stereovision, never once acknowledging their cultural blind spot.  These people who don’t know what the word “infibulation” means or what the Holy Koran states about those “captured by the right hand”—the same people who trust Connie Chung, a supposedly smart newswoman who told me and my assistant several years ago via her Producer that a man of Bin Laden’s wealth and stature would never have a black woman as his mistress—these people took it upon themselves to disrespect my cultural identity—openly deriding my name and my bare African breasts (something they can stand as long as I’m on the cover of National Geographic with the ridiculous monikers “earth mother-mother Africa” written across my navel as flies come out of my mouth) and dismissing whatever information I offered as “funny, hilarious—can’t possibly be true”.                       
                                                                                                    
I wish I could laugh, but as the Americans gasp over the latest headline: “The Pope’s parents met through personal ad”, you can understand why I don’t think they’ll ever find Osama.                       
                                                                                                         
The Osama Bin Laden that I knew in 1996 Morocco was a painfully soft spoken, religiously driven but politically and psychologically astute psychotic gangbanger, a chronic pot-smoker whose favorite foods were spinach yogurt and watermelon, and whose greatest joys were sex (“not the kind one has with his wife”, he used to tease as he grabbed me), hunting Snipe-duck and fishing (which we did every Friday), writing poetry beside the virgin pond at La Maison Arabe and the professional horse breeding he did with his best friend Isam al Turabi in Sudan.  Prayer to Osama was serious and beloved labor, as he did it on Tuesdays and Thursdays from sun up to sun down, and though I had no idea in those days that he was a terrorist (he was not famous back then), I was indeed privy to his financial bail-outs of the Sudanese government and had witnessed him break into tears, on more than one occasion, after ordering someone to be killed—but make no mistake, though I speak objectively about Osama—I saw him as the devil and I loathed and pitied him completely—but what could I do about it all?  There is no one in this world to protect African women.
                                                                            
                                                                                            
I had been actress Naima Kitar back then, and had been taken by Osama and his men at a restaurant in Marrakech, raped the first night by Osama, moved from my hotel and installed in the Winston Churchill room at La Maison Arabe, which was an estate located inside an ancient fortress in the Medina that had only one secret road leading out (Bad Doukkala), and within two months, out of fear for my life, I was calling Osama “Somi” and catering to his every whim.  For that cooperation, I lived in undeniable luxury (Osama sent me shopping in Milan), was given a white a maid, and though monitored by Osama’s guards—I was also the person who supervised them along with the rest of Osama’s staff while he was away in Afghanistan, Sudan or Ethiopia.  Whether I’m right or wrong, I never, at any time, felt like a “sex slave”.
I refuse to be called one.                                             
                                                                                                                                                                 
What I felt was that I was very cunning and practical in my  manipulation of Osama, and that because of my personal will and sexual “etiquette”, we were, on an animalistic level--equals.  I felt that I took my beatings well and that I challenged him as a poet—his work ultimately surpassing my own—and of course, one of Osama’s chief complaints about me was that I strived to be Alice Walker when what he really dreamed of was Nefertiti, but alas, I survived and I am alive, no matter what I had to endure, and unlike Osama’s wives and other mistresses, I became an entity unto myself.  I left the Arab world and became KOLA BOOF, an activist, an internationally published novelist and poet…a mother.                                                           
                                                                                                       
Certainly there are those who doubt the veracity of my experiences with Osama Bin Laden, something I can understand to a point, but what I can’t tolerate are the full out lies that have been made up to slander me and discredit my book—lies that have been told most notably by so called Bin Laden “expert” Peter Bergen.  He claims, quite stupidly, that Bin Laden has never been to Morocco and then wrote on his web site about me: “for instance, there is one vividly recounted scene in which Boof performs sex acts on a group that included bin Laden; Ayman al Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two; Abdullah Azzam, bin Laden’s mentor, and Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian jihadist theoretician.  Boof says this happened in Morocco in 1996. However, in 1996 bin Laden was living in Sudan, Ayman al Zawahiri was imprisoned in Dagestan, Azzam had been assassinated in Pakistan thirteen years earlier, and Qutb had been lying in his grave for three decades.  Boof should stick to poetry."
-- Peter Bergen                                                                          
                                                                                             
Mr. Bergen is full of camel-crap, because for starters—Ayman al Zawahiri didn’t go to Chechnya (Dagestan) until December of 1996, which is when he was arrested, and wasn’t imprisoned until April, 1997.  In my autobiography, the entire Bin Laden episode takes place between January 1996 and July 1996.  As for Qutb and Azzam being dead—Bergen is totally wrong, because the men mentioned in my book were not the two men he is talking about, but are very young men (late twenties, early thirties) who claimed to be the son and grandson of the men Bergen “assumed” I was talking about.  Please note that we don’t have “Jr.” or “Sr.” in my culture—my uncle is named Karbonis Kolbookek, his son is named Karbonis Kolbookek, and his grandson is named Karbonis Kolbookek.  But unfortunately, in Bergen’s desperation to discredit my book, he resorted to lying and name calling, and though neither he nor any western government has been able to capture Somi or pinpoint exactly where he was in 1996 (they declared him “un-find-able” you may recall), Bergen’s word as a white journalist who’s only obsessed with Osama was given immediate and complete credence over my word as a woman writer and activist who claimed to have actually shared Bin Laden’s bed.  It didn’t help that I was black (I believe this no matter what anyone says), but as I’ve stated before—in any mansion, it’s the maids and the whores who know the most.                                                
                                                                                                   
I shake my head bitterly at this past weekend’s headlines about Osama not getting along with Sadaam Hussein and how Americans seem so surprised by this revelation, because of course, I had already written first hand about the feud between Osama and Sadaam in my autobiography when it was published eight months ago—yet none of my critics are fair enough to acknowledge that.                                
                                                                                                          
Now, as it’s 2006, I really do wish that I was “in good” with the Bush administration and the CIA, because perhaps then, I wouldn’t have ended up classified under the Patriot Act as a “Suspected Terrorist”, and along with my two little boys, threatened with deportation, all because the London Guardian newspaper had contacted the U.S. government in 2002 and alerted them of my involvement with Bin Laden—a relationship that I originally denied in that newspaper, because I was so ashamed, embarrassed and afraid of what people would do to me and my children once they knew I’d been the girlfriend of today’s equivalent to “Hitler”—and not out to “make a buck”—though eventually I was forced to write about it in defending my status as an American citizen and my reputation as a serious literary writer and activist.                                                         
                                                                                                    
Thinking now of the murders Osama is responsible for around the globe, I feel sick knowing the scope of it, and as I watch the American public sympathize with Arab governments and castigate their own and react so nonchalantly to the specter of terrorism that is still aimed at this country like an invisible time bomb—I accept that I have at least done my part in warning them of the devastation that I believe the Arab world still has planned for America and the West, and even after I’ve voted for Hilary Clinton or whatever Democrat we rise up in the next Presidential election, I will still be saying the same thing—that there is a “fatwa” on America—and no one will ever be able to say that Bin Laden’s Mistress didn’t warn them.                                 
                                                                                                     
*KOLA BOOF WAS CHOSEN BEST BOOK OF 2006:

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