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Long Train

Sudan's Kola Boof (born Naima Alu Kolbookek) is slowly but surely becoming the new black woman writer that "lots of people love to hate". Remember back in the 70's and 80's when authors like Alice Walker, Ntozake Shange, Gayl Jones and even Toni Morrison were widely cursed and demonized for the skeletons they exposed? Well now we have the strangely fabulous and daring Kola Boof (she's a sexy feminist literary babe slash African warrior girl slash historian) and she's already getting death threats by the ton! Why is her work so confrontational?

Miss Boof claims it's because she was adopted and raised by Black Americans. She credits her teen years in the lower class Anacostia Park section of Washington D.C. with giving her "the nerve and skill of a hornet".

In her native Sudan, they recently told her that if she ever tries to return, she will be killed on the spot (she called Sudan's Arab government "Satanic" and wrote that Islam "is for Pimps"). She pissed off numerous African-Americans by using the 'N' word repeatedly in her short story collection "LONG TRAIN TO THE REDEEMING SIN", and she was roundly criticized by South African officials after exposing colorism in their society in the short story "DAY OF VOW"…add to that the rebuke of Black Southern Christians for her story in which Jesus Christ appears-as a very erotic Mexican. There's a decidedly sexual freakiness to some of Kola's prose ala Anne Rice.

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Tayeb SALIH

The Wedding of Zein and Other Sudanese Stories

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies

"These three stories...show what happens when a considerable sophistication and resourcefulness of technique is applied to traditional storytelling material."
-- The Guardian

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