N. Jamiyla Chisholm

This memoir requires a huge suspension of disbelief. I don't write this to invalidate author N. Jamiyla Chisholm’s experiences of loneliness and physical abuse in the Islamic cult known as The Community. Rather, I just can’t buy the author's implied claim that she remembers in detail events that happened to her between the ages of two to four years old. Moreover, the thought patterns she attributes to her younger self are those of a much older person.

All in all, this is an intriguing narrative, but perhaps it should have focused less on the author’s crypto-memories of The Community and more on the aftermath of her experiences.… (altro)

A few contemporary threads weave this memoir together: an Islamic Community in New York City whose leader ended up going to prison for child abuse, the never ending stresses of a de-centered family, and being a Muslim in New York City during 9/11. Chisholm begins her narrative explaining youthful dreams of a roomful of people speaking in Arabic. The thing was that she never experienced anything like this and she didn’t know Arabic. Her mom soon explained the experiential basis of these dreams – an experience as a toddler as a member of “the Community.”

Chisholm’s mother joined the Community as a newly married young adult, only to leave a couple of years later in deep frustration. The Community separated children from their parents, and wives, from their husbands. It formed a small patriarchal society where people slept together on the floor in small rooms, with money ultimately flowing to the leader. Years later, the leader was sentenced to decades of jail for child abuse. Racial empowerment lay behind the Community’s wider appeal, but inconsistencies seemed to haunt its reality.

Aside from these religious and cultural dynamics, the story also explores Chisholm’s own family structure. Despite claiming positional leadership of her family, her father did not play a tremendous role in her upbringing. Her mother struggled to forge an identity independent of him and Islam. Like many families, theirs consisted of more than just its immediate members.

In concluding chapters, Chisholm considers how her Islamic identity faced adversity while in New York City during 9/11. Honestly, these type of thoughts deserve a book of their own. Sure, including these chapters allows marketers to advertise this book as a memoir including 9/11, but these thoughts really deserve their own piece, spanning many more pages. Chisholm’s observations during this time deserve to be explored and heard, but this book abbreviates them too much.

Overall, this is an interesting autobiography describing what it means to be a black, Muslim girl growing up in New York City. It also describes the cultic Community in vivid detail. Some readers might take issue with Chisholm relying on dream-filled memories from young childhood aided by her mother, whom Chisholm does not describe as being a reliably objective data source. Those objections will have to stand. Nonetheless, she offers an interesting understanding of growing up Islamic and female in the modern United States.… (altro)