A memoir about a family’s indoctrination into a religious cult, a daughter coming to terms with a parent’s devastating choices, and the trials ahead in post-9/11 New York.
Imagine a two-year-old wrested from her mother’s arms, forced to sleep on a hard floor with strange children and wonder why she rarely gets to see her mother...So began Chisholm’s early years in the Community, a conservative, Brooklyn-based Muslim cult, in the late 1970s...Chisholm’s ne’er-do-well father had informed her mother that, converting to Islam, they’d be adopting a new life filled with purpose...The reality was much harsher: in the Community, the sexes were separated, and children were further segregated by age; Chisholm’s father spent his days panhandling for change while her mother tended infants inside the compound...It took the author years to get her mother to discuss what happened back then, and for them both to work out their feelings about the experience...Chisholm, a journalist, offers a nuanced examination of how and why people make decisions that harm them, and of the difficulty in extricating oneself from destructive situations.
Journalist Chisholm debuts with a transfixing look at the secretive Muslim commune her family joined in 1978 and the 'gravitational pull that would continue to tsunami through our lives for years'...Proselytizing messages of Black self-empowerment, the Brooklyn-based Ansaaru Allah Community was a cultlike 'society' led by Dwight York, a con man who was eventually arrested on multiple counts of child molestation...Vividly evoking the bleakness of the 'strict rules and bare-bones living policy' her family was subjected to when she was a toddler, Chisholm recalls how her father relished his newfound status 'as a person with a purpose'...As Chisholm untangles their complicated past and the trauma her mother refused to acknowledge, what emerges is a compassionate interrogation of the 'universal emotion of desperately wanting to belong' that her family fell victim to...In its striking search for redemption, this uncovers a uniquely human tale.
After talking to other women who were involved in the Community, the author decided to interview her own mother about their shared past to uncover the truth about the family’s time in the Community in the late 1970s...In addition to uncovering painful personal memories about separation from her mother and abuse at the hands of her caretakers within the group, Chisholm seeks to understand her parents’ motivation for joining the group in the first place...The author expertly balances passion with compassion, and her vulnerability electrifies the often harrowing narrative...Though the prose is sometimes overwritten, with Chisholm relying too heavily on exposition, her story is valuable...A heart-wrenching memoir about surviving a religious group helmed by an abusive leader.