'The Community' Takes Readers Inside A Black Religious Cult
essence.comN. Jamiyla Chisholm was two years old, her family joined a religious cult led by a man who called himself Imam Isa. Suddenly called by a new name, separated from her parents and forced to sleep on the floor with dozens of other girls each night, she learned Arabic and wondered why her mother didn’t protect her from abuse.
Decades later, now using the name Dwight York, their leader was sentenced to 135 years in prison for child molestation. In her memoir The Community (Little A, $24.95), Chisholm writes about her experience in the Ansaaru Allah Community, breaking open her memories and lying them alongside the events both historical and contemporary that drew people to York’s Black separatist ideology.
The result is a thoughtful meditation on the things that hold us together—and the things that pull us apart. Here, we talk to Chisholm about the challenges of memoir, the importance of perspective and the beauty of Blackness.More than a chronicle of life in the Community, your book also serves as an unfailingly honest documentation of your relationship with your mother.
How did writing it impact the way you all relate?In writing this book, learned how extremely elastic memory is. I interviewed my mother to examine the memories that felt fluid and make sure they weren’t the products of a child’s overactive imagination.
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