The Community
A Memoir
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Narrated by:
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Karen Chilton
About this listen
An arresting and emotional 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.
In 1978, when Jamiyla was two years old, her mother, Ummi, quit her job, converted to Islam with her husband, and moved into an exclusive Muslim society in Brooklyn. Once inside the Community, the family was separated by its powerful and charismatic leader, Dwight York, who was hiding behind the name Imam Isa. Instead of the devotional refuge they’d imagined, the Community was a nightmare of controlled abuse and unspeakable secrets.
Forty years later, Jamiyla was ready to excavate and understand a past buried in bad dreams, disturbing memories, and inexplicable rage. It was a place Ummi never wanted to return to. Jamiyla had to.
Jamiyla’s emotional memoir tells her family’s story of life inside and outside the cult, and of escaping into new challenges as conservative Muslims in the secular Brooklyn they left behind. A harrowing and deeply personal history fraught with racial tension and devastating personal betrayals, The Community is also a hopeful story brimming with Black pride, justice, and the long-overdue healing between a daughter and mother.
©2022 Nicole Jamiyla Chisholm (P)2022 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
“Journalist [N. Jamiyla] Chisholm debuts with a transfixing look at the secretive Muslim commune her family joined in 1978…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.”—Publishers Weekly
“The author expertly balances passion with compassion, and her vulnerability electrifies the often harrowing narrative…A heart-wrenching memoir about surviving a religious group helmed by an abusive leader.”—Kirkus Reviews
“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.”—Booklist
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Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. Mahmoud, a civil engineer, becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered. Forced to flee Kabul with her three children, Fereiba must find a way to cross Europe and reach her sister’s family in England. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba make a dangerous crossing into Iran under cover of darkness.
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Good story. Poor ending
- By Janine on 01-14-22
By: Nadia Hashimi
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Hum If You Don't Know the Words
- By: Bianca Marais
- Narrated by: Katharine Lee McEwan, Bahni Turpin
- Length: 14 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Life under Apartheid has created a secure future for Robin Conrad, a 10-year-old white girl living with her parents in 1970s Johannesburg. In the same nation but worlds apart, Beauty Mbali, a Xhosa woman in a rural village in the Bantu homeland of the Transkei, struggles to raise her children alone after her husband's death. Both lives have been built upon the division of race, and their meeting should never have occurred...until the Soweto Uprising.
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Completely wrong accents
- By Debbie on 02-12-22
By: Bianca Marais
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Secret Daughter
- By: Shilpi Somaya Gowda
- Narrated by: Soneela Nankani
- Length: 11 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Debut novelist Shilpi Somaya Gowda pens this compelling tale about two families, worlds apart, linked by one Indian child. After giving birth to a girl for a second time, impoverished Kavita must give her up to an orphanage. The baby, named Asha, is adopted by an American doctor and raised in California. But once grown, Asha decides to return to India.
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A Must Read
- By Stephanie on 06-08-11
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Finding Fish
- A Memoir
- By: Antwone Q. Fisher
- Narrated by: Thomas Penny
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.
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This book will not disappoint you.
- By Joseph on 10-16-16
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In the Country
- Stories
- By: Mia Alvar
- Narrated by: Nancy Wu, Don Castro
- Length: 13 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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These nine globe-trotting, unforgettable stories from Mia Alvar, a remarkable new literary talent, vividly give voice to the women and men of the Filipino diaspora. Here are exiles, emigrants, and wanderers uprooting their families from the Philippines to begin new lives in the Middle East, the United States, and elsewhere - and sometimes turning back again.
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My introduction to Filipino literature and culture
- By Amazon Customer on 03-28-16
By: Mia Alvar
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I'm Supposed to Protect You from All This
- A Memoir
- By: Nadja Spiegelman
- Narrated by: Nadja Spiegelman
- Length: 11 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers - French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly - exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja's body changed and "began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand", their relationship grew tense.
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Aweful
- By Haley Abreu on 07-05-17
By: Nadja Spiegelman
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A Chance in the World
- An Orphan Boy, a Mysterious Past, and How He Found a Place Called Home
- By: Steve Pemberton
- Narrated by: Steve Pemberton
- Length: 8 hrs and 5 mins
- Unabridged
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A Chance in the World is the unbelievably true story of a wounded and broken boy destined to become a man of resilience, determination, and vision. Through it all, Steve's story teaches us that no matter how broken our past, no matter how great our misfortunes, we have it in us to create a new beginning and to build a place where love awaits.
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Good Book
- By Amazon Customer on 08-19-20
By: Steve Pemberton
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Lifted by the Great Nothing
- By: Karim Dimechkie
- Narrated by: Neil Shah
- Length: 8 hrs and 52 mins
- Unabridged
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Max doesn't remember his mother, who was murdered by burglars before they emigrated from Beirut to New Jersey. He lives with his father, Rasheed, who is enamored of his concept of American culture - baseball and barbeques - and tries to shed his Lebanese heritage completely.
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Excellent
- By Cheyenne on 06-13-15
By: Karim Dimechkie
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Find Me Unafraid
- Love, Loss, and Hope in an African Slum
- By: Kennedy Odede, Jessica Posner
- Narrated by: Korey Jackson, Mandy Siegfried, P.J. Ochlan (foreword)
- Length: 11 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Find Me Unafraid tells the uncommon love story between two uncommon people whose collaboration sparked a successful movement to transform the lives of vulnerable girls and the urban poor. With a foreword by Nicholas Kristof.
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A difficult and rewarding listen
- By R. MCRACKAN on 08-23-18
By: Kennedy Odede, and others
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Honor
- By: Elif Shafak
- Narrated by: Mozhan Marno, Piter Marik
- Length: 12 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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An honor killing shatters and transforms the lives of Turkish immigrants in 1970s London. Internationally best-selling Turkish author Elif Shafak’s new novel is a dramatic tale of families, love, and misunderstandings that follows the destinies of twin sisters born in a Kurdish village. While Jamila stays to become a midwife, Pembe follows her Turkish husband, Adem, to London, where they hope to make new lives for themselves and their children. In London, they face a choice: stay loyal to the old traditions or try their best to fit in.
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Complex but Compelling
- By Cariola on 04-14-13
By: Elif Shafak
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Native Country of the Heart
- A Memoir
- By: Cherríe Moraga
- Narrated by: Cherríe Moraga
- Length: 7 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Native Country of the Heart is the writer and activist Cherrie Moraga's love letter to her "unlettered" mother. It begins with her mother, Elvira Isabel Moraga, who as a child, along with her siblings, was hired out by her own father to pick cotton in California's Imperial Valley. The lives of Cherrie and her mother, and of their people, are woven together in a story of critical reflection and deep personal revelation as Moraga charts her own coming to consciousness alongside the heartbreaking story of her mother's decline.
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a must read for all chicanx
- By Rachel Barnett on 04-28-19
By: Cherríe Moraga
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Apocalypse Child
- A Life in End Times - a Memoir
- By: Flor Edwards
- Narrated by: Flor Edwards
- Length: 6 hrs and 42 mins
- Unabridged
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For the first 13 years of her life, Flor Edwards grew up in the Children of God. The group's nomadic existence was based on the belief that, as God's chosen people, they would be saved in the impending apocalypse that would envelop the rest of the world in 1993. Flor would be 13 years old. The group's charismatic leader, Father David, kept the family on the move, from Los Angeles to Bangkok to Chicago, where they would eventually disband, leaving Flor to make sense of the foreign world of mainstream society around her.
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A truly unique background and story
- By Asaph on 04-13-18
By: Flor Edwards
What listeners say about The Community
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- mike
- 02-26-23
Good book
Try it. I wasn't sure if I would enjoy the book, but it gave a perspective on something I had no experience with. I liked it and feel like it was not a waste of time.
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- Tammy Moldovan
- 03-28-23
A moving story
I enjoyed reading this first person telling of life in the Community, a cult like Muslim community in the late 1970s. As told by the woman who was a small child when the events occurred, we are shown the potential reasons for making the choice for your family to be indoctrinated into a cult, the harshness of life in the community, and the after effects after leaving. Even though it is not the primary focus of the story, woven throughout the telling is the ever present misogyny, racism and white supremacy.
Karen Chilton did a phenomenal job narrating and breathing life into the story. Listening to the narration added beautiful dimension to the story.
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- vsquared
- 07-17-22
Hardly believable
This book is hardly believable but not because it can't be believed, rather it boggles the mind to think that people would willingly sunny to a community that would deprive them of freedom and rights, not realizing how it would permanently affect them. interesting read.
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- retired teacher
- 11-13-22
Frank and oh, so Human
This story grabbed me with its candor. I now have a better understanding of Muslims and people I don’t often talk with in my daily life. Thank you for broadening my horizons.
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- Pam P
- 02-10-23
I wish I could give it more stars.
This was one of the most well written personal accounts I have listened to or read in a long time, and the narration was perfect.
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- Jocelyn Schaible
- 08-01-22
What a troubling story!
Beautifully told, but such a sad and complicated life this brave woman has lived! She seems to have survived her experiences in “the community” but how many others have suffered because of this cult-like organization and its evil leadership? She was very bold to write this book, and I hope no harm comes to her because she had the courage to do so.
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- Ashley Grant
- 09-03-23
Did NOT disappoint!
This book was truly engaging and extremely heartbreaking. I've become a fan of cult bios and podcasts and you don't often get stories about black people who were engaged in cults. This book tore me apart from start to finish because it is the story of a daughters' stunted growth, a mother's desire to keep a family together at all costs that resulted in drastic mistakes, a father's failures, and a family torn apart that eventually somewhat reconciled. Very chilling and very worthwhile.
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- Informed Shopper
- 06-14-22
Misleading description
I did enjoy the book overall, however the description was a little misleading. I thought it was supposed to be about the author's time spent in a cult. While this was covered, the author also gives significant time to political views, going as far as to liken President Trump's supporters to a cult, and stating that The Community was an early Black Lives Matter. Meaning that people joined the cult because people of color did not feel valued by the "white man." It almost sounded like they were forced into it instead of making a choice to live that lifestyle. She also goes on to say how she left the country for a year, becaise of anti-American feelings.The book was well written, and I applaud the author for sharing her story. I just feel that the reader/listener should be informed about the political rhetoric before reading/listening.
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2 people found this helpful
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- Steven A Reyes
- 02-15-23
Eh
Idk I can’t judge too harsh but like the mother needs to accept everything she did to her. The trauma! It was rough.
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