Oct 22

Oct 22 Temple Folk

Author: Aaliyah Bilal
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Goodreads | The StoryGraph

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Note: Content and trigger warnings are provided for those who need them at the bottom of this page. If you don’t need them and don’t want to risk spoilers, don’t scroll past the full review.

Cover Description

A groundbreaking debut collection portraying the lived experiences of Black Muslims grappling with faith, family, and freedom in America.

In Temple Folk , Black Muslims contemplate the convictions of their race, religion, economics, politics, and sexuality in America. The ten stories in this collection contribute to the bounty of diverse narratives about Black life by intimately portraying the experiences of a community that resists the mainstream culture to which they are expected to accept and aspire to while functioning within the country in which they are born.

In “Due North,” an obedient daughter struggles to understand why she’s haunted by the spirit of her recently deceased father. In “Who’s Down?” a father, after a brief affair with vegetarianism, conspires with his daughter to order him a double cheeseburger. In “Candy for Hanif” a mother’s routine trip to the store for her disabled son takes an unlikely turn when she reflects on a near-death experience. In “Woman in Niqab,” a daughter’s suspicion of her father’s infidelity prompts her to wear her hair in public. In “New Mexico,” a federal agent tasked with spying on a high-ranking member of the Nation of Islam grapples with his responsibilities closer to home.

With an unflinching eye for the contradictions between what these characters profess to believe and what they do, Temple Folk accomplishes the rare feat of presenting moral failures with compassion, nuance, and humor to remind us that while perfection is what many of us strive for, it’s the errors that make us human.

TL;DR Review

Temple Folk is a strong work of fiction that does what it sets out to do very effectively. I recommend reading up on the Nation of Islam before diving in, if you are unfamiliar.

For you if: You like short story collections that examine internal conflicts, especially with organized religion.

Full Review

I struggled a little bit with Temple Folk (finalist for the National Book Award) while I was reading it, but after I’d read more about its subject matter (the Nation of Islam) and an interview with the author, I realized that was because of my own ignorance. If you do those things the other way around, I think you’ll like this a lot.

All the stories in this collection are about Black Muslim characters directly or indirectly connected to the Nation of Islam, which is the one Malcolm X became involved with during his time in prison (although he doesn’t have anything to do with this book). The stories are ordered chronologically, beginning in the 70s (when Elijah Muhammad died) and continuing until the near present. The characters grapple with their faith and allegiance, both real and performative, in extremely thought-provoking ways — which is exactly what Bilal set out to do. The book was inspired by her grandparents’ experiences in the Nation. A few passages from her recent interview with The New York Times which helped clarify this for me:

Her grandfather once told her that he hadn’t learned Arabic as a member, so couldn’t read the Quran at the time. So why, she asked, had he bothered to join?
“His face got really hard, and he said, ‘Don’t you know that white people were killing us and lynching us and calling us the N-word in those days?’” she recalled. “‘What would you have done?’ And it silenced me, because I didn’t know what I would have done.”
“Temple Folk,” which grapples with that era of the Nation of Islam, is her answer.

And:

This is part of my family history. I think the thing that disturbs some people is the idea that I can be of such a mixed mind about it, because I don’t like racialized thinking, and at the same time I understand, in its historical context, how inevitable it was that a movement like this would emerge. I have some pride, frankly, associated with the fact that my grandparents were brave enough to assert, in an environment where they were taught to hate themselves for being Black, that they should take pride in being Black. So I have pride attached to this personal history and I also have a lot of critique around the things the nation said and did.

Still, while effective and affective (more so in hindsight, for me), it wasn’t a perfect read. I had trouble keeping details straight within the stories, although that could have been because I chose to listen to the audio instead of reading in print. I was also left unsatisfied by the ending of several of the stories; while I know short stories do tend to end just before a resolution, a little open-ended but in a thought-provoking way, this was more like they just…stopped. I do think that the novella at the end (which is about 30% of the book) was by far the strongest, and it’s worth reading it just for that.

All in all, a strong work of fiction that makes sense to me as an NBA finalist.