Most memoirs gain their strength through their colorful descriptions of commonalities and common interests with the audience. They create such a strong rapport with their audience that everything becomes acceptable and believable.
What struck me most about Hirshi Ali's work was not her color, nor her rapport. Instead, she captivated me with her unerring, unswerving honesty. This work didn't exist to give color or flair, it wasn't an act of art or artistic license. Instead, this was a confession, a witness' testimony. It was descriptive, it was insightful, and it was honest, but more than anything else, it exists to condemn Islam.
In other works I've seen, an author will be somewhat forgiving of his/her background, will look kindly upon some aspect of it. In Infidel, Hirshi Ali has no such affection:
"Religion gave me a sense of peace only from its assurance of a life after death. It was fairly easy to follow most of the rules: good behavior, politeness, avoiding gossip and pork and usury and alcohol. But I had found that I couldn't follow the deeper rules of Islam that control sexuality and the mind. I didn't want to follow them. I wanted to be someone, to stand on my own.
Islam is submission. You submit on earth in order to earn your place in Heaven (132)."
Ultimately, the primary emotion I felt at Infidel's conclusion was curiosity. I couldn't (and still can't) quite put my finger on exactly why the book was written in the first place. At some points, it seems a rallying point for other ex-Muslims. At others, it seems to be polarizing non-Muslims against the faith. And at still others, it seems to exist to give form to her long-formulating anger. I suppose I understand (on some level) the emotions she's feeling, but I can't quite figure out why she is sharing those emotions so publicly.
This, to me, raises fascinating questions about the overall purpose of memoir. It is difficult to paint memoirists with a broad brush, assuming that they fall into categories of why they wrote, but there must be some common threads between them. Joan Didion wanted to embody her grief, Barack Obama wanted to trace and identify the ghost of his father's heritage, and Hirshi Ali's purpose was...what? To recant her earlier life? To express regret at the state of Islam? To rage against her spiritual, societal and physical captors? The title itself, Infidel, suggests that she is abundantly aware of her own pariah status. But this seems more a badge of pride than a mark of shame.
I don't know the emotion Hirshi Ali would want to convey. I don't know what category such spiritual abandonment falls under. What I do know is that the main emotion I took away from Infidel was a sense of proud infidelity to ones former beliefs. And I suppose, in the long and the short of it, that could have been the point all along.
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