I was privileged to be involved in a conversation with a first time best selling Canadian author, Jamil Jivani, towards the end of last year in one of the meeting rooms of Big Brothers Big Sisters of Greater Halifax in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, Canada. Jamil was on a tour around parts of Canada seeking to meet young people and their older adult befrienders such as mentors, elders in the community, allies of youth, who were willing to spend time and effort to lend a hand to youth in their passage through life.
Jamil had just published his book, Why Young Men: Rage, Race and the Crisis of Identity, published by HarperCollins (2018). The book, research informed and partly autobiographical, outlines his journey through his childhood and youth growing up in a ‘mostly immigrant’ community in Toronto coupled with extensive travels in Europe and wider afield in an attempt to explore the challenges youth face and what influences the decisions youth make in life to pursue one pathway instead of another.
He uses his own life as an example, outlining his single parent mother origins, absent father, no adult male positive influences in his life, the allure of peer pressure, the enticement from music icons extolling the virtues and rewards of life in the worlds of crime, drugs, uninhibited sex, money from illicit activities; all attracting the seeming approval from all around. What more could you ask for when you had none of the foregoing but hankered for it?
Jamil speaks of what he knows. ‘Most of the book’, he writes, ‘has been set in racial and religious minority communities because those are the communities I’ve lived and worked in. I hope I have told these stories in a way that helps people look beyond racial and religious differences, however, to see some of the common challenges and experiences of young men, and the ways they can be better included, supported, held accountable and empowered.’ (p. 219)
He honestly outlines his past activities, interests and passions. His wannabe gangster, hip hop, successful image, courted by peers but becomes increasingly clear that it is heading towards a dead end. It is unconvincing to him himself, and he is not fooling anyone else either including the very people he feels he needs to impress, his peers.
The influences confronting youth are laid out by Jamil in great detail and it is clear that he has a view that such markers have a profound impact on youth, shaping their desires, moulding behaviour, coercing one to move in a certain direction almost inexorably, like lemmings herded towards a cliff edge and the only thing left, is to drop off the edge to certain destruction.
I feel that Jamil is torn. As a reader I feel his tension. He does not know which way to turn in his story telling. In his own life he shows that in spite of the pressures surrounding him as a youth, he turned his life around, saw education as a source of escape from the negative influences propelling him towards the cliff edge. Managed to get to university, secured his law degree, saw new possibilities emerging and grasped them. He pondered why he was able to make such changes, such new possibilities and others, similarly situated to himself, brighter, more able, could not, would not, and disappeared from sight?
Jamil never explicitly answered his own question. It demands taking a position. Are you a grain of sand, buffeted by any prevailing current, forced hither and thither, to and fro, by any influences passing your way? Life circumstances, for example, being poor, having an alcoholic parent or a drug- addled carer. Having an absent parent or no parents at all and cared for by strangers. Some in society-state sanctioned including courts, interpret such indicators as ‘reasons’ for behaviour patterns ‘deserving’ of lesser criticism of the individuals laying claim to them. Mitigating circumstances. This fuels a victim mentality. Providing safety in a ghetto of perpetual victimhood.
There is an abdication of agency, an absence of volition, death of the exercise of the Will. This was not intended I am sure when writing the book, but the impression left after reading it, leaves little room for an alternative interpretation.