KWENU! Our culture, our future

Book Review

Oseloka Obaze

selonnes@aolcom

Tuesday, October 15, 2003

The Return of Tyreek

Caroline Ilogienboh

(ISBN: 0-9712781-3-X; Sun Rose Publishers, East Orange, NJ; pp. 275, Price, $14.99)

Five black kids, Tyreek Jackson, Alyssa Spence, Jayda Wills, Victor Demudia, and Jamal Bricks, their passion for living, raging hormones, sex, drugs, unmitigated passion and camaraderie, artful streetwise abilities, biracialism, and ubiquitous adolescent headiness, combine to form the racy backdrop of The Return of Tyreek.   Notwithstanding the challenges they face in an effectless society, these five youths – young, bright and precocious --  are  determined to rise above the daily humdrum of life in a society replete with drugs, bigotry, violence, alcohol abuse, oppression and indifference. To survive, they bond, and elect to default “in favor of love and a better future”.

Nigerian-born Caroline Ilogienboh’s The Return of Tyreek is about youths and the challenges they face daily.  It is, more importantly, a book that should attract the curious interest of any serious-minded parent with a teenage child.  Parenting is a joyful but thankless job. Customarily, it is a hard job. Parenting of teenagers is even harder and risky too, since untutored parents, without any formal training or a how-to-do-it-yourself guide, are nevertheless expected by the society to succeed at parenting. When you succeed no one bats an eyelid, but then, try to fail and see how society reacts, assuming you do not make the front page news.  But parenting gets even riskier for youths, who might, and do fall through the cracks when parents fail. The process and implications of such failure is the underpinning focus of The Return of Tyreek.

In this book, the protagonist, Tyreek Jackson, a brash, hip-hop, in your face, handsome, savvy and athletically built brother is neck-deep in drug peddling. Despite his aliped and ten-speed abilities, a réclame, for which he earned the sobriquet “Speed”, his past is fast catching up with him. There is nowhere to hide -no way out of his jam. On the run, he is aware that his only chance of surviving rested on the resilience of Alyssa, a sister he dissed, Jayda’s love and his newfound camaraderie with Victor. But he had burnt many bridges – most notably Alyssa’s. The chicken has come home to roost. Tyreek must return to his past and cross one of those burnt bridges, if he must stay alive.  

Well beyond the subplot of The Return of Tyreek, Ilogienboh pokes into the eerie ways of our contemporary society, families, and the dichotomy between dutifully raising upright, trouble free children or recidivist adolescents, especially those entrapped in the spiraling, drug-laden vortex of inner cities. The book takes more than a deferential cursory look into juvenile delinquency, and the unending saga of repeated and pernicious youth incarceration without rehabilitation. The key question asked: “Can the cycle be broken?”    Finally, Ilogienboh explores the vexatious societal contradiction, in which poor black youths pay a disproportional price for serving the drug needs and demands of rich, spoiled addicts. 

The Return of Tyreek is also focused on contemporary realities of family life and something the society regards as the apotheosis of family: children, and how we try to address their adolescent problems. Even in free democratic countries, children in crisis represent an easy invitation to the State to insinuate itself into your everyday living. What ought to be remedial efforts by the State is now being turned into permanent features.  But alarmingly, alternative parenting by foster homes, state-run protective agencies have all too often proven to be inadequate.

Why is parenting so hard?  This is a question Ms. Ilogienboh never pointedly asks, but no doubt, attempts in many ways to address in The Return of Tyreek.  In response, I believe the task of parenting has been further compounded, “because the desires for the approval of others make us do strange things.”  For adolescents, this comes in the form of excessively pushy or inattentive parents or peer pressure. In sum, the difficulty arises from what Herb Van Lugt calls, “people pressure”, which he says “bears down on us from all directions.” 

Very few people truly understand “people pressure” and its implications for adolescents as well as probation officers, child caseworkers and others who serve in the Division of Youth and Family Services (DYFS).  Caroline Ilogienboh is a mother of three adolescent children, a Principal Probation Officer with the Essex County, Probation Services, New Jersey and a self-published author of two books on adolescent crisis.  The Return of Tyreek, her third and most recent book, looks into the everyday challenges that teenagers face, and delves into those challenges that parents fear the most – the challenges that come with children coming of age. 

The Return of Tyreek is written with deep compassion, understanding and based on Ilogienboh’s first hand, and on-the-field experiences. The key strands in the book are clearly drawn from many years of encountering and dealing with adolescent and juvenile problems.  The book is inextricably entwined in the virtual realities of our increasingly globalized world, strung and interconnected by the Internet and cell phones; factors that make lives easy, but do not make it any easier for our adolescents, who struggle daily with the realities of life beyond “the birds and the bees”.  Youths who were once sheltered and protected in the comfort of cozy homes, but now run the risk of being violated by a distant and unseen interlopers. Likewise, youths, who by no choice of theirs, have to contend with mean streets on cities, but now even face greater risks of being swallowed up by unseen hands.

The Return of Tyreek highlights the clear and imminent danger youths face daily on television, the school buses, school teams, and malls.  In several ways, some perfunctory, Ilogienboh, skillfully explores and trace her pointer at how our youths might, in an unguarded moment, succumb to peer pressure that might push them through an indiscernible crack, towards drugs, sex, and self-destruction, when faced with the added but normal pressure of schoolwork, defining their identities, and in many instances, with the understandably growing parental absenteeism arising from exigencies of work and striving to make an honest living in order to support the same often neglected children.  

The Return of Tyreek is a looking glass-self for most teenagers and their parents. Often as parents, we are afraid to look into the mirror that youth problems present. But not Caroline Ilogienboh.  For her, youths and their problems is a mirror she must look at everyday at home and at work, just as she must, her bathroom mirror, when she puts on her makeup every morning. Every parent with a teenage child will be served well to look at the societal mirror metaphrased and metamorphosed in The Return of Tyreek.

Commonly, when adolescent crisis stories are told, the all-too-familiar escapist response, is to ask why the child’s family or managers of the foster care programs didn't keep better track of the erring youth.  But then, blame like talk, is a plentiful and cheap commodity. The greatest risk we run as parents, is being in denial over ongoing or prospective youth problems. While we may always wish and hope for the best, thinking and uttering those words, “Not My Child”,  is the first step to folly and great pains.  Averting such pain begins with thinking the unthinkable, and knowing that it could happen to you or your child.  From thereon, you can work to avert any such adolescent crisis, of course, with a lot of prayers. 

Carole Ilogienboh has written a book worth celebrating, for the service and cautionary pointers it offers to parents and teenagers.  The book belongs to every family library and should form part of the formal and informal reading list for Middle School students, especially those from the inner cities. It is a book that is inclined to make you think deep and hard about black families in America, and indeed, about family life in any country, from Albania and Britain to Nigeria, Zambia and Zimbabwe. For those slightly conversant with the realities of the inner cities of the United States, it is a book that conjures sadness, but yet evokes hope and warmth, as one thinks of the life and saga of Tyreek Jackson as being representative of those of thousands of young black youths who may be enduring a similarly heartrending childhood.

There are striking parallel s between The Return of Tyreek and Denzel Washington’s film “Antwone Fisher” and the movie “Thirteen”.  None of them celebrates failed motherhood or acclaim that parenting or being a youth is easy.  The common thread they share, is that they all delve into unending teenage problems by provocatively exploring and presenting to us -- the reluctant parental audience -- an unglamorous portrait of what a lot of our youths are faced with today, what they think, feel, do, and go through, often without our knowing about them. They also forewarn us, that what we may read as “other peoples’ children” may easily, by a quirk of fate, become our own children. Like the films "Antwone Fisher” and “Thirteen,”  The Return of Tyreek should be a catalyst for change. It ought to be made into a film too, for the sake of our youth and posterity.

To obtain copies or information on The Return of Tyreek, write to:

Sun Rose Publishers, P. O. Box 2314 East Orange, NJ 07019

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