One of my closest friends gave me this book saying it was a book she couldn’t give just anyone. I knew what she meant as soon as I started it. Towelhead – the inflammatory title is a taste of the controversy to come – is an explicit, shocking story about a pubertal girl’s coming of age amidst a horrifically dysfunctional background which includes a hostile, jealous mother, a violent father and a paedophile neighbour. From the subject matter one would expect Towelhead to be depressing . But while it’s often disturbing and uncomfortable, it’s unexpectedly a funny read – but more on that later.
The story is related in the first person by the thirteen year-old protagonist, Jasira. Jasira is the daughter of divorced parents – an Irish-American mother and a Lebanese – American father. At the beginning of the novel, Jasira is being dumped from her mother in Syracuse, New York onto her father in Houston, Texas, because of the unhealthy interest her mother’s boyfriend Barry is showing in her. Swept up in the turbulent mass of hormones of puberty, Jasira is flattered by Barry’s attention, the situation complicated by the fact that he has been kind to her and stood up for her to her mother. Jasira’s mother blames her daughter, accusing her of flaunting her curves and instilling a sense of shame into Jasira about her changing body.
So Jasira arrives in sun-drenched Houston to live with her father who works at NASA. He’s a traditionalist and very strict. While her father abhors his racist Republican neighbour, the brawny and brash reservist Mr Vuoso, who refers to Arabs as ‘towelheads’, Jasira’s father is himself racist, forbidding Jasira from seeing her black schoolfriend Thomas. He is also violent, and Jasira soon learns that if she disobeys his edicts she suffers for it. Jasira has to keep secret normal female urges such as wanting to wear tampons instead of bulky towels, or reading about adolescence in educational books.
But Jasira’s interests are not all normal and healthy. The turmoil of hormones has awakened her sexuality and she is flattered by the attentions of Mr Vuoso. She confuses her burgeoning sexuality with love, and becomes embroiled in a deeply dysfunctional situation. The only adult who shows any love for Jasira is a pregnant newly-wed in the street, Melina.
This sounds like it should be a disheartening and ugly story and it is certainly horrific in parts, but Erian has employed a lightness of touch by using the first-person narrator and telling the story from Jasira’s teenage point of view. Because the language is the simple uncomplicated kind a teenager would use the story is very easy to read, fluid and clear. Erian is adept at capturing the guileless frankness of a child of this age, the disregard for social niceties: ‘ His toilet was in a little room with its own separate door, and right after we moved in, it started to smell like pee.’
This disarming honesty and matter-of-fact relating of events gives the book its charm and wit. It also helps depict the characters accurately, down to the details of their accents and facial expressions:
’ ’Come and help me chop this salary,’ he said, which was what he called both the vegetable and his paycheck…’.
Or
‘ Thomas stood in front of the fireplace, playing air guitar. Every time there was a solo, he scrunched his face , like he was in pain.’
This is a wickedly clever way of enlightening the reader to the faults of the characters. For example, Jasira’s father protests he’s not racist despite ordering his daughter to stop seeing Thomas. When she points out that he himself is from the African continent, he replies ‘Listen to me: when we fill out forms that ask our race, we check white. North African is considered white, and that’s what we are. Then there’s the black category for your friend. You see the difference? You should be glad we don’t have to check this box.’
Often, the humour carries with it the slap of awareness of Jasira’s awful childhood. Here she is on her mother, who comes to visit but seems uninterested in Jasira:
’ All she wanted to do was lie around and read books. She was so boring. I wasn’t sure why I had ever liked her so much. Maybe it was just that I had liked Barry, and she had introduced me to him. At least Barry had wanted to do things, even if they weren’t the right things.’
This unusual mixture of shock, sadness and amusement persists throughout the book, a jarring combination of conflicting emotions. There are sections that are genuinely horrific, such as the occasions when Jasira is assaulted by the paedophile neighbour, which are outlined in explicit detail. Even then, though, Erian resists the urge to switch to an adult perspective by condemning the act or otherwise passing judgement. Instead we have the unbearable sweetness of the confused teenager mistaking her physical sexual responses for love. To Erian’s credit, Mr Vuoso is not demonised as a monster; like any human he is capable of good as well as bad, threatening Jasira’s father with the social services if he strikes his daughter and occasionally showing tenderness to Jasira.
The only problem I had with Towelhead was an inability to believe in the final resolution. While it’s heartening and soothing to have a happy ending, Jasira’s father goes from being a brutish, selfish, violent, insensitive man with no redeeming features to almost showing compassion at the end. This strikes me as Erian wanting it both ways – it’s implausible that a man who made his daughter’s life so unbearable and who acted with such spitting rage and ferocity at finding out about her black boyfriend would react almost reasonably when events come to light at the very end. Suggesting that Melina then wants him present at the birth of her own daughter is also cheaply sentimental. Jasira’s mother too changes from her dreadful stance at the beginning of blaming her daughter for her boyfriend’s interest by saying she paraded her body and invited Barry’s attention, to behaving at the end like a concerned mother. Such golden endings are unlikely if we’re to believe in the characters portrayed.
Nevertheless, Towelhead is a thought-provoking novel in many ways. Despite being such an easy read that it can be finished in a day, it throws up many controversial issues. It subtly highlights the way girls are sometimes blamed even by their own mothers for the crimes of paedophiles, and examines the double-standards surrounding teenage girls as regards sexuality where on the one hand they’re told sex is dirty and on the other they see adult males indulging in porn. Outwith the arena of sexual abuse, it draws attention to the taboo fact that some mothers lack maternal instinct and openly show jealousy and resentment of their daughters, and it also depicts the problems faced by the westernised offspring of some immigrants. It is bound to be a controversial book but once you pack away any simplistic kneejerk suspicions that Erian is suggesting that all immigrants are violent or abusive to their daughters, it is a gripping and entertaining read.
3 Responses to Alicia Erian – Towelhead
Another thorough and informative book review, Leyla. I’m a bit confused though by your recounting of the plot incident in which Jasira reminds her anti-black father that he’s from Africa himself. He protests that he’s rather “North African,” whose residents are considered “white.” However, you’d noted earlier that the father is “Lebanese-American,” and while Lebanon is close to North Africa, it’s actually in Asia, just north of Israel. Maybe there’s some other plot element that explains this apparent discrepancy, but if it is an error, it interests me that it got past the editors. I noted on Wikipedia that author Alicia Erian’s own father is from Egypt, which of course lies in North Africa, so perhaps she inadvertently assigned his continent of origin to the fictional father. (Can you tell how obsessively I studied atlases in my GPS-free youth?)
Well spotted, Richard! I’ve wondered before about different people’s interpretation of where Africa starts and Asia ends, but since I spent geography lessons at school making people laugh instead of actually learning any geography, I’ve never felt qualified to question this myself. The book definitely says Jasira’s father is from Lebanon – page 1, ‘he had a weird accent and came from Lebanon’. When I looked at my atlas to remind myself, I saw what you meant – sandwiched between Israel and Syria, Lebanon certainly looks as if it’s in Asia rather than Africa. Perhaps the continuity of that land mass connecting Syria, Lebanon and Israel with Egypt has led to a fluid definition of continents? I think your explanation, that the author was thinking of her own father’s provenance (and perhaps his own selective racism) is more likely.
I do think the point Erian is making re selective racism is interesting, though. I have met selective racists and been shocked by it. A friend of my boyfriend’s went to see an Indian GP at uni and was aghast when the GP launched into a tirade at ‘bloody Pakis’. My own father had bizarre views on race – Indians, Pakistanis, Egyptians and Jews were, in his eyes, ‘well educated’ whereas Africans other than Egyptians were less so, regardless of individual cases. It was very odd to see someone with brown skin making these pronouncements.
Yikes, the above hastily-written comment – scribbled when late for day in hospital yesterday morning – makes it sound as if I didn’t know Lebanon was in Asia and not in Africa. Obviously events in the middle East over my lifetime mean this isn’t the case. What I was hazy about was how Africa and Asia relate to each other in the world atlas.Which is still poor, but not quite as staggeringly ignorant.
(Retreats in embarrassment).