Review of the Novel Towelhead

Towelhead: A Novel by Alicia Erian
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

The book Towelhead had a dramatic impact upon me. When Jasira was slapped, I felt it. I even felt tired and desensitized when, three quarters into the book, she had been slapped so many times that its occurrence almost seemed normal. I say this in spite of running the risk of giving you an impression of Towelhead that appears to be all too common: that it’s a book about child abuse, or a book about sexual abuse, or a book about racism. Towelhead isn’t any of these things. This is a book through which you get to know a 13 year old girl named Jasira who experiences physical abuse, sexual abuse and racism.

This book has helped me to realize that I may have actually interacted in real life with other Jasira’s: girls that have experienced many of the same things that she experiences in this book. Without entering into a relationship as unusual as the one created between the reader and the main character of Towelhead, it’s very unlikely that I would recognize a real life Jasira. I would have to notice the bruises that a young girl tries to hide by covering it with her shirt sleeve. I would have to notice when she makes an odd or suspicious comment during a casual conversation, which would reveal experiences beyond her years. In Towelhead Jasira tells you, the reader, in a very intimate and yet matter of fact fashion what she is experiencing, on the day it happens, at the moment it happens.

This book is written in the first person. This is the reason why it’s so intimate. Through her masterful use of the first person narrative Alicia Erian creates a vantage point like that of sitting on Jasira’s shoulder, witnessing her every experience and being made privy to her every thought and desire.

I noticed that online this book is either tagged erotica or put in the category of erotica. Considering the fact that the main character is 13 years old this may seem strange. I’m not going to argue one way or the other whether it’s erotica or not. The simple fact is that, in the first three or four chapters of the book, Jasira discovers how to pleasure herself sexually. And as with all of her other experiences her descriptions are direct, intimate, and matter of fact.

If these specific sections of the book were separated from the rest of the book and the age therefore was not known by the reader, they would certainly have a lot in common with popular erotica. The reader wouldn’t have any reason to know that they were the experiences of a thirteen year old girl. The experiences are not age specific. Her first person descriptions of producing more and more sexual pleasure in a wider and wider variety of ways are descriptions that could have been made by a twenty year old woman, a fourteen year old boy, a forty-five year old woman, or a fifty year old man. The descriptions were not age specific and it wouldn’t be hard to switch the gender. That universality ends though with an age and gender specific sexual assault, and Jasira’s specific situation is integral to all subsequent descriptions of her sexual experiences.

After watching the movie I wondered about the relevance of the title Towelhead. Now that I’ve read the book I feel that this debate totally disregards the book’s uniqueness. It is the best presentation, out of everything that I’ve read, of everyday racism. This is not the story of a racially charged environment in which two communities struggle to occupy the same space; or the story of the heroin who stands up to pressure from her people and defends members of an oppressed community. Through Jasira you see how racism is part of the complexity of everyday life in the United States. You see typical contradictions in the interactions between the characters, the everyday contrast between what characters in this book say and what they do, or what they espouse and what they admit.

This book is unusual on three dimensions: the main character has intense sexual experiences but it’s not a book about sex; she encounters racism in an intimate way but it’s not a book about racism; and she has a different perspective on the first gulf war but it’s not a book about the first gulf war. It’s a book about Jasira, a thirteen year old girl that has sexual encounters and racist encounters, and a different perspective on the first gulf war. So the reader looking for a focus on only one of these issues will be disappointed.
Another significant aspect of this first person account is that Jasira’s intense experiences are not managed for the reader through judgment oriented narration. When Jasira is slapped, you are not lifted from her shoulder onto a big picture vantage point in which this instance of child abuse is placed in the broader context of child abuse across the country, or child abuse among the children of immigrants, or child abuse in Arab-American communities. When Jasira is slapped you are still on her shoulder when she runs into her room to cry and wonder why she was slapped and why she wasn’t just told not to do whatever it was that elicited the slap so that she would avoid doing that thing and therefore avoid being slapped. Jsaira doesn’t know the broader context of this experience; all she knows is that she was slapped and she doesn’t want to be slapped again, so in a way that’s all you are left with.

No one in Jasira’s life knows what you know. One of the things that annoyed me about her was that her default response to questions was to lie. When faced with direct questions related to where she got the bruises, or why she wanted to know the definition of rape, or why she was crying, or when she actually lost her virginity her least likely response was the truth. Her most frequent answer to these kinds of questions was “I don’t know” or “no he didn’t” or “I guess not.” It’s easy to understand why she evaded questions from the people that hurt her, but it’s hard to understand why she evaded questions from individuals that sincerely wanted to help her.

Perhaps it was because if she revealed the bad things that happened to her, she would run the risk of revealing the things that she did and the decisions that she made which were difficult to justify or explain. One thing that makes the book, on the one hand, feel realistic and believable, but on the other hand, very frustrating is that Jasira is not just a victim. She makes choices on the basis of selfishness and misguided desires. This is not a story about a person who always does what she is supposed to do for reasons that are respectable or easy to justify. She’s a kid that’s been clumsily exposed to experiences that seem inappropriate and beyond her years but since they make her feel good she lies and sneaks around and even keeps her abuse secret in order to continue experiencing pleasure.
I strongly recommend that you read this book. It’s not an escape from reality though, in a way it’s the exact opposite. It’s the act of staring straight into the reality of a person’s life. This may be your only opportunity to get to know someone quite like this.


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