Towelhead

Jasira is 13 when her Irish-American mother sends her to live with her Lebanese father in Houston. This is because her mother's new boyfriend has started to pay a little too much attention to Jasira. This is Jasira's own fault; after all, she's the one walking around with tits out to here and hormones all over the place, and the boyfriend is just a man after all, he can't be expected to control himself around her. She just needs a firm hand and a strict upbringing - if need be, have some modesty beaten into her.

Towelhead is told in the first person from Jasira's point of view, against the backdrop of the first Gulf War, which means that whatever her father may argue ("North Africans are white! When I got my green card, I checked white under 'race'!") Arabs aren't the most popular people in the American heartland. (The fact that he and Jasira are Christians barely comes up; it's not like anyone cares.) Hence the book's title, and much of the humour that comes up when Jasira's first boyfriend turns out to be black and her father vehemently protests that he's not a racist for forbidding her to see him; it's just that he knows first-hand how difficult interracial relationships can be for the woman. The fact that all the kids (and quite a few adults) are already calling her "towelhead", "camel jockey" and "sandnigger" on a regular basis is beside the point; the point is that he's not a racist. And while he's staring himself blind at his own hang-ups, he completely misses that the 40-year-old neighbour is starting to be interested in his daughter, who - hormones all over the place, and taught to respect her elders - finds it more than just a little flattering...

This is a comedy. Yes, it is. It deals frankly and matter-of-factly with teenage sex, parental abuse, cultural clashes, misogyny, racism and child molestation, and it's funny. As a narrator of her almost Lolita-in-reverse story, Jasira is a classic 90s US teenager; smart but not as smart as she thinks, cynical because her head is full of naive ideals, dismissive of everyone else - and not for no reason, as the adults (presented from her POV) are hardly the best role models. (If anything, the novel's biggest drawback is the rather clichéd adults.) But at the same time, what makes the humour uneasy is the way she still learns from them. Hormones or not, sexually active or not, she's still a kid and still believes what she's told - and if everyone, Lebanese dad or American boyfriend, tells her bad things that happen to her are her own fault for not living up to their standards, eventually she takes it on board. And there she finds herself caught between the eternally conflicting and mutually exlusive roles she's expected to play. Told to be obedient, especially towards men, then blamed for obeying the wrong men; told she's just a girl, then blamed for not being mature; told she's free to live her life, then blamed for not living it exactly as everyone - whether the racist paedophile next door or the liberal couple on the other side - thinks she should. And as said, obviously it's all her fault. They couldn't possibly be wrong. And so we build a world, teach our children their place in it, and make sure they pass on the guilt for being human to the next generation.