1/50 Push by Sapphire

[ms-mmelissa.livejournal.com]

Beware of spoilers:

This novel will cut you.

There are only a handful of novels that I can remember affecting me so strongly that I had to put them down while I was reading them, the words on the page too much to handle. One of them was Alice Walker's The Color Purple. The most recent is Sapphire's 1996 novel Push.

The basic plot of the book should be familiar to anyone who was paying attention during last year's Oscar season when the movie adaptation, "Precious" swept through the awards circuit. A young teenager named Precious who is illiterate, unloved and sexually abused, pushes through her circumstances in order to find, if not happiness, then a little bit of hope, a sliver of light in a well of darkness.

Right away, from the very first sentence, what keeps the reader engaged and hoping, what forces the reader to turn page after page is the voice Sapphire gives Precious. As Precious recounts her rape at the hands of both her father and mother, as she describes the abuse she suffers at the hands of her classmates and the abuse she dishes back you realize that this young girl may be beaten but she is not beat.

Her voice burns the page. You may know this girl from a few statistics, the high school drop out, the obese teenage welfare queen with two children, but you have never truly met her. Her voice is strong and clear as she recounts her conflicted feelings over her abuse (where she loathes her father, but can't help having orgasms as he rapes her), her internalized racism, her hatred of her mother and her strong desire to be a good parent, whatever that may be.

Her salvation comes through a pre-GED class where Precious admits, for the first time, that she is illiterate. Her life from then on becomes a struggle to learn how to write and read, and the book follows Precious for a further two years, through the birth of her second child and as she slowly, slowly, makes the steps towards basic literacy, and later, poetry.

The novel ends with a "class journal" that briefly outlines the lives of some of the other girls in Precious's class. Their stories remind us that Precious is only one of many and that each one of these young woman has a story that is as devastating as Precious's and a voice with just as much right to be heard.

There is a great chance that I will never pick up this book again, but it is a book I will never forget. Brutal and surprisingly poetic, this tiny novel is a painful but rewarding read.

As a final note I mentioned The Color Purple at the beginning of this thread. While Push is a perfectly fine novel on it's own, there is no doubt that it is written as a response to The Color Purple with Sapphire even acknowledging the similarities in the text by having Precious declare that Celie is just like her. The two work as excellent companions for each other so I suggest that anyone who wants to read one, pick up the other.

tags: a: sapphire, abuse

Comments

[moseley2010.livejournal.com]

Very powerful novel. Reading the story brought out a lot of emotions from within me. And Precious reminds me of Oprah Winfrey's story. Not that they're entirely the same, but there are parallelisms. This only says a lot about the circumstances that many African-American girls face during those times.

African American novels (http://www.21blackstreet.com)