push sapphire
Yesterday evening, I had listen "Amazing Grace" sang by The Destiny's Child. And, there was some years, I listened "Amazing Grace" reading Push, a book of Sapphire. But, this morning, i was really surprised when we had studied a extract of the book. I had read Push in french, but, we had studied Push in english. Very good.I like a lot the style of writing. Here, a summary of the book. Large. It's not mine.
With these words by William Wordsworth as warning, the performance poet Sapphire lurches into her first novel, PUSH, to take the reader to stark landscapes devoid of poetry and so much in need of it. Enter the world of Claireece Precious Jones: eating herself into oblivion on the sagging couch in her mother's suffocating apartment. Illiterate 16 year-old "Precious," as she prefers to be called, is pregnant with her second child by the same father as the first--her own. Sapphire hits the reader head-on with a blow-by-blow of the brutal reality that Precious knows as life. The setting happens to be 1980's Harlem, but the location shuttles back and forth between the Jones' cramped and stinking living room to the bright atmosphere of Mrs. Rain's "Each One/Teach One" pre-G. E. D. classroom.
Every stone Sapphire overturns in this first novel reveals a festering underworld that repulses as it fascinates. There is not an "issue" that Precious does not thrust before us. First her language offends the senses, shattering whatever membranes of safety the reader needs to maintain some psychic distance between the indignities one would rather not look at let alone live through. Like a jackhammer to consciousness, the raw words achieve their power, erupting from a woman who is powerless over everything else. There is no hint of poetry in the prose as the book opens, no promise of sweetness or repose, no touch of a poet.
Precious' first child has Downs Syndrome, and the young mother names the baby "Lil' Mongo" for mongoloid, a word which she neither knows how to pronounce or comprehend. She gives birth to Mongo on the floor of her kitchen, after being kicked and beaten by her mother for "stealing her man." The infant goes to live with Precious' grandmother, but is brought over for the half hour of the caseworker's monthly visit so Mrs. Jones can claim her as a welfare dependent.
Sapphire conjures up every stereotype imaginable and lays each spread-eagle across the pages of PUSH, daring the reader, just daring the reader to flinch. Incest, AIDS, pedophilia, welfare fraud, illiteracy, homelessness, domestic violence-- she refuses to let up. With the exception of Farrakhan, an icon of "a real man" looming in the background on a poster on Precious'closet door, Sapphire will not push the politics of these issues.
Despising "crackheads and dykes," Precious meets both in circumstances as desperate as her own, and learns to recognize human faces beneath these labels. In her actions, the reader is slowly and patiently taught to do the same in dealing with Precious' own pugnacious and pathetic character. The irony of Precious' desire to be invisible is that she becomes indelibly etched into the memory as her fierce desire to learn, to survive, and to make a life for her children, begins to grow.
Why read this novel? Why choose for entertainment an in-your-face-urban poverty case study? Ever read Dickens? Think Oliver, with a twist--20th century, Black, female, not London but Harlem. Minus the "look at all you have and be grateful" admonition. For some impossible reason, this novel is totally out from under the white guilt umbrella. No fingers point your way. In fact, no fingers point, period. Remember, Sapphire's a poet first and by the time you're through, this book sings and shouts. The language cuts deep until the reader crawls out from under the rock of her own ignorance and faces the world Precious Jones never asked for but was born into and struggles to accept with dignity.
With these words by William Wordsworth as warning, the performance poet Sapphire lurches into her first novel, PUSH, to take the reader to stark landscapes devoid of poetry and so much in need of it. Enter the world of Claireece Precious Jones: eating herself into oblivion on the sagging couch in her mother's suffocating apartment. Illiterate 16 year-old "Precious," as she prefers to be called, is pregnant with her second child by the same father as the first--her own. Sapphire hits the reader head-on with a blow-by-blow of the brutal reality that Precious knows as life. The setting happens to be 1980's Harlem, but the location shuttles back and forth between the Jones' cramped and stinking living room to the bright atmosphere of Mrs. Rain's "Each One/Teach One" pre-G. E. D. classroom.
Every stone Sapphire overturns in this first novel reveals a festering underworld that repulses as it fascinates. There is not an "issue" that Precious does not thrust before us. First her language offends the senses, shattering whatever membranes of safety the reader needs to maintain some psychic distance between the indignities one would rather not look at let alone live through. Like a jackhammer to consciousness, the raw words achieve their power, erupting from a woman who is powerless over everything else. There is no hint of poetry in the prose as the book opens, no promise of sweetness or repose, no touch of a poet.
Precious' first child has Downs Syndrome, and the young mother names the baby "Lil' Mongo" for mongoloid, a word which she neither knows how to pronounce or comprehend. She gives birth to Mongo on the floor of her kitchen, after being kicked and beaten by her mother for "stealing her man." The infant goes to live with Precious' grandmother, but is brought over for the half hour of the caseworker's monthly visit so Mrs. Jones can claim her as a welfare dependent.
Sapphire conjures up every stereotype imaginable and lays each spread-eagle across the pages of PUSH, daring the reader, just daring the reader to flinch. Incest, AIDS, pedophilia, welfare fraud, illiteracy, homelessness, domestic violence-- she refuses to let up. With the exception of Farrakhan, an icon of "a real man" looming in the background on a poster on Precious'closet door, Sapphire will not push the politics of these issues.
Despising "crackheads and dykes," Precious meets both in circumstances as desperate as her own, and learns to recognize human faces beneath these labels. In her actions, the reader is slowly and patiently taught to do the same in dealing with Precious' own pugnacious and pathetic character. The irony of Precious' desire to be invisible is that she becomes indelibly etched into the memory as her fierce desire to learn, to survive, and to make a life for her children, begins to grow.
Why read this novel? Why choose for entertainment an in-your-face-urban poverty case study? Ever read Dickens? Think Oliver, with a twist--20th century, Black, female, not London but Harlem. Minus the "look at all you have and be grateful" admonition. For some impossible reason, this novel is totally out from under the white guilt umbrella. No fingers point your way. In fact, no fingers point, period. Remember, Sapphire's a poet first and by the time you're through, this book sings and shouts. The language cuts deep until the reader crawls out from under the rock of her own ignorance and faces the world Precious Jones never asked for but was born into and struggles to accept with dignity.