Book 17: Precious by Sapphire
I saw a little blurb about tihs book on NPR's facebook update.
Oh good heavens this could have been so very depressing, but it wasn't. It's a book that clearly a sort of younger-sister version of The Color Purple - the book is told in Precious' first person voice, and at a later point Precious does read the book and she and her teacher talk about The Color Purple and its fairy tale ending. Precious is both more hard hitting and blunt than The Color Purple (the passages explicitly describing Precious' incest rape by her father one-up Alice Walker) and less of a fairytale (there isn't a wrapped up "and then everyone was reunited and all was beautiful and fine" that you have in TCP). The thing is, Precious herself is a bit of a fairytale. I had a very very safe, secure, comfortable upbringing of being raised by two very competent and educated adults who made it their highest priority to get me the best education and healthcare possible - and yet the undercurrents of emotional pain and hostility that they also dumped on me from time to time messed me up so badly that I didn't feel I could function and put myself through intense therapy for years before I felt whole again. Precious is a fairytale magical princess if she could, with just a single open door to a single person who smiles at her that one time with genuine kindness, transform from catatonia (induced by rape, incest, verbal abuse, physical abuse, bearing her rapist father's child at age 12, and spending all her childhood years in a school system that gives an illiterate girl an A in English) to an open hearted joyful self-loving centered assertive person.
Then again, why not? Maybe when you are dying of thirst in a hot desert that single cup of water makes you able to run the marathon the rest of the way. My therapist and I used to talk about this - about how school, just the chance to go somewhere else for most of the day, is such a lifeline for a lot of people whose homes are not what you would want for them.
As a study of language acquisition and the cocomitant development of a self awareness, Precious is fantastic and a real accomplishment. I don't remember not being able to read or write so Precious' gradual steps - of at first doing a sort of boiled-down acronym of the things she wants to say with the letters she knows (and somehow her Helen Keller type teacher always knows exactly what that alphabet soup she jots down is compression for) and then getting better - was fascinating too
Oh good heavens this could have been so very depressing, but it wasn't. It's a book that clearly a sort of younger-sister version of The Color Purple - the book is told in Precious' first person voice, and at a later point Precious does read the book and she and her teacher talk about The Color Purple and its fairy tale ending. Precious is both more hard hitting and blunt than The Color Purple (the passages explicitly describing Precious' incest rape by her father one-up Alice Walker) and less of a fairytale (there isn't a wrapped up "and then everyone was reunited and all was beautiful and fine" that you have in TCP). The thing is, Precious herself is a bit of a fairytale. I had a very very safe, secure, comfortable upbringing of being raised by two very competent and educated adults who made it their highest priority to get me the best education and healthcare possible - and yet the undercurrents of emotional pain and hostility that they also dumped on me from time to time messed me up so badly that I didn't feel I could function and put myself through intense therapy for years before I felt whole again. Precious is a fairytale magical princess if she could, with just a single open door to a single person who smiles at her that one time with genuine kindness, transform from catatonia (induced by rape, incest, verbal abuse, physical abuse, bearing her rapist father's child at age 12, and spending all her childhood years in a school system that gives an illiterate girl an A in English) to an open hearted joyful self-loving centered assertive person.
Then again, why not? Maybe when you are dying of thirst in a hot desert that single cup of water makes you able to run the marathon the rest of the way. My therapist and I used to talk about this - about how school, just the chance to go somewhere else for most of the day, is such a lifeline for a lot of people whose homes are not what you would want for them.
As a study of language acquisition and the cocomitant development of a self awareness, Precious is fantastic and a real accomplishment. I don't remember not being able to read or write so Precious' gradual steps - of at first doing a sort of boiled-down acronym of the things she wants to say with the letters she knows (and somehow her Helen Keller type teacher always knows exactly what that alphabet soup she jots down is compression for) and then getting better - was fascinating too