The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Push by Sapphire
Susann Cokal

Sapphire. Push. Knopf, 1996. 157 pp. $20.00.

For the first sixteen years of her life, Claireece Precious Jones (but “only motherfuckers I hate call me Claireece”) wants one thing from her mother: the older Ms. Jones, housebound and enormously overweight, should say to her lover—who is both Precious’s father and the father of the girl’s two children—“Can’t you see Precious is a beautiful chile like white chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers. . . . Git off Precious, fool!” In Push, the first novel by performance poet Sapphire, Precious never gets her wish. Instead, Mama forces the girl to binge, beats her until she delivers her first baby prematurely (a girl called Little Mongo, for Mongoloid), and finally drives her out of the house when she learns Precious is pregnant for the second time.

Precious is, of course, a name dripping with irony, given to her by the same woman who has perpetrated these crimes. Ironic, too, is the picture of the white child on the toilet paper wrapper: Precious’s vocabulary of images is so impoverished that in her mind the summa of beauty and love is attached to something to be used, in the most degrading way, and discarded. This novel chronicles Precious’s struggle to haul herself out of the discard pile. Along the way, two people tell her to push: one is a paramedic coaching her through Little Mongo’s birth, the other a teacher at the alternative school to which Precious is rerouted during her second pregnancy. But no amount of effort will save her; when eventually Mama resurfaces, it is to announce that Precious’s father just died of AIDS. Naturally, the girl and her newborn son are infected; thus even as she tries to better herself—to rescue herself—Precious is doomed, just like the product that bears the white child’s image. “We is a nation of raped children,” she has learned; and even “the black man in America today” (her father) “is the product of rape.”

Incest, rape, Harlem, AIDS: Sapphire’s material is sensationalist and horrific—not necessarily bad qualities—but she puts it all to such didactic use that we never fully enter Precious’s world. We never, for example, see her mother as more than a one-dimensional monolith; and even in the collection of Precious’s poems that concludes the volume, we barely find out what life is like away from the incest bed or the classroom. In fact, Push hardly ever gets out of school; most of the action takes place there, as we watch Precious’s emergence into literacy, her poetry and personal narrative part of a class project. And it is apparent that the reader is to be taught as well: We learn not only that life in the ghetto is desperate but also that incest is damaging and fat girls are sensitive about their weight. These are all valuable lessons, certainly, but lessons that Sapphire might have presumed people interested in this novel would already have learned. Perhaps the book would have been more effective if its author had concentrated more on plot than on message—on showing us Precious’s world instead of pushing to be sure we think the right away about it. [Susann Cokal]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Push by Sapphire Susann Cokal Sapphire. Push. Knopf, 1996. 157 pp. $20.00. For the first sixteen years of her life, Claireece Precious Jones (but “only motherfuckers I hate call me Claireece”) wants one thing from her mother: the older Ms. Jones, housebound and enormously overweight, should say to her lover—who is both Precious’s father and the father of the girl’s two children—“Can’t you see Precious is a beautiful chile like white chile in magazines or on toilet paper wrappers. . . . Git off Precious, fool!” In Push, the first novel by performance poet Sapphire, Precious never gets her wish. Instead, Mama forces the girl to binge, beats her until she delivers her first baby prematurely (a girl called Little Mongo, for Mongoloid), and finally drives her out of the house when she learns Precious is pregnant for the second time. Precious is, of course, a name dripping with irony, given to her by the same woman who has perpetrated these crimes. Ironic, too, is the picture of the white child on the toilet paper wrapper: Precious’s vocabulary of images is so impoverished that in her mind the summa of beauty and love is attached to something to be used, in the most degrading way, and discarded. This novel chronicles Precious’s struggle to haul herself out of the discard pile. Along the way, two people tell her to push: one is a paramedic coaching her through Little Mongo’s birth, the other a teacher at the alternative school to which Precious is rerouted during her second pregnancy. But no amount of effort will save her; when eventually Mama resurfaces, it is to announce that Precious’s father just died of AIDS. Naturally, the girl and her newborn son are infected; thus even as she tries to better herself—to rescue herself—Precious is doomed, just like the product that bears the white child’s image. “We is a nation of raped children,” she has learned; and even “the black man in America today” (her father) “is the product of rape.” Incest, rape, Harlem, AIDS: Sapphire’s material is sensationalist and horrific—not necessarily bad qualities—but she puts it all to such didactic use that we never fully enter Precious’s world. We never, for example, see her mother as more than a one-dimensional monolith; and even in the collection of Precious’s poems that concludes the volume, we barely find out what life is like away from the incest bed or the classroom. In fact, Push hardly ever gets out of school; most of the action takes place there, as we watch Precious’s emergence into literacy, her poetry and personal narrative part of a class project. And it is apparent that the reader is to be taught as well: We learn not only that life in the ghetto is desperate but also that incest is damaging and fat girls are sensitive about their weight. These are all valuable lessons, certainly, but lessons that Sapphire might have presumed people interested in this novel would already have learned. Perhaps the book would have been more effective if its author had concentrated more on plot than on message—on showing us Precious’s world instead of pushing to be sure we think the right away about it. [Susann Cokal]

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