Narrative As Empowerment: Push and The Signifying On Prior African-American Novels On Incest

NARRATIVE AS EMPOWERMENT: PUSH AND THE SIGNIFYING ON PRIOR
AFRICAN-AMERICAN NOVELS ON INCEST
Monica Michlin
Klincksieck | « Études anglaises »
2006/2 Tome 59 | pages 170 à 185

ISSN 0014-195X
ISBN 2252035439
DOI 10.3917/etan.592.00170
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Monica MICHLIN
Narrative as empowerment: Push and the signifying

on prior African-American novels on incest
This article argues that Sapphire’s novel Push (1996) is to be read as a talk-
ing book that signifies upon previous African-American novels revolving around
the three major themes of invisibility, literacy, and incest within the black family.
Focusing first on the oralized narrative of Precious’s memories of trauma and on the
empathetic reading contract her voice creates, this study examines how Precious’s
journey into literacy can be seen as a contemporary “neo-slave” or “emancipatory”
narrative, and finally how Sapphire pays tribute to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
(1970) and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple (1982) while critiquing them, in her
portrayal of Precious’s self-empowerment and rebirth through the “delivering” of
her own story.
Cet article propose de lire le roman naturaliste de Sapphire, Push (1996), dans
son double aspect de récit « oralisé » et de texte jouant de son intertextualité avec
des romans africains-américains célèbres ayant évoqué les mêmes thèmes majeurs de
l’invisibilité, de l’illettrisme (ou de l’apprentissage de la lecture), et de l’inceste dans
la famille noire. Si la voix de Precious permet la représentation du traumatisme tout

en créant un rapport empathique chez les lecteurs, son apprentissage pénible de la
lecture est le récit d’une émancipation qui se rattache à la tradition des slave narra-
tives. Finalement, on verra comment Sapphire rend hommage aux œuvres de Toni
Morrison et d’Alice Walker, tout en s’en démarquant, dans ce récit réflexif qui met en
scène la libération et la renaissance de Precious dans le processus même d’« accou-
chement » de sa propre histoire.
Sapphire’s novel Push (1996) narrates how a young black teenager

survives a childhood of physical abuse and incest. Told in Precious’s
crude and uneducated voice, it is in part testimonial, since Sapphire is
an incest survivor, albeit of middle-class background (her interviews,
her collection of poems American Dreams, or her poem “Crooked
Man” in Loving in Fear all evoke this); it is also a naturalistic novel that
reflects the lives of girls the author met working in literacy workshops
for abused teens in Harlem over the course of seven years. It is also,
Monica MICHLIN, Narrative as empowerment: Push and the signifying on prior Afri-
can-American novels on incest, ÉA 59-2 (2006): 170-185. © Didier Érudition.
EA 2-2006.indb 170 17/07/06 12:19:41

NARRATIVE AS EMPOWERMENT IN SAPPHIRE’S PUSH 171
implicitly, both a tribute to, and a critique of, prior narratives of incest
by African-American authors of the twentieth century. I will first exam-
ine how Push is a “talking book” that establishes a disturbing aural con-
nection between sixteen-year-old Precious and the readers to literally
re-present trauma in reviviscence; then show how Precious’s journey
into literacy is part of a narrative of liberation—a problematic theme in
African-American literature since Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man. Last,
I will show that Sapphire deliberately signifies—signifyin’ being the
African-American term for that intertextuality whereby “black writers
read and critique other black writers as an act of rhetorical self-defini-
tion” (Gates 1987, 242)—on prior African-American novels on incest,
in particular Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Alice Walker’s
The Color Purple (1982), in the search for aesthetics to best enact the
dedication that opens the novel: “to children, everywhere.”
Precious begins her story in a move of aggressive self-empowerment:
“My name is Claireece Precious Jones. Everybody call me Precious.
I got three names—Claireece Precious Jones. Only motherfuckers
I hate call me Claireece” (6). This brutal variation on other first-person
famous openings such as “Call me Ishmael” or Holden Caulfield’s “If
you really want to hear about it,” goes with a commitment to the truth:
“Some people tell a story’n it don’t make no sense or be true. But I’m
gonna try to make sense and tell the truth, else what’s the fucking use?
Ain’ enough lies and shit out there already?” (4). From the outset, the
testimonial aspect of the voice is thus impossible to dissociate from
its crudeness. This literary convention, which gives the marginalized
teenager control over the narrative voice, displacing such notions as
authority and “sivilization,” can be traced back to Huck Finn; while it

allows a reversal of hierarchies (social and literary), it also functions as
stand-up comedy, and as a defense against melancholia or depression (if
one thinks, for instance, of Holden’s provocations in The Catcher in the
Rye). Precious—like Claudia in The Bluest Eye—tells us from the very
first paragraph that she is having her “fahver’s” baby for the second
time, so that the double shock of voice and theme are made immediate,
rather than mediated, by the “in-your-face” voice that immediately
speaks the unspeakable.
The actual description of what Precious has endured, though, is
delayed; given the psychological need to repress traumatic memo-
ries, these are conveyed piecemeal, through a jigsaw-puzzle of horrific
scenes, whenever the present triggers an episode of post-traumatic
stress. The flashbacks to the abuse become less frequent as Precious
finds a new community at the Each One/Teach One alternative school
and starts to build a life of her own (9, 18, 19-21, 24, 32, 36, 38-39, 59,
63), but they reemerge when she is told she must talk about her past
(111-12), and when this past returns to haunt her (129, 132, 135-36).
Because her suppressed memories resurface without warning, read-
ers are caught off guard too. Sapphire uses onomatopoeia, exclama-
tives, italics (“wump!”), block letters, the overlay of blows and insults,
EA 2-2006.indb 171 17/07/06 12:19:43

172 ÉTUDES ANGLAISES, T. 59, N° 2 (2006)
and the mise en abyme of episodes, to make us feel we are suffocating

and cannot return to the “surface” of the text, caught by the undertow
of trauma. For instance, when, pregnant for the second time, Precious
remembers how her mother almost killed her when she came home
from having her first baby at the age of twelve, the flashback takes place
in real time, over a dozen pages.
Naturalistic narrative does not preclude Sapphire’s revising of
other genres, such as the fairy tale, portraying Precious’s mother as an
ogress:
Devil red sparks flashes in Mama’s eyes, big crease in her forehead git
deeper . . . . She take up half the couch, her arms seem like giant arms, her
legs which she always got cocked open seem like ugly tree logs. (20).
More brutally than Bettelheim, Sapphire reveals the story so many

fairy tales actually tell: Precious’s mother beats her, forces her to cook
for her, to overeat with her, and finally, in the last seconds of this scene,
uses her sexually (the “cocked legs” now reading like a sordid pun). As
Precious passes out from too much cumulated abuse, and readers feel
they can read no more, her voice cuts back to the present, in the “now”
where she is sixteen and pregnant again: “all been getting mixed up in
my head. . . . Everything seem like clothes in washing machine at laun-
dry mat—round’n’round, up’n down” (22). While this is an apt reflexive
image for the narrative itself, the image of dirty laundry of course reads
as that of family secrets being revealed to the reader.
Everything in Precious’s life is both “mixed up” and connected: abuse
at home leads to illiteracy at school. Not only is Precious mocked for the
verbal symptoms of abuse (“Secon’ grade they laffes at HOW I talk,”

36), but she is humiliated for the physical symptoms too (“thas when
I start to pee on myself,” 36). Trapped in yet another situation of psy-
chological violence—“Secon’ grade teacher HATE me. Oh that woman
hate me” (36)—she dissociates:
I stare at the blackboard pretending. I don’t know what I’m pretending—
that trains ain’ riding through my head sometime and that yes, I’m reading
along with the class on page 55 of the reader. Early on I realize no one
hear the TV set voices growing out blackboard but me, so I try not to
answer them. . . . Me sitting in my chair at my desk and the world turn to
whirring sound, everything is noise, teacher’s voice white static. My pee
pee open hot stinky down my thighs sssssss splatter splatter. I wanna die
I hate myself HATE myself. Giggles giggles but I don’t move I barely
breathe I just sit. They giggle. I stare straight ahead. They talk me. I don’t
say nuffin’.
Seven, he on me almost every night. First it’s just in my mouth. Then it’s
more more. He is intercoursing me. Say I can take it. Look you don’t even
bleed, virgin girls bleed. You not virgin. I’m seven. (39)
The vivid use of the present tense, but also of onomatopoeia, repeti-
tion, childish syntax and vocabulary (“my pee pee”), emphasizes that
Precious speaks in the voice of the seven-year-old she was then. The use
EA 2-2006.indb 172 17/07/06 12:19:45

of duplication, as in “splatter splatter” or “I hate myself HATE myself,”

and the arrested syntax implied by the repetition of the same word,
illustrate her traumatized numbness, and the self-erasure she seeks as
an ultimate refuge (this stylistic figure reappears each time Precious is
thrown into extreme anxiety: “I feel panicking panicking—I don’t know
alphabetical order—whas that!” [51], or “I want die I want die” [53]).
It also shows how the abuse at school and at home mirror each other,
in a relentless chain of pain. The image of the trains driving through
Precious’s head is one of rape (“to put a train on someone” is a ghetto
image for gang rape); only later will she find out that metaphorical
trains can mean liberation, when she learns about the Underground
Railroad at the Alternative School with her teacher/savior, Ms Rain.
The removal of punctuation (“I don’t move I barely breathe”) reflects
how she tries to self-erase; while the incorrect use of the transitive “they
talk me” symbolically highlights how she is not spoken to, but reified
and undone by others’ speech. The fact that there are noticeably no
quotation marks around the father’s insults and taunts conveys how his
voice destroys Precious’s self-image while he is raping her. Only as she
narrates this episode can she finally speak up for the child who couldn’t
“say nuffin’” (49)—hence her use of the present tense, and of italics, to
reassert the unacceptable reality: “I’m seven.”
Being expelled from high school at the beginning of the novel turns
out to be a blessing in disguise. Redirected to an alternative school,
Precious is about to discover literacy. At first, she is overwhelmed by
terror: “my head is big ’lympic size pool, all the years, all the me’s float-
ing around glued shamed to desks while pee puddles get big near their
feet” (40). This is due to Precious’s exhibiting every symptom of “com-

plex post-traumatic stress disorder” (Herman 121): “hyperarousal”
(35) and “intrusion” of traumatic memories (37) explain the “triggering
effect” of sights or sounds related to past situations of terror: similarly,
she swings between traumatic memories and amnesia, or moments of
dissociation (Freyd 86-92), which function as a (dangerous) coping
mechanism. However overwhelming her initial terror of the alterna-
tive school, however, by admitting she is “illiterit” (47), Precious finds
a “place” (48) for the first time. Even the very first lesson, learning the
alphabet again, turns into a magical charm that counteracts memories
of abuse: that very night, she dreams that the alphabet allows her to
play the “good” Pied Piper to herself, against the abusive mother who
once again preys on her in her nightmare:
I squeeze my eyes shut but choking don’t stop it get worse. Then I open
my eyes and look. I look at little Precious and big Mama and feel hit fee-
ling, feel like killing Mama. But I don’t, instead I call little Precious and
say, Come to Mama but I means me. Come to me little Precious. Little
Precious look at me, smile, and start to sing: ABCDEFG . . . (59)
The alphabet is also the start of Precious’s written self-expression:

when Ms Rain asks her to write one word for each letter, this list
EA 2-2006.indb 173 17/07/06 12:19:47

turns into an inventory of the pain and degradation she has endured
(“dog, evil like mama, fuck, gun, home, kill, North America, open,
punks, stop, two ton, zonked”), but also, of her feelings of hope
(“Africa, Baby, black colored, Farrakhan real man, home, I some-
body, Jermaine, love, main man Malcolm, Queen Latifah, respect,
vote, well”). Although “Farrakhan real man” points to Precious’s
alienation, she means it as synonymous for black pride; the respect-
ful familiarity of “main man Malcolm” points to this too, while
“Jermaine” (Precious’s classmate) and Queen Latifah (the singer)
embody proud black (lesbian) womanhood, and “I somebody” of
course asserts Precious’s preciousness. So that when Precious says
of this list “Them words everything” (66), she means that all of her
life can be expressed through these words, but also that words are
her salvation. The layout of the list irresistibly calls to mind that of a
poem, even before Precious experiments with poetry (90-91, 99-105,
126-28), and finally includes two poems in the “Life Stories” class
project the novel ends on.
The aesthetic difficulty is to materialize Precious’s learning how to
write, in a book which is necessarily all writing from cover to cover. The
paradox we are asked to accept is that the initial voice was spoken, as if
on tape, without this being the explicit frame of the narrative—contrary,
say, to Ernest Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman (1971),
or Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen (1996), a novel which actually
substitutes to a title like “Part I” the label “Side A.” The inset book of
Precious’s journey into literacy appears through inserts of her journal,
which Ms Rain “translates” line by line, in italics, and answers with
new questions, compliments, or objections. We thus become aware

of Precious’s illiteracy only when her fluent oral voice is already so
familiar to us that we are ready to take the trouble to decipher her
garbled writing. Entire pages of the novel are thus in “double” writing,
Precious’s almost undecipherable words, with their missing syllables or
vowels, followed by the literate version (61, 65-66, 69-73, 89-93, 98-106).
The problem with this representation of literacy is that Precious’s voice
seems to regress because her voice reads like “baby talk” even as she is
making progress in her acquisition of writing.
For readers not to be alienated by the reflexive process of being
taught to read again, Sapphire eventually has Precious resume her oral
narrative. She refocuses Precious’s apprenticeship of literacy, beyond
the technical aspects of language, on her “unlearning” her condition-
ing by years of sadistic treatment. Within this context, TV is used as
a symbol of illiteracy—it is the only form of “culchure” in Precious’s
home—and one which is always connected to the abuse:
I think my mind a TV set smell like between my muver’s legs. I stupid.
I ain’ got no education even tho’ I not miss days of school. I talks funny.
The air floats like water wif pictures around me sometime. Sometimes
I can’t breathe. (57)
EA 2-2006.indb 174 17/07/06 12:19:49

I am a TV set wif no picture. I am broke wif no mind. No past or present

time. Only the movies of being someone else. Someone not fat, dark skin,
short hair, someone not fucked. A pink virgin girl. (112)
What literacy brings is the exact opposite: a means of expression, a
possible to create and to recreate herself, and to share her story with
others. At the heart of the novel is the idea that Precious can overcome
both her awful past and unbearable present and give birth to a new
self. This is highlighted through the return of the word push at pivotal
moments in the story. First, when a Hispanic paramedic encourages her
when she is in labor with her first child:
He say, “Precious, it’s almost here. I want you to push, you hear me momi,
when that shit hit you again, go with it and push, Preshecita. Push.” And
I did. (10).
The night before Precious’s first day at the Alternative School, this
guardian angel figure appears in her dreams: “Push, Precious, you gonna
hafta push” (16). The next day, when Precious admits she is “illiterit”
(47), Ms Rain encourages her with the same words: “But for now, I want
you to try, push yourself Precious, go for it” (54); and again, when Pre-
cious must move on to writing: “Write what’s on your mind, push your-
self to see the letters that represent the words you’re thinking” (61).
The fact that the imperative “push” is most often voiced by Ms Rain
illustrates how the novel associates literacy, empowerment, and the dis-
covery of collective strength, whether in the classroom, through black
history, or through black literature. This is obvious when Precious runs
away from her abusive family, and helped by Ms Rain, finds refuge in
Langston Hughes’s house. Being symbolically housed by the poet of

black dreams, and of the black vernacular, allows a redefinition of kin-
ship from the family cell to the inspirational ancestor. This positive lit-
erary ancestor-figure is to be contrasted with the absence of a loving
grandmother—a figure like Baby Suggs in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, or
Mama Day in Gloria Naylor’s eponymous novel, to quote only two—
as Ms Rain puts it, when Precious quotes her real-life grandmother’s
uncaring platitudes: “where was your grandmother when your father
was abusing you?” (71).
Precious’s inventory of the books she owns similarly reads like the
matrilineage she can find strength in: that of black women who write
about the resistance to oppression (80-81). While asserting her belief
in the liberating role of committed African-American literature—the
fact that literature changes the world, by changing representations of
the world, and raising readers’ consciousness—Sapphire suggests that
Precious too can participate in that liberation by sharing this heritage
in turn. When Ms Rain, Sapphire’s spokesperson in the novel—Blue
Rain is a clear pun on Sapphire—has the class read The Color Purple
(CP), Precious says: “We reading The Color Purple in school. Which is
really hard for me” (81); by this she means that it is difficult technically
(because she is barely literate), but also emotionally (because of the
EA 2-2006.indb 175 17/07/06 12:19:52

mirroring effect of Celie’s story). Contrary to the Kirkus Review’s

charge when the novel came out, Sapphire did not quote CP out of
“commercial aspirations,” but out of the double desire to validate
Walker by having a contemporary abuse survivor identify with Celie a
generation on, and to authenticate her own narrative by having Precious
comment on the testimonial authenticity of Walker’s novel (83). We are
forewarned, however, that Push is also a critique of its forerunner:
Things going good in my life, almost like The Color Purple. . . . Ms Rain
say one of the criticisms of The Color Purple is it have fairy tale ending.
I would say, well shit like that can be true. Life can work out for the best
sometimes. Ms Rain love Color Purple too but say realism has its virtues
too. (83)
Indeed, just when Precious seems safe, her abusive mother reemerges
to bring new hurt: Precious’s father had AIDS (and has just died). When
Precious tests HIV positive, the limits of literacy and counter-narrative
become brutally clear: there can be no escape from the past, no total
“closure” because of the permanence of the body, and the continued
damage wreaked by the now-ended abuse. Later, in a telling slip of the
pen on “Rain,” which she misspells “Ran,” and on “past,” which she spells
“pass,” Precious expresses both her defeated hopes, and her enduring
hope that she can still, like Harriet Tubman, run from the bondage of
the past, and pass into freedom: “BUT I was gon dem / I escap dem like
Harriet/ Ms Ran say we can nt escap the pass.” (101). But before she
can come to this ambivalent acceptance, Precious almost gives up. This
is the last, crucial time Ms Rain tells her to push:

I don’t have nothing to write today—maybe never. Hammer in my heart
now, beating me, I feel like my blood a giant river swell up inside me
and I’m drowning. My head all dark inside. Feel like giant river I never
cross in front of me now. Ms Rain say, You not writing Precious. I say I’m
drownin’ in river. She don’t look at me like I’m crazy but say, If you just
sit there the river gonna rise up drown you! Writing could be the boat
carry you to the other side. One time in your journal you told me you had
never really told your story. I think telling your story git you over that
river Precious.
I still don’t move. She say, “Write.” I tell her, “I am tired. Fuck you!”
I scream at Ms Rain. I never do that before. Class look shock. I feel
embarrass, stupid; sit down, I’m made a fool of myself on top of everything
else. She says, “Open your notebook Precious.” “I’m tired,” I says. She
says, “I know you are but you can’t stop now Precious, you gotta push.”
And I do. (96-97)
Writing her life story cannot undo Precious’s past; but it can be
her buoy into survival. The water imagery means drowning but also,
redemption and escape, the way it does in spirituals—“I wonder / How
I got over / You know my soul / Looks back in wonder / How did I make
it over?” (“How I Got Over”). This gives this passage heightened sym-
bolic meaning, as it underscores how Precious’s voice and Sapphire’s
EA 2-2006.indb 176 17/07/06 12:19:54

work stand rooted in an African-American oral tradition. The sti-

chomythic dialogue, Ms Rain’s imperatives and Precious’s reiteration
of her absolute weariness, create intense (melo)dramatic tension, which
is resolved in Precious’s “I do” which resonates performatively as the
final words of this chapter, and of Part Three. The blank part of the page
that follows the “I do” also embodies the engulfing void over which
Precious must travel. Her identification with Harriet Tubman, the cel-
ebrated Black heroine who went back to the South as a “conductor”
of the Underground Railroad, risking her own life over and over again
to save hundreds of her people, emphasizes how Push is to be read as
a neo-slave narrative—depicting her escape from both racial discrimi-
nation and entrapment within her abusive family (Octavia Butler and
Gloria Naylor also rework abuse within the black family or community
and racial oppression in “split” neo-slave narratives: Kindred and the
stories in Bloodchild; Linden Hills and Bailey’s Café).
Forcing herself to go beyond the half-way mark means filling in the
gaps of her narrative, even/especially if it means recounting how rape
used to push her into extreme self-abuse, out of despair, and the inter-
nalized feeling of abjection: by telling, Precious can cleanse herself of
the feelings of shame. Readers are expected to react against her self-
blame (“Is it my fault because I didn’t talk to the polices?” 125), and
to understand that the child-protagonist’s smearing herself in feces or
cutting herself with a razor (112) were inadequate substitutes, then, for
writing, now. Instead of staying imprisoned within the infra-verbal, Pre-
cious can now create collages of the verbal and non-verbal, with draw-
ings, such as the happy face (101) or the crying eye (102), that express
what her literary voice does not yet allow her to. In the same way, the

crossed-out words on page 101 highlight how her journal is a work-in-
progress. As her reading and writing skills improve from page to page,
so does her political and literary consciousness: she explicitly revises
Langston Hughes’s Harlem, opposing the sordid lyricism of a land-
scape of crack addicts and dirty lots to his lyrical imagery of a “jazzee
Harlem” (102). When Precious copies his poem “Mother and Son” as
a tribute to the poet, but also, to her love for her own son, she revises
the text through contextualization, admitting that she would rather not
have had to give birth: “cause even if I not raped, who want a baby at
twelve! . . .) Hours hours push push push!” (114).
What she gives birth to now is meaning, by becoming the “passer-on”
for others’ stories. After having announced this explicitly—“One day
when I have time I read you what the other girls wrote” (94)—she lets
us read Rhonda’s, Jermaine’s, and Rita’s stories in the “Life Stories /
Class Book.” This last section of the book has no page numbers, and is
set in different type, like an inset document. Each of the stories portrays
incest, abuse, and subsequent patterns of self-destruction (drug addic-
tion, prostitution, violence). The two texts, Precious’s story, and the class
book, are authenticating each other. Since Precious’s own story does
not appear in the “Life Stories” section at the end of the book, it seems
EA 2-2006.indb 177 17/07/06 12:19:55

obvious that her entire narrative is that “Life Story.” Her voice thus
forms a loop back to the beginning of the text, in a perfect example of
“self-authorization”: “Ms Rain say we got to write now in our journals.
Say each of our lives is important. . . . Say each of us has a story to tell”
(96). Precious thereby achieves the essential goal of the Each One/
Teach One school—to help others “push” themselves: “Only now I the
one who say ‘keep on keepin’ on!’ to new girls” (94).
Push is also very much about Precious’s learning how to read the
Other’s text about her, for instance when she “steals” the file her white
caseworker, Ms Weiss (an unsubtle pun on the white power-system)
keeps on her. Ms Weiss despises Precious: her report illustrates how
language is power and how “file” should be read dyslexically, as an ana-
gram of “life.” Precious has already expressed earlier on that the file is
part of the abuse:
I don’t know what file say. I do know that every time they wants to
fuck wif me or decide something in my life, here they come wif the
mutherfucking file. (28)
As she finally reads it, she perceives that behind the well-written,
technocratic language, lies a social death sentence. While she still feels
some difficulty deciphering complex words (118), she aptly translates
into “slavry” (121) the decision to force her into workfare, despite her
very young age (eighteen). This episode stages what happens when those
who are constantly the object of definition in a society that oppresses
them suddenly read what was never meant for their eyes: terms like
“obvious limitations” (121), which stigmatize Precious, abuse her anew:
“She look at me like I am ugly freak did something to make my own

life like it is” (124).
While Sapphire is clearly working on the referential issues of the con-
nection between sexual abuse, poverty, illiteracy, and the racist white
gaze, she is also, as an African-American writer, signifying on an already
established body of African-American texts that deal with three funda-
mental issues: invisibility, incest, and literacy as liberation. Since Ellison’s
Invisible Man, the conceit of blackness as invisibility has been the object
of constant revision; Sapphire’s version of this trope revises Toni Mor-
rison’s The Bluest Eye, and the scene in which Pecola, the deprived and
abused little black girl cannot be “seen” by the white grocer:
At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the
effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to
see. How can a fifty-two-year-old white immigrant storekeeper with the
taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth . . . see a little black girl? (36)
In Push, Precious expresses this denial of her existence in her own

voice:
I big, I talk, I eats, I cooks, I laugh, watch TV, do what my muver say.
But I can see when the picture come back I don’t exist. Don’t nobody
EA 2-2006.indb 178 17/07/06 12:19:58

want me. Don’t nobody need me. I know who I am. I know who they say
I am—vampire sucking the system’s blood. Ugly black grease to be wipe
away, punish, kilt, changed, finded a job for. (31)
The vampire image is used in its double sense of invisibility and of
feeding off others: this is Sapphire’s angry rephrasing of the stigmatiza-
tion of single black mothers in the drive towards “welfare reform” at the
time this book was written—indeed, the 1996 Personal Responsibility
and Work Reconciliation Opportunity Act put a 5-year lifetime limit
on welfare, forcing poor women from welfare into work, and making
escape from poverty practically impossible (and even Sapphire could
not imagine that Congress would refuse to raise the so-called “mini-
mum wage” of $5.15 from 1997 onwards). The text revolves around the
opposition between Precious’s activity, through the accumulation of
verbs, her extreme physical presence (“I big”) and the fact that she does
not exist—the verb “to be” is suppressed, while several terms (“disap-
pear,” “I don’t exist”) repeat society’s obliteration of her. The antithesis
between “I know who I am” and “I know who they say I am” is the
very core of the novel: because we are within Precious’s mind, we lose
track of “exterior” perceptions of her as obese, pregnant, and “ugly.”
Although “grease” acts as a double image, for her obesity, and for her
being accused of “living off the fat” of the land, this appalling reification
summarizes the scapegoating, both symbolic and literal, of black people
in America over the past four centuries.
The second topos that Push reworks is that of incest within the black
family, in a critique both of CP and BE. CP was already a transtextual
variation on BE, which itself was Morrison’s “intertextually charged
revision of the Ellisonian depiction of incest” (Awkward 62). The ini-

tial text is defined by the incestuous father’s perspective: Ellison lets
the illiterate poor black man, Trueblood, claim that he cannot be held
responsible for incest that took place while he was still dreaming in
sleep. Morrison, in her rewriting of the theme, depicts her character,
Cholly Breedlove—the onomastics, in both Ellison and Morrison, draw
attention to the perverse meaning of “blood” or “love” in the dysfunc-
tional and abusive family—as a rapist, conveying in sordid lyricism the
ambivalence of his feelings (“hatred mixed with tenderness,” 129) and
his literally sick desire for his child (“his hatred of her slimed in his
stomach and threatened to become vomit,” 127). The entire scene is a
replay of Cholly’s own traumatic scene of sexual initiation. Morrison
highlights this by focusing on the loosening of Cholly’s anus as he rapes
Pecola (BE 128), in an echo of the symbolic rape by white men that he
experienced then: “the flashlight [on his buttocks] wormed its way into
his guts and turned the sweet taste of muscadine into rotten fetid bile”
(BE 116). This unusual “devirilization” of the rapist obviously con-
veys Morrison’s refusal to glamorize sexual violence—but the primary
meaning is that Cholly is caught in this repetition of sweetness turning
to bile, or semen to vomit, when he violates his child as he himself was
symbolically violated.
EA 2-2006.indb 179 17/07/06 12:19:59

Sapphire, in turn, revises this scene in her depiction of incest from the
child’s perspective. While Morrison is an uncontestable craftswoman
of lyrical language, the very beauty of the imagery used in BE—the
oxymoron “the dry harbor of her vagina” (128), or the play on the
literal and the symbolic in the image of Pecola as punctured balloon
in the scene of the rape (128)—is problematic. Although the very
incongruity of the beautiful images is, arguably, violent beyond the
mere specularity of crude terms for violent acts, formal beauty creates
a deep malaise—not that of voyeurism, but that of being to a degree
aligned with the rapist, in feeling the aesthetic pleasure of the text even
as it narrates unspeakable cruelty. Sapphire rejects these ambiguities
of the BE as well as its final pages which celebrate Cholly for being
a “free man” (163) and assert that he loved Pecola—an example of
narrative contamination by the perverse character’s warped logic and
vocabulary.
For the same reason, Sapphire refuses the chapter-long flashbacks
into the abusive parents’ pasts that are fundamental to BE. The overall
structure of BE, its polyphony, its web of imagery (a broken tooth, the
stain of dark berries) which connects the abusive parents’ stories, con-
textualizes the abusers’ actions within a broader frame of dispossession
and oppression, which, in fine, justifiably humanizes them, but in doing
so, dilutes the abused child’s perspective—even when the collusion
between the rapist father and the violent mother is brilliantly captured,
for instance when the rape scene and the chapter end on:
So when the child regained consciousness, she was lying on the kitchen
floor under a heavy quilt, trying to connect the pain between her legs with
the face of her mother looming over her. (129)

While abuse is indeed related to trans-generational repetition, Sap-
phire explicitly underlines that the role of the child-narrator is not to
argue this psychoanalytical aspect of her parents’ past—if the victim is
telling the story, it is ideologically necessary not to explain, and ration-
alize. Push dramatizes the moment when Mama’s inset story could
surface—“I cry for every day of my life. I cry for Mama what kinda
story Mama got to do me like she do?” (96)—and deliberately refuses
to allow it, marking this narrative as the space where Precious, not
“Mama,” speaks and (re)constructs herself. When Precious’s “Muver”
does speak up in the interview with the social worker (135-36), her
speech is used against her, as she (insanely) describes how she felt jeal-
ous, not horrified, when her husband first raped Precious as a baby still
in diapers. By portraying Precious’s mother as a rapist herself, Sapphire
creates, what is, to the best of my knowledge, the first literary repre-
sentation of explicitly genital maternal violence, thus going beyond the
helpless or physically abusive mothers represented in either CP or BE,
and beyond, too, the collusive or battered mothers portrayed in poor
white Southern fiction such as Dorothy Allison’s Bastard Out of Caro-
lina or Jim Grimsley’s Winter Birds.
EA 2-2006.indb 180 17/07/06 12:20:02

These choices of perspective and narrative voice are fundamentally

political. Although Morrison’s depiction of the intergenerational con-
struction of abuse is realistic, and although BE ends on the poignant
lament of collective guilt in the victimization of Pecola, the very struc-
ture of the novel is ambiguous in that it silences the child, in what could
be read as an additional move of abuse and victimization (Morrison’s
own Afterword [BE 167-72] analyzes this difficulty). Claudia’s voice
cries out against a racist, classist, and sexist society that destroys some
of its native daughters, in a loaded reference to Wright’s Native Son:
I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to
marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain
seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land
kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to
live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least,
on my edge of the town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my
town, it’s much, much, much too late. (164)
But the fact that Pecola does not survive psychically and that the
story is told by everyone but her is one of the things that feminist writ-
ers have necessarily revised since.
As Pin-Chia Feng has argued in The Female Bildungsroman, the
“minority female bildungsroman” is already primarily a counternar-
rative (18). Feng argues convincingly that through such techniques
as palimpsest, re-presentation, “re-memory” (taken from Morrison’s
Beloved), or images that signify haunting, minority female writers can
highlight, rather than erase, the previous invisibility and/or marginali-
zation of the voices of females of color. Yet Feng agrees that although

BE plays on presence and absence, fragmentation, and decenters the
male and/or white voice, the novel ultimately fails, because of the sense
of “over-determination to Pecola’s tragedy” and the fact that she is
caught in Claudia’s narrative, or in the ominiscient narrative voice, in
an “unbreakable discursive prison” (57). This is exactly what first Alice
Walker, then Sapphire have tried to avoid in CP and Push. CP revital-
ized the epistolary novel: Celie addresses herself to God, thus obey-
ing—but circumventing, given that the true addressees are the read-
ers—her incestuous father’s silencing threat: “You better not never tell
nobody but God.” In its use of colloquial authenticity, black dialect,
crude sexual vocabulary, and childish syntax, CP is a direct ancestor to
Push, seeking the illusion of direct, uncensored speech; its faults do not
lie in this choice of voice, but in the unrealistic ending, its mapping out
of escapism in an exoticized Africa, its eventual watering down of pain
and conflict. Push explicitly and formally avoids these pitfalls, placing
Precious firmly in Harlem in 1996, and allowing her the space of class-
room and literature as sole spaces of escape.
Sapphire’s depiction of literacy as a stepping-stone to freedom relies
on her distinguishing the official classroom from the alternative, black
feminist school: this allows her to revise the defeatism of BE, without
EA 2-2006.indb 181 17/07/06 12:20:04

losing its charge against the class-based and racially oppressive public
school system. Morrison’s BE attacks the school system by turning its
lies back on itself: the novel is preceded by a liminary text, a single para-
graph taken from the “Dick and Jane” primer most children learned to
read from then, which describes an idyllic (implicitly white) family. The
text is then repeated without punctuation, and then, without the blanks
between words, in a “rewriting” that resembles a “crushing” into illeg-
ibility, the last version turning into a frightening compression/amputa-
tion of the original body of the text. Pecola’s story is thus placed under a
rebuttal of the clichés on “family values” and a rebuttal of the “simple”
(in the meaning of stupid, too) text of the “reader”—the whole novel is
thus, as D. Gibson puts it, a “counter-text” to the destroyed “authoriz-
ing” text, shreds of which are then pointedly used as antiphrastic heads
of chapters. The narrative violence imposed on both the body of the
text, and on us as readers is part of a symbolic immersion into Pecola’s
story; as Donald Gibson put it, we are being taught how to read again,
from the black child’s perspective—but in an unbelievable twist, Gib-
son manages to misread the rapes as perhaps having been enjoyable for
Pecola. What the compression of the text also forces upon us, through
its elimination of spaces between words, is the absence of boundaries
between parent and child in abuse: new words are formed that her-
ald the rape (“fatherdick”), and the tearing apart of the initial text to
form chapter-heads can be seen as the destruction of Pecola’s body and
spirit, but also, the paradoxical “reconstruction,” shred by shred, of the
taboo story that the clichés of the primer masked.
As opposed to this, Sapphire makes her story a neo-slave-narra-
tive in which literacy means the freedom for Precious to create her-

self as subject, where her parents’ (and white institutions’) speech and
physical abuse unmade her. In Ms Rain, Sapphire revises black texts
on the black teacher. Morrison, like Ellison, often casts the connection
between literacy and liberation as a fallacy—even if her own praxis as
writer belies this—and the teacher as oppressor: in Song of Solomon,
the oral heritage frees black people where the written word denies
them; in Beloved, the Schoolteacher uses language as a weapon of dehu-
manization against Sethe. Yet, also in Beloved, the black schoolteacher
ultimately saves Denver and Sethe. Ernest Gaines also swings between
the petit-bourgeois black teacher who despises the poor black children
who are his charges but whom he sees as a burden (the narrator in A
Lesson Before Dying) and the black teacher as liberator (Ned in The
Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman). Sapphire simplifies the dialectics
of liberation and oppression within the school-system by opposing the
ideal black teacher (helper, friend, and substitute family), Ms Rain, as
counter-model to the abusive black parents and to white public school
system. Ms Rain is a double of the militant black teacher in Toni Cade
Bambara’s “The Lesson;” but where this teacher’s political lessons
are resisted by the feisty little girl she is trying to educate—Elizabeth
Muther brilliantly analyzes Toni Cade Bambara’s “feisty girls”’ “resist-
EA 2-2006.indb 182 17/07/06 12:20:06

NARRATIVE AS EMPOWERMENT IN SAPPHIRE’ PUSH 183
ance narrative” against racial, gender, and class oppression alike—and

whose vernacular stays rebellious, Ms Rain’s lessons are quickly inter-
nalized, to her benefit, by Precious. Just as slang and curses in “The Les-
son” are part of addressing the reader-as-peer—a basic dynamic of all
contemporary teenage voices in literature, including Push—and just as
the black vernacular’s political charge is to raise a black feminist con-
sciousness within the short story, as Janet Ruth Heller has deftly shown
(Heller), so too does Sapphire use the crudeness of Precious’s voice
in Push to simultaneously create complicity with her character, and to
pass on her resistance to/acceptance of Ms Rain’s “lessons.”
While Ms Rain may seem too good to be true—part of the “perfect-
teacher” syndrome that has inspired characters like Michelle Pfeiffer’s
in Rebel Minds—Sapphire’s double investment in this character is
obvious: through this idealized self-portrayal, she is asserting that the
poor urban black community needs to distinguish false models (Louis
Farrakhan) and real ones (the committed lesbian teacher). This double
signifying on teachers and preachers, and on “family values” and
homosexuality, makes the novel an important one within lgbt (lesbian
gay bisexuel transsexual) literature. Ms Rain’s sexual orientation is
essential to the novel’s critique of homophobia; but also to creation
of a “hall of fame” of gay or lesbian characters in African American
fiction. Sapphire is clearly intent on furthering a double African-
American tradition: that of black feminism, and that of black lgbt
authors which she simultaneously charters and expands through her
own creation of Ms Rain as lesbian heroine. This is why all the authors
explicitly quoted in Push are presumably gay, Langston Hughes being
the case in point—see Julien Isaac’s film Looking for Langston, or the

true significance of the adjective “asexual” volunteered by Rampersad
(1986, 35, 133)—or overtly lesbian (Audre Lorde, etc.). “Ms Rain” also
reads as a pun on Ma Rainey, one of the first female blues singers, and,
according to Angela Davis, one of the first out lesbian singers—and, of
course, “Sapphire” is a pun on the mythical founder of lesbian writing,
the Greek poetess Sappho. The superimpression of Ma Rainey and
Sappho is also that of the black vernacular and of literary classicism: it
shows the distance between Sapphire and her protagonist, who knows
neither of the figures quoted above. Significantly, Ms Rain’s sexual
orientation functions only as a political sign—there is no lesbian love
story in Push, in part due to the choice of narrator (Sapphire certainly
did not want Ms Rain to be perceived as seducing Precious), but also,
perhaps, because the anxiety of influence associated with CP was too
intense, dissuading Sapphire from trying to create a love story that
would compete with Celie’s and Shug’s. On the other hand, one might
also argue that all of Push is the unfolding of a love story: between
Precious and the homosocial community of her classroom, as well
as between Precious and us. Despite what is sometimes said to the
contrary, readers’ reactions predictably fall along the lines of this
defining aspect of the novel: only a minority of male readers will read
EA 2-2006.indb 183 17/07/06 12:20:08

the novel with sympathy or empathy instead of resisting it (to quote

Judith Fetterley in a reversed context).
Written out of autobiographical pain and political commitment,
Push is a disturbing and poignant literary work, which signifies upon
the depiction of incest in African-American literature. As Precious
reworks trauma into speech, implicitly turning her “life story” into
the novel we have before us, she teaches us to see those whom society
continues to consider as ugly, contemptible, exploitable and disposable,
as precious human beings. The literary beauty of the novel lies
precisely in its speakerly authenticity as it performatively enacts what
Farah Jasmine Griffin has called “textual healing.” Although writing,
in a deliberately reflexive play on rebirth, only laboriously becomes
“a site of healing, pleasure, and resistance,” it undoubtedly manifests
in Angelyn Mitchell’s terms (144-50) its “transformative potential”
and “curative value” both for the protagonist and for the readers. It
is thus a “liberatory narrative” in the sense that A. Mitchell applies
to contemporary black women’s neo-slave narratives (in particular,
Toni Morrison’s Beloved [1987], Octavia E. Butler’s Kindred [1979]
and Sherley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose [1986]). The voice Sapphire
has written into life may strike some as being too sordid, or too
campy; but to others, it is truly inspirational—all the more so since
Sapphire respects the ultimate reading contract of any committed
novel—something Toni Morrison evokes as a test of her own writing
(“Whenever I feel uneasy about my writing, I think: “what would be
the response of the people in the book if they read the book? That’s
my way of staying on the track. Those are the people for whom I write”
[Le Clair 371]): to be readable, in every way, with no loss of dignity for

her, by Precious herself.
Monica MICHLIN
Université de Paris IV-Sorbonne
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Feng, Pin-Chia. The Female Bildungsroman by Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong
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Freyd, Jennifer J. Betrayal Trauma. Cambridge, Mass. : Harvard UP, 1996.
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EA 2-2006.indb 185 17/07/06 12:20:12

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Klincksieck | « Études anglaises »

2006/2 Tome 59 | pages 170 à 185

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