Precious: review of the cult novel by Sapphire

Push – 176pp – Minerva – £6.82

The novel Push, by Sapphire over the years has taken its place as a Womanist novel, according to Alice Walker’s definition of feminism for women of colour. Like Walker’s novel The Colour Purple, Push shows the impact of abuse on a young girl who draws strength from other women to confront her abusers and take control of her life.

Push has a lot to answer for. It is brutal in its depiction of the suffering of Clareece Precious Jones, its protagonist. Precious is physically and emotionally abused by her mother, repeatedly raped by her father, and left to bring up two children of these rapes. Unsurprisingly, she has trouble keeping up in school, she’s illiterate – and she is only 16yrs old. Hope comes in the form of an alternative learning class, her teacher Ms Rain and her fellow classmates. For such a slim book Push is in no way light reading.

Everything is told from Clareece’s honest point of view as she struggles from day to day and practices her reading and writing skills. This is a novel loaded with anger and shame, and not all of it is on Clareece. The reader feels shame for Clareece when she blindly extols the virtues of Minister Farrakhan and judges the worth of her fellow classmates by Eurocentric notions of beauty. But most of all, the reader feels anger. It is all too much that all of this is abuse is going on unheeded and that Clareece has been so close to perishing under the weight of her suffering. Sapphire works very hard throughout the novel to establish that although Precious’s situation may seem extreme it’s part of a greater pattern of social injustice and violence against women that goes on unseen. The accounts of Ms Rain’s class at the end are a testament to this and the poems convincingly written in Clareece’s voice are the means by which she finally realises that she is indeed precious.

Push is Sapphire’s only full novel, her other works American Dreams  and collection of poetry Black Wings and Blind Angels  deal with similar issues of violence against women, social injustice and urban decay. Ever divisive, Push is a novel that is not for the faint of heart but it is essential reading. Girls like Clareece and the other women in Ms Rain’s class need to be seen and Push provides a lens.

The movie adapted from the book will be out in the UK in January 2010

Push, a novel by Sapphire is available now on paperback