Push and The Kid By Sapphire.
I just cried.I really felt physically and spiritually ill after reading these books.
I know I'm quoting a post from 2014, but I felt it was a good leaping point for my post, so there.
I haven't read
The Kid, but I read
Push, and initially, I was like, "This is too much." She's sixteen-years-old, illiterate, beaten by her mother, pregnant with her second child after being raped by her father, and later, she discovers as a result, she is HIV positive. Since this book is set in the eighties, her HIV-positive status means that Precious's future is uncertain at best.
My objections are mostly based from years of reading and writing fanfiction. An important lesson I learned during all that, is about the usage of Angst. Nearly all fictional characters, to a degree, have a some sense of Angst. Some have more than others, but you get the point. Anyway, one of the worst fanfic tropes is when the author just piles on angst on a character, just keeps dumping on them over and over, turning the character into an emotional punching bag that just sits and takes abuse, without making any effort to save him/herself.
Needless to say, at first, I didn't really quite get
Push, because like I said, Precious seemed to be suffering from every imaginable form of abuse whatsoever. My view changed when I read a message board where they were discussing the movie based on the book. Some of the posters were like, "This is too much," but another one, who claimed to be a social worker, said that they didn't feel it was too much, because in their experiences, there's never just one thing wrong with an abusive family. They said something like how it's seldom a case of "The father rapes and impregnates his daughter, but her mother is kind and supportive and not at all affected by a lifetime of poverty and abuse herself." They basically said that in their experience, when it comes to abusive, toxic families, it's not just one thing that's wrong with them; it's everything.
This enabled me to read Push in a new light. I still don't enjoy the book--I don't think it is a book you really enjoy--but I can understand it a little better and pick up on some of the nuances. Sapphire managed to do amazing things with the first-person-style narration; I've never seen another book where the narrator has Precious's natural rhythm. The beat is akin to a rap song on paper. Precious starts out as illiterate, so the word choice for her narration/dialogue is initially very simple with few, if any, polysyllabic words in it.
Though in using such a limited vocabulary, Sapphire managed to convey so much. Like this line, which would have had a completely different feel if it was written in a more traditional narration style.
I see me, first grade, pink dress dirty sperm stuffs on it. No one comb my hair.
There is so much aching sadness in so few words. As the book wears on, Precious becomes literate and her narration grows a bit more sophisticated, as does her vocabulary, but it still has that rhythm to it and it reads true to her character: she's a sixteen-year-old girl raised in poverty and abuse in Harlem, not a Harvard professor.
Last week we went to the museum. A whole whale is hanging from the ceiling. Bigger than big! Ok, have you seen a Volkswagen car that's like a bug? Um huh, you know what I'm talking about. That's how big the heart of a blue whale is. I know it's not possible, but if that heart in me could I love more? Ms Rain, Rita, Abdul?
It also works because Sapphire doesn't just make Precious a passive angelic target. At the beginning, Precious is prejudiced against homosexuals and Hispanics, because being victim of abuse, doesn't mean you are completely incapable of being hateful towards others. And once Precious is able to see that there is a future for herself and her child beyond all the poverty and pain, she commits and throws herself head on into the struggle. She knows that college is a longshot, but it's enough of an achievement that she is able to dream of it and consider it a possibility.
In any case, like I said before, I still don't really like the book, but I understand it better.