Affirmation of Life
Push by Sapphire is an amazing novel that took me by the throat from the first sentence and then wrapped around my brain and buried itself deep in my heart. I will never forget this story of Precious Jones. There are novels written that are meant to entertain, and there are ones written to instruct (enlighten) or displace (offer escape) or promote (sell something) and then there are ones like Push.Push was written to communicate a universal truth by telling a very individual story. For most of us, Precious is an unknown, her story is from a world we cannot imagine, and what she has had to endure is horrifying. The story is not told to convey the horror but to convey the humanity: Precious is one person alone and she has no chance at survival, no chance at all, until she is no longer alone. She is a person who — like all people — needs respect, care, and acknowledgment in order to thrive. She is a child who requires protection in order to live. She is a poet and a visionary who has to learn how to read and write to be able to find herself. She is a mother who needs support to be able to — she wants to — nurture her child.
Readers of Push will come to the novel from different places. For me to readPush is to become witness to a world I do not know and to recognize how much I share in my needs and my desires with this battered and abused child. Push took me outside of myself and placed me within a life of hard challenges, small victories, great pain, and occasional joy. For a person from Precious’ world — failed by society and by family — Push is a testament to the hurdles faced and also a promise of, a glimmer of, hope. For anyone who reads this
book, the communication of genuine feeling will result in an understanding — an affirmation of what is suspected, known, or denied — of all that is lost when one child is left unprotected, and of all that can be gained when one person is given hope, safety, support, and opportunity.
When Precious begins to read and to write, her world — past, present, and future — opens up. She comes to understand her past, that she was abused when she should have been cared for; her present, that she has something inside to be shared; and her future, that she can keep going up those stairs described so well by Langston Hughes (“It’s had tacks in it,/And splinters,/And boards torn up,/And places with no carpet on the floor”) and make a life for herself and her child, maybe even rescue her first child from life in an institution.
Or maybe not: the book does not end with a promise that Precious will achieve the future she dreams of. But even if Precious fails in her dreams (and the odds are heavily stacked against her), the acknowledgment of her right to have dreams is an acknowledgment of her humanity. To quote another great poem by Hughes, what happens to “a dream deferred?/Does it dry up like a raisin in the sun?/Or fester like a sore? And then run?/Does it stink like rotten meat?/Or crust and sugar over — like a syrupy sweet?/Maybe it just sags like a heavy load./Or does it explode?” Can acknowledging (allowing) a dream save it from stink, fester, or explosion?
As readers, we cannot give Precious what she needs to see her dreams come true; as readers, we can only give our attendance to her story, our recognition of her existence, and our engagement with her struggle. Push is a novel but the truth of it is undeniable and unforgettable. What we give to Precious is more than doubled back in what we get from her story: an affirmation of life. Every life.
