Question 1

Is Push appropriate to read given its subject matter?

Accepted Answer

Push is a genuinely difficult book to read — Precious's experiences include incest, rape, severe physical abuse, illiteracy, and an HIV diagnosis — and Sapphire does not soften or aestheticize any of it. The novel is not gratuitous; the difficulty is necessary to make Precious's experience legible to readers who would otherwise not encounter it. Sapphire has said that she wrote the novel partly from her experience as a literacy teacher in Harlem, where she encountered students like Precious, and that her intention was to make visible the lives of young Black women whose suffering is systematically ignored by the institutions and the culture that are supposed to address it. The novel's power comes precisely from its refusal to look away: Precious's voice, which develops from nearly incoherent fragments at the beginning to more fluent poetry-inflected prose as she learns to read and write, is one of the most formally accomplished achievements in American fiction, and the contrast between what Precious has survived and the voice she develops to describe it is the novel's central argument that literary language is an instrument of survival. Readers who are survivors of sexual abuse should be aware that the novel's depictions of incest and rape are explicit and detailed.

Question 2

How does Push use literacy as a theme?

Accepted Answer

Literacy in Push is not a metaphor — it is a literal skill that Precious learns, with enormous difficulty, in the alternative school to which she is assigned after her second pregnancy is discovered. But Sapphire treats literacy as something more than a skill: in Precious's case, learning to read and write is inseparable from learning to see herself as a person whose experience is worth recording and whose voice is worth hearing. The novel is formally organized around Precious's developing literacy: her narration becomes more syntactically complex and more poetically ambitious as she learns to write, and the poems she produces in Ms. Rain's class are included in the text as evidence of her growth. The novel's argument is that the system — the schools, the social services, the institutions — failed Precious not only because it did not protect her from her abusers, but because it did not teach her to read, which is the minimum condition for self-representation and therefore for self-determination. Ms. Rain's classroom is the first institution that treats Precious as a person with a voice worth developing, and it is the only one that actually helps her.

Question 3

What is the difference between Push and the film Precious?

Accepted Answer

Lee Daniels's film Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire (2009) is a faithful adaptation of the novel's plot but significantly different in tone and aesthetic. The film, which won Academy Awards for Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (for Mo'Nique as Mary, Precious's mother), is more Hollywood in its emotional shape: it is more cathartic, more conventionally moving, and more organized around the transformation of its protagonist than the novel. The novel is rawer, more formally experimental — Precious's developing literacy is an explicit formal strategy in the novel that the film cannot replicate — and more unsparing about the limits of institutional help; the novel does not resolve the question of whether literacy and Ms. Rain's support will be enough to allow Precious to make a viable life. The film is excellent, but readers of the novel often feel that it domesticates the novel's radicalism; the novel is an angrier, stranger, and more formally ambitious work.

Push Reading Order

Complete Push Book List

Push

The Kid

Push — Frequently Asked Questions

Is Push appropriate to read given its subject matter?

How does Push use literacy as a theme?

What is the difference between Push and the film Precious?

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