A CONVERSATION WITH

PUSH AUTHOR SAPPHIRE

by Sergio Mims

Few novels that have inspired more discussion or controversy than Push, written by the poet/author Sapphire. The 1996 book went on to become a best-seller, later adapted for the screen and becoming the equally discussed and controversial Academy Award-winning film Precious. Now Sapphire has returned with her new novel, The Kid, the years-in-progress Push sequel that deals with the tough and relentlessly brutal life of Precious’ second child, Abdul, which is also guaranteed to create much talk. 

Born Ramona Lofton in California to a peripatetic Army family, she eventually moved to New York and became deeply involved in the world of poetry writing and performance art, taking the name Sapphire because of its “cultural association with the image of a belligerent Black woman.” Her experiences during the 1980s in Harlem as a literacy instructor led to the inspiration for Push and The Kid. 

Recently, we had an opportunity to talk to Sapphire, who was on a nationwide tour for The Kid, about her new book, on why she hates the term “controversial” when it comes describing her and her work, and why language is the most powerful force on the planet.  

EBONY: Do you consider yourself controversial, a social realist, or are they one and the same? 

 

SAPPHIRE: Well, they shouldn’t be the same. What happens is that at various times when you’re writing about certain kinds of reality that affect society in a certain way, they will be controversial. Other times, they might be overlooked. If you went to the George Washington Bridge and took off your clothes, that would controversial, you know what I mean? So I think the term “controversial’ might just be another way of not wanting to deal with what the writer is talking about. The things that I write about are very real issues and, a lot of times, rather than deal with the issues, people will resort to personality over politics and such, like, what is “controversial”?

EBONY: Wouldn’t you agree that it’s a good thing to be “controversial,” in that it’s better to get a reaction from the audience, even if it’s negative, then getting a blasé one or no reaction at all? Wouldn’t you rather have people talking about your work than not at all? 

SAPPHIRE: Or people not looking at it at all. I see what you mean in that way. There is “controversy” that upsets people that could be deemed positive, because it gets people focused on the issues that you’re talking about. And there’s controversy that gets people off the issues you’re talking about. That is why I don’t like to be called “controversial.” Instead of focusing on what my work is about, it veers off into something else totally.

EBONY: Which reminds me of what a friend of mine said after she saw Precious: The only people who would be upset by the film had either experienced some or a lot of what Precious went through, did to someone what she went through or knew of someone who experienced it and did nothing to help. 

SAPPHIRE: Wow. I’ve never heard anyone put it quite like that.

EBONY: In an article I recently read about you, you referred to the Russian writer Dostoevsky and said he wrote exclusively about the poverty, oppression, dysfunctional families, even in Crime and Punishment. Yet no one ever went up to him and said, “Why don’t you write about something nice instead of all this sad stuff?” Aren’t African-American writers put under this burden when it comes to Black imagery and what is perceived to be “negative”?

SAPPHIRE: Exactly! You know, it’s the exact same thing they said to Richard Wright, the exact same thing they said to Alice Walker, the exact same thing they said to Ralph Ellison. So at some point we cannot be stopped by that. The artist cannot be stopped by that. We have a job. I’m not your massage therapist. I’m not here to make you feel good. That’s really not my job. Can you imagine someone going up Charlie Parker when Bird was bringing in bebop and saying, “That’s music doesn’t make us feel good; could you play ‘Summertime’?” You know what I mean? Or saying to Coltrane, “Stop all that damn screeching. It doesn’t make us feel food. Play ‘Swanee River’ or ‘When the Saints Go Marching In’; we’re tired of ‘My Favorite Things’ and ‘A Love Supreme.’”

EBONY: No doubt, a lot of people will assume that you wrote The Kid to capitalize on the success of Push/Precious. But hadn’t you actually been working on it for some 10 years? 

SAPPHIRE: I actually stared on this novel in the late 1990s. I started on Push in 1993, and when I signed the contract with Random House, it was for two books. The second book for the publisher was my book of poetry, Black Wings and Blind Angels, so to fulfill that, I stopped working on The Kid. The poetry book was published in 1999 and I went back to working on The Kid, which back then I was calling The History of the Future. I clearly remember sitting at my desk working on it on Sept. 11, 2001, when someone came up to tell me that the World Trade Center had been bombed. So I’ve been working on it a long time.

And I probably could have still been working on it—it could have turned into a Ralph Ellison scenario—if it hadn’t been for the movie. The movie lit a fire under me and made me realize that people still cared, that it wasn’t just a flash in the pan, that people are concerned about African-American kids maybe in a way that they had never been concerned before.

EBONY: This is perhaps an unfair question, but why did it take you so long to write The Kid? 

SAPPHIRE: I stopping working on it to write the book of poetry, then I started working on it again, then I took a series of academic positions. But I was still working on The Kid even if it was 15 minutes or an hour a day. So I had most of the book written by the time the movie came out, but I hadn’t finished it in my mind. I gave it to a friend to read, then later I gave her the manuscript to read it again, and she said: “Sapphire, it was good when I read it five years ago. You’re caught in the cycle of perfectionism. At some point, you need to cut the umbilical cord and let this book go.” I really thought it was now or never. If I didn’t do it in the wake of the success of the movie then, when was I going to do it?

EBONY: So are you saying that writing, for you, is sort of a form of therapy? 

SAPPHIRE: No, I wouldn’t say that. For me, writing is my avocation, the job I have chosen to do in the world. For me, therapy is therapy. If you need therapy, go see a therapist or go to African dance class to heal yourself.

EBONY: What I was getting at was that you use writing as a way to express your anger or rage, to address what you see as issues that are avoided or aren’t dealt with in society. 

SAPPHIRE: I wouldn’t say that. There are stories I have decided to tell as an artist and the medium I use is writing. But I wouldn’t say that I am using writing as a way of releasing my rage or my feelings. I channel my feeling to create these characters who I then give the appropriate feelings for their situations.

EBONY: Why did you choose writing as your medium of expression instead of, say, painting, sculpture or music? 

SAPPHIRE: I feel that writing is the most powerful form of expression. I think that music is powerful; it is the form that transcends every other emotion and it is the form that is understood by everybody. But it is language that shapes our destiny. You have to remember that it was Thomas Jefferson who used language to say that African-Americans were three-fifths human, and therefore, the Declaration of Independence did not apply to us. And it was language that wrote us back in as human. It is language that makes the difference between a single mother and an unwed mother. It is language that makes the difference between a survivor and a victim, a nigger and an African-American. That’s all language, isn’t it?

EBONY: Do you expect that kind of reaction and impact that Push would have when you wrote it? 

SAPPHIRE: No. I knew that it would have impact. I thought it would appreciated by a small artistic circle. Yes, you have “famous” part, the movie, the Oscars and all of that, but what is happening now is Push being required reading for some courses by 100 schools of social work, it being used by psychiatrists in training in Harlem hospitals as way to deal with rape victims, it being recommended by 12-step programs leaders and therapists for clients to read. But the movie took it to another level.

EBONY: Are you hoping that The Kid will have the same sort of impact and fevered discussion? 

SAPPHIRE: I hope it will. Earlier this week I was in Miami doing a reading at Miami Dade Junior College, and they bought in—without my advance knowledge—a group of foster children 17,18 and 19 years old who were aging out of the system involved with people who were working to see that they didn’t wind up in jail or homeless, because these kids wind up with nothing. One of the subjects that comes up in the book that people don’t want to talk about very much is that we have African-American children in this country who never get a change to be adopted, yet we have people who will go all the way to Russia to get a baby while we have children here. I sat next to a pretty little dark-skinned Black girl, 17 years old, who looked just like Naomi Campbell.  She told me she entered the system when she was 4, and never once did she ever come up for adoption. Why? Why?

EBONY: Obviously, because Black children are not as valued or respected as White children. 

SAPPHIRE: Exactly! None of those Black children ever had a chance to be adopted. They stayed in foster care their entire childhoods. I wanted to say something about that. I wanted to have a discussion about that.

 

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October 27, 2009 

Sapphire speaks about how her novel "Push" became the inspiration for the new movie "Precious," and her skepticism when she was first approached by the director, Lee Daniels.

>via: http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5426263n