Push

    The novel “Push” by Sapphire may be read as a rebirth story. In chapter 1, as I stated in my last blog, we get the central metaphor of the novel. Lying on the kitchen floor of her meager apartment, beaten and bloody, Precious clings to the words of a kind stranger as she gives birth to her first child at 12 years old: “Push, Precious, you gonna hafta push.” Perhaps this is how we should read this novel. Finding her voice, finding herself and finding her way is going to be like giving birth — ugly, bloody, and beautiful.
    In a sense, Precious has to rebirth herself in order to claim a life for herself. She has to give herself a second chance at life by giving herself a life, beginning with her childhood and the ABCs. In chapter 2 we get a twisted birth scene in which the dreaming Precious takes her infant self away from her abusive mother. She acts as midwife, mother, and teacher to herself in this dream, first delivering herself from her mother, then nurturing the little Precious and finally giving herself the key to her voice — ABCDEF … “Thas the alphabet. Twenty-six letters in all. Them letters make up words. Them words everything,” Precious wrote in her journal in chapter 2.
    And when Precious is on the verge of collapse, facing a sad future as an HIV positive victim of sexual abuse, rape and incest with two babies to support, Ms. Rain drives her on, pushing her past her exhaustion:
    “‘I’m tired,’ I says.
    She says, ‘I know you are but you can’t stop now Precious, you gotta push.’ And I
    do” (97).
This scene is heavy with the connotations of labor and birth. Precious has to labor through her exhaustion in order to create meaning out of her cruel world and carve a space for herself within it.