Interview transcript of author Sapphire, on her novel "Push"

Excerpt of Interview with Sapphire, author of "Push"/"Precious"

"Sexism is a worldwide phenomenon and the patriarchy is a phenomenon that exists among all peoples of the world. Black men are not exempt from it. They are not worse than other men and they are not better.

Women own two percent of this world’s property, call the UN and check up on it. That’s called sexism. That’s called producing the bodies that fuel this world, doing most of the labor, the cooking the cleaning, the working of the fields and you own two percent of the property.

As we speak right now, a female baby in China is being murdered. In India, when the husband dies, the wife must be murdered also. There are women in Africa being cliterendectomized. In Sweden and Denmark there are child porn films being made. This is what sexism is.

I remember when my own parents divorced. My father had everything, the house, the car, everything. My father died with six figures, my mother died on welfare. This is one family. That’s real. That’s what sexism is.

It isn’t necessarily about getting beaten up and raped and all that. It’s the same thing as racism. We can be all dressed up and everything but the net worth of African Americans is only one quarter that of whites in this country. We are just talking about some material conditions that exist and from those conditions arise mental and social conditions such as female slavery, prostitution, the murder, the abuse of children and rape of women. This has nothing to do with “black people.”

When you finish Push, Precious talks about the good things too: her life, learning, her child, her friends, Langston Hughes. In the beginning, she’s full of anger. But she’s really full of love. She loves everyone. They don’t love her. She’s loves the black men that don’t want to be her boyfriend because she’s fat and black. She loves Madonna. She loves Alice Walker, Langston Hughes. It’s not a book about hate and vindictiveness. It’s a book about redemption and love. It’s about how one abused child comes forward to become a strong woman.

The hardest material happens in the first chapter. What would be the point of writing a novel if there was no change or growth in the end? The book is not about pain, it’s about push. You can either lie down and do nothing or you can stand up and be strong.

Precious could have gone out and hurt other people or become a crack addict. Why doesn’t someone like her go out and do something like what happened in Littleton, Colorado? Why does she try to go to school, try to get money for diapers for her baby? Why does she try when so many who have suffered less than her take the darker path?

In the beginning of the book, she gives birth to a child. What is dark about that? What could be brighter than that? It would have been dark if she had done like that girl at the prom who strangled her baby. The criticism of Push sometimes baffles me.

And don’t you think it [sexual abuse] disturbs the people it’s happening to? This is happened to 40 percent of American women. Don’t you think it disturbs them? It’s not my fault. Forty percent of women say that they have been sexually abused under the age of 15, whether it’s by parents or the bus driver. This is something that happens to women in western culture. Right now, you can get on the net and surf for the child porn of your choice.

If it really disturbs you, there are ways that we can work to stop the abuse of women and children. And I’m not going to stop writing about it until it stops happening.