Presentation Abstracts/Description

Joni Adamson, “Teaching Environmental Justice Themes in Push”

From India, to Nigeria, to Brazil, to the U.S., community leaders and activists are revealing the links between Global Warming and malaria, between poaching of nearly extinct animals and rape as weapon of war, between resource exploitation and poverty.  Those involved in this movement, loosely termed the Environmental Justice Movement, redefine "environment" to mean not only the places that are still relatively untouched by human cultures–such as the Alaskan National Wildlife Refuge, but "the places we live, work, play, and worship."  Thus, these community leaders and activists bring the movement home, to their families, their communities, their schools, their places of employment, and their churches.  Many novelist both inside and outside of America are writing about these struggles and depicting why the creation of "environmentally just" communities must include the preservation of valued rivers and forests, the elimination of chemical toxins in homes and communities, and the elimination of sexual oppression and discrimination of all kinds.  By representing sexed and gendered speakers and protagonists who live inside the issues, these novelists give us an honest emotional sense of the complicated costs of physical abuse and environmental ills for those who dwell within affected communities.  This presentation will examine Sapphire’s novel, _Push_, for the ways in which it presents opportunities to teach the themes and issues at the center of the worldwide Environmental Justice Movement.  The discussion will cover how one might present these issues in a high school, lower division, or upper division classroom.

James Blasingame, “Pushing the Envelope in Young Adult Literature”

This session will connect Sapphire’s novel, PUSH, with secondary education.  In particular, I will address the need for all teenagers to see characters like themselves in their reading, as well as characters who represent the complete range of diversity across all young people.  Recent developments in the publishing of young adult literature include a trend toward books that push the boundaries of the traditional coming-of-age novel, and I will also discuss other books that have much in common with PUSH, and what young readers and their teachers, librarians and guardians are saying about them.

Nina R. Candia, “Explaining Ourselves: A Rewriting and Recollection of Personhood”

Reaching beyond challenges to white supremacy, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker and Sapphire exude a literary dynamism that acts as a balm to soothe and repair their historic victimization. Boldly, they face the catastrophe and trauma that has been suppressed and forgotten by many throughout the centuries.  Through their personal remembered victimization, they connect to a collective past mired in oppression and subjugation, particularly in The Bluest Eye, The Color Purple, and Push.  Their voices testify and bear witness to events that have been ignored and repressed in conscious minds of both black and white America.  As socially conscious writings, they seek to not only heighten awareness, but to also interrogate accepted notions of trauma and to ultimately stop the cycle of abuse. By revisiting traumas of the past and exposing traumas of the present these writers are empowered, and in turn they empower readers to reclaim their authority, voice, and most importantly, their own lives.  By engaging audiences with their deeply personal and intimate experiences of trauma, the narrative serves as a vehicle of awareness, encouraging the end of cultural and social paralysis.

Elizabeth McNeil, "Sapphire's Literary Freak Show: The Ecofeminist Landscape of Push"

A continuum of characterization exists, from 19th-c. females showcased in broadsides, newsprint, and literature as grotesque freaks—such as Joice Heth, upon whose body (both living and in public autopsy) P. T. Barnum’s famous career rests—to contemporary literary representations of in/famous historical figures and common modern women and girls who fight against environmental forces that would represent and even form them as grotesques. Focusing on the virtually anonymous black and brown girls and women today who live under the deforming duress of poverty, disease, and various forms of abuse, Sapphire’s Push (1997) undoes silence, de-exoticizes the body, and asserts agency through the novel’s main character, Precious Jones. Precious asserts her life in the midst of the urban, materialistic, unnatural, polluted environment of her mother’s apartment and Harlem/New York City, her intellectual and metaphysical evolution echoing ideas from ecofeminist thought that emphasize one’s wholeness of experience and interconnection with nature and all other beings—“unitive dimensions of being” that, in ecofeminist literature, extend far beyond the sense of tragic dissolution inherent to the discourse of male-identified Western individualism (Spretnak 425). Through her character’s grotesque, and increasingly humane and articulate, confrontation with her embodied social problems, Sapphire extends and revises the historical representation of black women’s bodies as spectacular and violated exotic (/erotic) freaks of nature.

Lynette Myles, “Locating Sites for Writing and Personal Transformation in Sapphire's Push”

Using the text Push, I will show how literacy is liberating and transformative for illiterate and abused individuals.  I will present my paper “Locating Sites for Writing and Personal Transformation in Sapphire's Push.”  Conceptually, the “politics of location” calls for finding sites to position one’s self in the act of resistance where one begins the process of change.  Such places are not found on the margins of white male society or at the center of hegemonic discourse.  In determining which position to take, Precious in Sapphire’s Push is faced with remaining in the location that others have placed her or finding new sites to change her social position.  The choice of location for Precious is precisely the one that bell hooks asserts “determine[s] our responses to existing cultural practices and our capacity to envision new alternative oppositional... acts” (Yearning 145).  Such responses that hooks refers to, in fact, point to Precious choosing literacy as agency in moving from her marginalized position as black and female.  Push reveals literacy is a liberating political act.  For Precious, writing provides a creative space for her to express her painful history of sexual abuse and oppression while also providing a transformative location for female healing.  Synonymous with freedom, literacy becomes for Precious a means of breaking away from her tragic past and of re-writing herself in the recovery of her black female psyche. This examination shows the expressive need to write leads Precious to move from a fragmented traumatized girl to a whole, revived, and learned black woman.  This study of Precious and the women at Higher Education Alternative School shows critical consciousness, transformation, and self-renewal are realized through testimony in the form of personal writing.

Terri Pantuso, “‘He my shiny brown boy:’ Maternal Vernacular and Literacy in Sapphire’s Push”

In her first novel, Sapphire explores multiple themes of abuse, neglect, and issues of literacy.  However, the thread that ties all of them together is the ‘mother tongue’ used by the protagonist to demonstrate that maternal obligations are intrinsic, much like language.  With Abdul as her inspiration, Precious overcomes dramatic odds in her fight for literacy, motherhood, and self- actualization.  Although this novel may be difficult to follow at times, I believe its strength lies in the ways in which the vernacular forces readers to acknowledge a communal responsibility for children who are victims of abuse.  The code-switching used by Precious demonstrates the oppression of a young girl struggling to break free and to become literate in two dialects.  Although Precious was permitted to venture out of her home, the emotional and sexual power wielded over her by her parents enslaved Precious to them for years until she found inspiration in the possibilities for herself and her newborn son through literacy.  In this paper, I will demonstrate how Sapphire replicates the maternal narrative style of Harriet Jacobs in a vernacular novel that appeals to all mothers and which proves bell hooks’ belief that ‘language is a place of struggle.’

Michael Pfister

Poets and blues musicians are visionaries and storytellers, explicating truth from society and confronting inequalities that exist but are often overlooked. Raising questions, sometimes uncomfortable ones, and challenging existing imagery of black womanhood, Sapphire uses the trope of the blues in both written and aesthetic form to frame her poetry and short stories about African American women on the social margins. Sapphire’s prose poems are particularly illustrative of this blues aesthetic and focus on the intimacies between women and how such relationships are both life affirming and tragic. These poems include: “Trilogy,” “Eat,” “There’s a Window,” from Sapphire’s American Dreams (1994), and “The Grey Wolf” from Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999).

As an African-American artist, Sapphire follows a long line of black feminist and womanist poets that draw on a blues tradition to reconfigure and sanction the thoughts, living conditions, and feelings of black women - Ntozake Shange, Sonia Sanchez, Hattie Gossett, Nikki Giovanni, and Alice Walker to name a few. Thus, my aim is to highlight Sapphire’s blues poetry and prose as powerful and consciously political, with strong language and volatile situations that accentuate the life struggles of marginalized black women.

Steven Reigns, “Uncollected, Dedicated, and Contributed: Sapphire’s Earlier Work”

This brief presentation discusses Sapphire’s uncollected poems from primarily lesbian and feminist publications in the early and mid 80s, including her 1987 self-published collection of poems Meditations on the Rainbow.  These earlier works are examined for themes and imagery evident in her later and more widely published work. 

Her contributor notes from these early publications are also examined.  These notes differ from the standard narrative, “i don’t teach at college/or get grants/i’m on my knees/cleaning your mother’s house” or   “I appreciate the Conditions editors’ decision to publish “The Last Day of Winter.  I am angered and saddened by their decision not to publish material I sent concerning gentrification, Zionism and imperialism in the lesbian, gay and world community.” These will be explored as well as the evolution of the dedications in her published books.  The dedications and contributor notes are asides to readers and insights into Sapphire’s life, character, and her devotion. 

Dan Shilling, “125th Street Transcendentalism”

For decades literary scholars have discussed fiction from historical, social, political, ethnic, and gender perspectives – as they should, since these contexts illuminate plot, character, and our overall understanding of the work’s meaning. To examine a novel through a Marxist or feminist lens, for example, often results in new interpretations. One of the more recent literary approaches is sometimes called eco-criticism, which looks at how natural and built environments are depicted and, more importantly, how these environments influence the story. Beyond nature writing, or the novels of authors closely associated with creating a sense of place (such as Faulkner), eco-criticism is being used today to shed new light on nearly every genre and every writer. With PUSH, for example, we find the depiction of the Harlem environment in which Precious lives to be as toxic as her home environment, as well as the situations in which she finds herself. Looking at the depiction of place, then, helps readers to better understand and appreciate the characters’ motivations and actions, not to mention to work’s themes. In addition to examine the book’s environmental impact, I will also compare Sapphire’s urban descriptions – and the impacts of these environments – to other writers, placing Sapphire in an eco-literary context.  I play around with "transcendentalism" in a lot of ways - personal, environmental, philosophical, etc.  I'll mostly look at how the physical environment reflects and influences Precious' thoughts, actions, etc. Often when scholars do eco-critical studies they're talking about mountains, deserts, forests - "the environment." But here, and with writers like Dickens, the urban setting is such a strong and vital character.

Erin Vonnahme, “Dysfunctional Sex: Social and Familial Isolation in Contemporary Victimization Narratives”

Precious cannot understand how her body’s reactions belie her disgust and confusion during her repeated rapes at the hands of her father.  She tries to distract herself, but she’s “coming now, rocking under Carl now… her pussy be poppin’, it feel good.” But, “I feel shamed,” she thinks. Sapphire’s vivid rendering of the experiences of an adolescent abuse victim in her novel Push (1997) extends the tradition of such writing by Alice Walker and Toni Morrison and parallels works by contemporary writers JT LeRoy and Dorothy Allison. These contemporary writers enhance, if not unsettle, how readers might understand literary representations of poverty, sexuality, and abuse. My work will demonstrate how Allison, LeRoy, and Sapphire modify narratives of abuse in the process of constructing works that enrich our understanding of characters who live in impoverished conditions. Similar to Sapphire’s Precious, onlookers are inclined to negotiate perplexing pleasures of reading with the shame of witnessing such troubling incidents.  

Within such an isolated and violent environment, Precious claims a sense of self, a voice through becoming literate.  Given a chance to enroll in an alternative school,  Precious begins to use writing, via her class-assigned journal, as a means to articulate her life—the abuse, deprivation, and neglect that formed the first 16 years and the eventual encouragement and self-confidence that will aid her as she leaves home, raises her children, and forges a new existence.  By the end of the novel, Precious is read as a deeper, more clearly communicative and introspective character because she allows her self—that has been present all along—to come through in her writing.