'Push', 'Beloved', and 'The Colour Purple'

As featured in Oxford Afro-Caribbean Society Magazine

Push (1996)’s protagonist Precious is sixteen, black, poor, and pregnant by her father for the second time in four years. She is overweight, illiterate, and ritually abused by her mother. Precious is expelled from middle school as her second pregnancy becomes apparent. Sapphire, author of Push, has captured part of the beauty of literature in interview, as she has stated how her novel intends to eschew ‘heavy-handed politics about racism and classicism’, instead reaching people’s hearts through depicting Precious’ ‘story’. The predominant theme in Sapphire’s book is Precious’ use of ‘language’, first ‘mute in the beginning’, but later ‘through voice [Precious] comes alive’. Precious’ phonetic spelling means that the reader must accustom themselves to her diction, to her perspective. Sure, Precious is physically indomitable at ‘five feet nine-ten’ and ‘over two hundred pounds', and inhabits the role of maintaining ‘law and order’ for her teacher’s class. But as the novel progresses, there is a development from her having ‘never [talked] in class before’. Precious’ newfound voice has wider repercussions in her life, too, as she mentions ‘from going to school n’ talking in class I done learned to talk up’. This growing voice is mirrored in a greater appearance of her journal entries in the book as it goes on, signalling her greater confidence. 

There is journeying indicative of increased liberation in the novel. At first, ‘Push’ begins betraying huge amounts of self-loathing on Precious’ part. She is critical of black people in the novel, and expresses concern about the role of crack addicts who ‘give the race a bad name’. Precious seems to have internalised Eurocentrism and is constantly placing people into categories and hierarchies. She maintains an insistence of the redeeming quality of there being a ‘white girl’ inside of her, worthy of love and respect in spite of her exterior, which she perceives as an obstruction. Over time, in subversion of the angry black woman trope, Precious embraces herself and instead boasts of the blazing ‘tyger’ within. Precious’ prejudices also become dissolved through proximity. For instance, through her bond with her son, it comes to pass ‘in his beauty [she sees her] own’. In a similar way, through proximity Precious’ homophobia is superseded by a sense of common humanity. Her head which feels at times like it is swimming from confusion is echoed in Jermaine Hicks’ line, ‘how can a river be wrong?’, the river is Jermaine’s inexorable feelings of same-sex attraction, but what’s reflected here is the similarity of the characters' feelings.

This same liberating journeying in ‘Push’ sees Precious leave her neighbourhood for the first time at sixteen, when she takes her first trip downtown to an incest survivors’ meeting, which in itself is a source of expression and liberation. The liberating journeying also sees Precious’ influences expand from short phrases she borrows from her teacher and her mother early on in 'Push', to the works of Farrakkan, Alice Walker, and Harriet Tubman. The formative role of these latter figures, who ‘help [her] like being black’ and from whom she derives ‘so much strength’, is shown through how their pictures are pinned onto the wall of Precious’ room at the halfway house, demonstrating how they have come to make a mark on her.

The sheer extent of Precious’ progression during the course of the novel is perhaps epitomised in how she goes on to become the recipient of the Mayor’s Office Literary Award. Additionally, progress is made in the fact that ‘Push’ as a novel resoundingly ends with Precious' pre-GED class’ anthology. Each of the class' heart-wrenching pieces demarcate stories which would never otherwise be heard by readers. 

Yet, throughout ‘Push’ there is equally a prevailing sense of Precious’ failure to conform to expectations to have ‘gone ’n graduate’ from middle school already. Precious is an outlier from the outset, the book begins describing how she is behind the expected system of progress, in the ninth grade rather than the eleventh. In ‘Push’, Precious comments how a file divulging everything about her is present whenever something is decided in her life. The file recommends that Precious start work immediately rather than continue with school, and at the end of ‘Push’ we are left with no firm resolution as to whether Precious' wishes or the file will decide her future. There is some resolution in that the TV screen which plays in Precious’ mind as she dissociates is reconciled in her piece in the anthology at the end of the book, with an idyllic picture of her and her son Abdul ‘riding like in the movies’ in a car off into the sunset. But for a novel that so precisely begins on the 24th September 1987, ‘Push’ does not leave us much in the way of closure as to Precious’ future.

In the end, the title of ‘Push’ signals more than the push of Precious’ precocious pregnancies. Precious asks ‘is life a hammer to beat me down?’ in response to which Ms Rain urges her to write, pursue her education and prevail. Push is a continuous act of resistance against being beaten down, ‘you can’t stop now Precious, you gotta push’, says Ms Rain.

On the other hand, as ‘the one who lost everything and had no say in any of it’, the revenant most central to Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ (1987) could never have realistically fought with Precious’ grit. ‘Beloved’ is based on the historic Margaret Garner (Sethe), a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (Beloved) and trying to kill the others rather than let them be returned to the owners' plantation. Morrison highlights the murder by placing it in the middle of the novel, and also by circling it with flashbacks and flashforwards which make references to the event. To mimic the helplessness experienced by the characters of ‘Beloved’ and to evoke a ‘shared experience with the book’s population’, Morrison sets out in her novel to ‘render enslavement as a personal experience’ for the reader. The book’s epigraph is dedicated to the ‘sixty million and more’, the estimated number of black people who died during the Atlantic slave trade, and at one point one of the characters remarks, 'all of it is now and it is always now', showing how slavery is immediate to the novel. In capturing the experience of slavery, Morrison tries to enact ‘the sense of things being both under and out of control…the order and quietude of everyday life…violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy dead…the herculean effort to forget…threatened by memory desperate to stay alive’.

There is certainly an impression of ‘things being both under and out of control’ conveyed in the way in which bitterness is infused with sweetness throughout the book, which is both alleviative and bewildering. Life is hard for the characters, yet death is described as being ‘soft as cream’. The name of a slave plantation, ‘Sweet Home’, is suggestive of delightful cosiness, and indeed Sethe recalls the ‘shameless beauty’ of the place. Lynching is described in terms of ‘boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world’. The animalisation and commodification of slaves demonstrated by slave owners, comparing the uses of a dead slave with that of ‘a snake or a bear’ and reminding each other to treat slaves with the consideration they would treat their ‘own horse’, is filtered down and tarnishes romantic love, even, as Paul D looks at Sethe, ‘interested, as though he were examining an ear of corn for quality’. Paul D’s ability to ‘make women cry’ and confide in him is tragically also coupled with the fact he has a ‘tobacco tin’ heart which is indicative of personal entrapment and restriction. A trip to the carnival is overshadowed in people’s minds by macabre rotting roses on the carnival’s fringes, ‘everybody who attended the carnival associated it with the stench of the rotten roses’. Sethe’s scarred back from being whipped is bestowed an element of poetic resonance as the patterns of the scars are described as ‘flowering’ and as a ‘tree’.

The presence of the ‘needy dead’ and ‘memory desperate to stay alive’ results in pain in ‘Beloved’. A character called Amy points out how ‘anything dead coming back to life hurts’ which is underlined as ‘a truth for all times’ by Denver, Sethe’s daughter. Even so, supernatural activity is common within ‘Beloved’, from Sweet Home’s Headless Bride ghost, to a stone structure inhabited by Redmen ghouls, to finally Sethe’s house, number 124, ‘a house peopled by the living activity of the dead’. Sethe is ‘loaded with the past and hungry for more’. She is preoccupied with her ‘rememory’. This portmanteau combines and intensifies the ideas of memory and remembering. The prefix ‘re-’ in front of 'memory' in the word shows how Sethe is agonisingly haunted by her past, subject to her 'memory' again and again. 

Paul D moves into 124, beating its occupying spirit away, but ‘[bringing] another kind of haunting’ through the ‘damage’ he causes to the family dynamics. This painful ‘damage [comes] undone with the miraculous resurrection of Beloved’. Beloved is incarnated and arrives straight after the carnival during which there were the ‘shadows of three people [holding] hands’ in familial unison, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. Beloved changes the family dynamic until eventually it is just her and Sethe in a twosome, ‘only interested in each other’. Beloved is sated by ‘sweet things’ and ‘storytelling’. She is ‘a greedy ghost’ who ‘[needs] a lot of love’ and she ‘[laps] devotion like cream’. Her huge appetite comes at a price as Denver observes how ‘the bigger Beloved got, the smaller Sethe became’. 

Sethe’s justification for the murder is that she sought to protect Beloved, ‘the part of [Sethe] that was clean’, Sethe's ‘best thing’, from being ‘[dirtied]’. To avoid Beloved having her sense of self so threatened by slavery that she would not ‘like [herself]’ and would ‘forget who [she was]’. Morrison communicates her disproval of Sethe through repeatedly describing Sethe as a brutal ‘iron-eyed girl’. Immediately after the murder, the narrative describes the perturbing clarity of Sethe’s ‘knife-clean profile against a cheery blue sky’, the dried blood eerily making Sethe's dress ‘stiff, like rigor mortis’, and it is through fear of Sethe that her sons Howard and Buglar run away from home. Paul D castigates Sethe for having ‘love too thick’. 

Yet the tragedy is that in the end, Beloved is exorcised from the other characters' lives while for Sethe life will go on. There is a tragic gradation of Beloved fading away in the novel, from ‘124 was spiteful’, ‘124 was loud’, ‘124 was quiet’, to finally ‘unloaded 124 [was] just another weathered house needing repair’. The narration mentions, ‘first they saw it and then they didn’t’, describing Beloved’s vanishing, the distancing pronoun ‘it’ reflects how Beloved is alienated. The final description of Beloved ‘disremembered and unaccounted for’, forgotten ‘like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep’, comes just after Paul D and Sethe’s reunion, emphasising how she is left all alone.

In contrast to this isolation, Alice Walker has explained how ‘The Colour Purple’ (1982) shows a spiritual journey involving ‘a rebirth into feelings of Oneness’ and a ‘conscious connection to All That Is’. The main character of the epistolary book is Celie. Her situation is dire: she has been raped by her father and her two children have been taken away from her. Celie is forced into an unhappy marriage with a man who is still enamoured with his ex-lover, Shug Avery. Celie initially addresses her letters to God in the book, since she has nobody else to confide in. Yet, she projects her negative experiences of other men onto this God to which she is writing, perceiving Him as ‘trifling, forgitful and lowdown’, so even this source of respite is sullied. To start off with, she leaves her letters to God unsigned, so that it seems as though Celie has no proper relation to her God and is almost shouting into a void.

Celie acquires a new spiritual awareness, though, as her conception of God becomes untied from what she thinks He looks like. With some persuasion from Shug, Celie comes to see that ‘God is everything’ and she herself experiences ‘[feelings] of being part of everything’. It’s clear that this idea of being part of everything comes intuitively to Celie, as previously in the novel she imagined herself as wood to lessen the pain of being beaten.  As ‘The Colour Purple’ goes on, there are increasing mentions of nature, reflecting Celie’s deepening appreciation of the world around her. Celie addresses one letter, ‘Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God’. This shows her view now that God is all encompassing, bookmarking everything in creation. For Celie, this new appreciation of the world around her improves her relationship with God, shown by how she then progresses to signing off her letters with ‘Amen’, signalling ratification and agreement, rather than perhaps shouting into an unresponsive void. Celie’s spiritual understanding is paralleled by her sister Nettie’s who writes to Celie saying ‘God is different…now…more spirit than ever before, and more internal’. 

What’s clear in ‘The Colour Purple’ is the presence of sisterhood. Even though Celie’s husband is in love with Shug, Celie recognises that Shug is ‘the most beautiful woman [she] ever saw’. She remarks that Shug is ‘like a queen’ to her and Celie’s copy of an advertisement of one of Shug’s performances ‘[burns] a hole in [her] pocket’ it is that special of an artefact. Even when Shug behaves demandingly towards Celie, Celie perceives this behaviour as endearing. Celie describes an angry Shug as having a ‘mouth just pack with claws’ 'like a kitten' and a dissatisfied Shug as being 'like a child'. These innocent, flattering comparisons reveal a spirit of sisterliness, and this spirit becomes mutual as Shug kindly says to Celie ‘us each other’s peoples now’. Shug and Celie’s solidarity is revealed when they confront Celie’s father and they dress up ‘in blue flower pants that match and big floppy Easter hats that match too’.

Women wearing trousers is significant in ‘The Colour Purple’ as a sign of the power of womankind to be just as industrious, self-sufficient and resourceful as men in early 1800s American society. Men in the novel are uncomfortable with the inevitability that ‘the world is changing…it is no longer a world just for boys and men’.  In this way, some of the male characters disprove of women wearing trousers.  Celie eventually sets up a trouser making business in the novel, creating pants ‘in every colour and size under the Sun’, and so in this way acts as a pioneer. At the start of the book, Celie is urged to be more assertive and to ‘fight’ by a few characters. But making trousers is a more sustainable mode of protest than fighting, as fighting results in even the untouchable and amazonian character Sofie ending up maimed and imprisoned. Celie ends up being so empowered in ‘The Colour Purple’ to the extent that she is able to look upon the tyranny of her abusive father as ‘just a bad odour passing through’, and so make a full circle from the start of the book. For the reader, this is the most hopeful ending out of the three novels.

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With thanks to https://www.imdb.com/, https://afterlivesofslavery.wordpress.com and https://www.telegraph.co.uk/ for the images which I spliced together.