SAPPHIRE
INTERVIEWED BY LISA MILLER

---

UD: Sapphire, for somebody who hasn't heard about the book yet, describe PUSH.

I would describe PUSH as the coming of age story of a young black girl in Harlem. It details the life of Clareece Precious Jones from the ages of sixteen to eighteen. She is a survivor of an abusive household. Her father has molested her, she's pregnant for the second time with her father's child. Her mother is also abusive and a batterer. Also, Precious has "fallen through the cracks" of the educational system, as the cliché goes. This just compounds everything. All the other oppression she is suffering is worsened by her inability to read and to write. So while the novel deals with her as an incest survivor, as a child dealing with poverty and the welfare system, it focuses on her acquisition of language.

"There is almost no person who doesn't know something and there is no person who knows everything."

UD: What were you trying to do, as a writer and as a political person, with this story?

As a political person I was really trying to paint a picture of a person who I feel is the object of almost genocidal neglect and genocidal assault in terms of the removal of services that someone like Precious would need. Right now in our culture we are seeing the dismantling of the welfare system, the dismantling of the affirmative action system, a reordering of the medical system. Not that any of these things have worked so well, but to totally remove them from people... It's almost unbelievable. Talk about "family values" and in the same breath talk about "we will be withdrawing welfare checks from women with more than one child." We will be putting that child in an orphanage at great cost to the society at large so that a woman can go and earn a minimum wage. Just nonsensical type of things.... if it doesn't work out on the job, we will remove all benefits from the family and let them starve. I was also trying to show what I thought was an invisible world. I think that the world of alternative education is a hidden world. Many people don't know that it exists. If I mention Harvard, you know what Harvard is. I know what Harvard is; I've never been there but I know that there's ivy on the walls, there are fraternities and sororities, some of the literature they read... The media, everyone has made me well aware of the educational world of the rich and how well it works. Even if it doesn't work so well sometimes. But the world of literacy, of alternative education, of some of the ways in which...

UD: Freierian methods?

Exactly. This new learning system and how it works. How effective it is and how cost effective it is. I didn't think that world was known and I wanted to show the world of this particular teacher and young child .

UD: I recognized the name of the school in the book: Each One Teach One. But, I can't remember what it refers to.

It comes from the '60s and 70's saying: "If you don't know learn; if you do know teach. And each one, teach one." There is almost no person who doesn't know something and there is no person who knows everything. Teaching and sharing of knowledge can be a continuous and endless process. That is something very much lost in the hierarchical system of education, where one person stands up on the mighty podium and talks ad nauseam and you tape record it and you bow down and then you go up and beg for a minute of their time, ask them to explain what they are talking about and they spit on you and tell you when their office hours are. You go and of course, they aren't there during office hours. You know, that kind of contemptuous "I am the knowledgeable one and you are the nothing."

UD: Tell me about your own experience in school.

I was fortunate in that my degrees are in dance and creative writing... and, of course, dance can't be taught effectively that way. And then my graduate degree was not in a literature program, I was in a creative writing program. And we sat in a circle, you know, ten of us, and the teacher commented on the poems that I wrote and everyone else commented on the poems. And then we had private tutorials where we met one on one with the teacher once a week, things like that. So I had a very different education in some ways.

UD: Didn't you grow up on military bases all over the country?

Yes. Well, not all around..but I was born at Fort Orr, California. And from Fort Orr...by the time I was five years old I had been to Philadelphia and to Germany and I was back at Fort Orr for kindergarten. Then from kindergarten to third grade in Fort Orr. And then the fourth grade in Salinas, California, which is where Cesar Chavez and the Farm Workers' Union were... So that was interesting, although I wasn't aware of (what they were doing). I was just aware that the town was divided into two sections: there was a white section and there was a brown section, the Mexicans. And then there was a black family, which was us. So Salinas that one year was very much about totally being an oddity. The white kids would come up and they would look at the palms of my hands and they would want to know why the palms of my hands weren't black also. All that stuff, you know. Why aren't the bottoms of your feet black. No one had explained to me why the bottoms of my feet weren't black. I didn't know what to tell these kids. But you know it worked out. Then I moved to Texas, stayed in Texas for two years. And then Philadelphia and from Philadelphia back to California, Los Angeles. That was the longest place I'd stayed in my life, six years in junior high and high school. When I leave Los Angeles, I'm an adult, in my twenties, and I go to San Francisco.

UD: How did you begin to write?

I know I wrote a little bit in elementary school and junior high school. I wrote something in junior high school. I remember then the teacher just telling me that she didn't believe I wrote it. This is a black woman, too. She really really went off. And she was a very evil woman.

UD: She liked the writing so she decided it wasn't yours.

Yeah. She decided that it wasn't mine. She attacked the usage of words. I remember the word was eons. I had said something like: oh, this had gone on for eons, meaning it had gone on for a long time. And she made a point about eons being thousands of years. In other words, I was using the word figuratively and she made it literal. It was horrible. So, anyway, no support there. Move on. So I didn't write really again until...oh, a long time.

UD: Do you know what it was about?

I don't know what it was about, I just remember the words..and her picking on that word. I'm sure it wasn't autobiographical or anything like that because you know I wrote far out little things for far out people...because when you're a troubled child you either write about your life or you write about way out stuff. So I know it wasn't autobiographical... which may have been why she thought it was plagiarism, something like that. Then I started to keep a notebook, in my twenties, after I left Los Angeles. I had hitchiked to San Francisco...I was twenty-one when I got to San Francisco. I stayed in a hotel and I started keeping a journal. And then from there I would go to school and I started dancing. And then the writing turns into..you know, I'm already doing kind of imitations of poets...

UD: Who were some of them?

Those early people would be people like Don L. Lee, Sonia Sanchez, Jayne Cortez, I don't know if I was actually hearing Nikki Giovanni then. So this is '71 and '72. There were others whose work I read but because they're not around now, I don't remember them.

UD: When did you start performing?

I started performing around that same time, in the early seventies.

UD: And what impact did that have on your writing?

I don't think they were ever that separate for me. I think for a little while I was writing in the journal. And then you have to understand that one of the first people I see in '72 and '73 is Ntozake Shange. So I'm taking a dance class and she's also...Now I'm San Francisco.

UD: And 'For Colored Girls'... started in a women's bar out there, right?

In a bar out there. Mmuhm. So I saw that original performance. But even before then she was working with a dance teacher, in a dance company called The Raymond Sawyer Afro-Asian Dance Company. So I was taking dance classes with Raymond Sawyer. I was in the beginning class. Ntozake was in the company and everything and she would come out onstage during the dance performances and do the poetry. What was to become ... 'Colored Girls'... was already being put together. So I saw that in the very nascent stages. I also saw Jessica Haggerdorn at that time...

UD: So it all made sense together for you. It was one thing.

Yeah, it all made sense, it was all one thing to me then. I think later it actually started to separate even more, you know. My early exposure to poetry was performance poetry. And at that time I was listening to music..um, Marian Brown, Archie Schepp, all these people were combining poetry on records. That it would be something separate was something of course I would have seen in my childhood: the poetry in the book, Robert Frost and that kind of thing. But what I saw coming up, you know, in my early twenties when I was trying to be an artist was this amalgam of forms.

UD: How did you find Precious' voice?

I think Precious' voice was... um, channeled, if you will. So it wasn't like...I just quieted my own voice, shut my own voice up and shut everybody else's voice up. Which you know some people have a problem with in the novel...that other characters are not as developed as her. But you know, that wasn't what I was trying to do. But basically it was just about trying...about being very very still and open to her, really just trying to be open and let her come out and speak. And she did. She did. So it wasn't like I had to find her voice or create it. I mean, I had real difficulty...real difficulty in trying to convey her process of literacy accurately. You know, like, the first couple of things -- trying to convey her writing -- were easy. But then after that it was really, really hard. That was really hard. But actually her actual voice was overwhelming. And I feel it is a very voice-driven novel. And I think her voice almost always rings true.

UD: I was interested in the way it's written, the way you chose to express what she didn't yet have the written English for.

Right, right. That actually was the hard part.

UD: So you feel conscious of having made a decision that her voice should be the loudest.

Right.

UD: And that telling her mother, Mary's, story was not something you wanted to do.

The mother's and the father's and all that...somehow I thought that that story had been told. Maybe it hasn't but I really felt like oh, we've heard..you know, we've heard a lot about the mother. We've heard a lot about the mother in Black literature. But we also were hearing a lot, in the news, about the abusive mother and all of that. But what we weren't hearing was how these kids survive. You know, the story always ended with yeah, the mother kicked the kid in the head and threw her out the window and whatever...and the poor mother had a horrible history and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, you know it's true or else she wouldn't have done what she did. But we still weren't getting the detail of what abuse does to a person. I also wanted to navigate how a survivor navigates the world.

UD: Also, in this story Precious is the mother.

Exactly. And I didn't feel that Mary was a survivor. I don't feel you're a survivor if you're a perpetrator. You're still a victim. You know what I mean? So I don't feel like you're a survivor if you're out there raping every day. I feel that survivors are the people who have been raped and have decided not to rape and have moved on. So for me I was very into telling the story of a survivor and not of a victim. I really feel that the mother and the father are victims. And that's another novel. You know, and I wasn't interested in her heroes..you know, I wasn't interested too much in Ms. Rain or Germaine or anybody else.

UD: How come? Why not Ms. Rain in particular?

Actually, when I did turn the story over to Ms. Rain she took over. She took over. And then we'd get more of: "I'm a hero, I'm a hero," get it. You know, it would have been just a black 'Up the Down Staircase'. Or another 'Stand and Deliver'. You have that heroic teacher. And I can't remember one student in that movie. Can you? You can see Mr. Valante or whoever, you can just see him have his heart attack, you can see him walking in to take over that class. It's his story. It's not easy to do, I'm not saying that it's easy to do..but that's a known story. I know the teacher story. I know 'Up the Down Staircase', I know 'To Sir With Love'. And then there's been these kind of quasi-sociological stories. I don't want to mention any names because they're real books. You know, such and such teacher in Harlem ..and the Harlem teacher's journal..and the white teacher walks into the black classroom. So we have all these stories of teachers. And I'm a teacher, so that was a close experience for me. I didn't feel it was vital. And what happened was when I did give the story to Rain, she took over Precious' voice. And I felt that it was very important that we keep seeing and feeling Precious from the inside out, from her perception, from her sense..and that it not be turned over to.. It's important that we know how other people perceive her but it didn't need to go there. Because it's Precious' book it was more important for me to show how Precious looked at Germaine than how Germaine looked at Precious. It was more important to show how Precious looked at the West Indian or at the Puerto Rican or than at how any of these people look at her...because I already know how West Indians look at Black Americans, I already know how Hispanics see us.

UD: So you don't care much about this idea that Ms. Rain is not as full a character as she might be?

Exactly. I already know how Ms. Rain sees Precious, no matter how she likes her. I already know how...but we needed to hear Precious from the inside. We didn't even need to hear her mother and her father. And that may be a limitation in the novel but it was also a goal. I just felt very strongly, if I can be true to this child's voice, the other things will just be flaws in a still good picture. If I don't then it'll be a disaster , it'll be a parody, it'll be weak. As long as I let her talk and let her do her thing, things worked out. The minute I tried to...you know, at some point I thought, well, she's gonna have a girl and she can have a feminist awakening. That's not what she wanted to do: you know, she had a boy, she did not have a feminist awakening. You know, I mean, she becomes more conscious of herself as a girl and does understand. But we don't get that she'll be running off to the Village to join the lesbian feminist movement. We get that she's her own self. She's not necessarily who I even wanted her to be, you know, she's her.

UD:What do you imagine about Abdul's future?

I think that Abdul's future is very dependent upon the readers of the book and the members of this society. We know that if Precious gets to remain in the halfway house and finds adequate housing, they have a very good chance of having a good life. We know that if she continues with her education and Newt Gingrich and Clarence Thomas, don't cut out all the Head Start programs, he'll have a good chance.