Learning to read politically: narratives of hope and narratives of despair in Push by Sapphire

Abstract

The ability to shift reading position has long been recognised as a means for politically minded readers – particularly those motivated by Marxist, feminist and/or race-related agendas – to read against the grain and uncover the implicit ideologies in the text. Little research has been conducted on how inexperienced and thus less sophisticated readers learn to make strategic decisions about how they will respond to the reading position offered by the text. Reading against the grain is a highly sophisticated reading practice which cannot be mastered successfully before the reader is able to simultaneously recognise the communicative practices of the author and reject the proffered viewpoint. This paper begins by examining how the novel Push by Sapphire (1996) encourages readers to try out more than one reading position, and in doing so enables her readers to gain the prerequisite skills for future political readings.

Keywords:

• reading
• thinking skills
• children’s literature
• citizenship education
• pedagogy

Notes

1. The sequel The Kid depicts Abdul’s life as a teenager and confirms all these suppositions: Precious dies, and although her grandmother maintains contact with her great grandson, Abdul is raised in foster and institutional care. He receives a decent education, but is repeatedly abused and abusive.

2. The film’s ending is happier than the novel and several of the scenes I focus on in this paper have been removed. For instance, the film reunites Precious with her daughter, which does not happen in the novel. As a response to the novel, the film is evidence of how difficult it is to make narratives of despair palatable. Film viewers like happy endings and are more willing to pay to watch or read an uplifting narrative than a depressing one.

3. ‘Problem novels’ became acknowledged as a genre in the late 1970s and became widespread from the early 1980s (see Cart, 1996, pp. 64–66 and passim). These are novels that place a social issue at the centre of the plot. The term is derogatory. As Michael Cart helpfully surmises: ‘think of it this way and you’ll understand the problem with the problem novel: It is to young adult literature what the soap opera is to legitimate drama’ (Cart, 1996, p. 64). The problem with later problem novels was their tendency to wag the finger and lecture at their readers, thereby trivialising teenagers’ genuine concerns.

4. Sapphire’s most controversial poem – ‘Wild Thing’ – was a response to the rape of a white woman jogging in Central Park by five African American youths, who claimed they were simply ‘wilding’. Sapphire’s poem is written from the perspective of one of the rapists, and proffers a view of how the hopelessness of their daily lives can erupt in seemingly random acts of violence. The poem rose to public attention when Donald Wildmon of the American Families Association (a conservative watchdog group) objected to the use of public funds from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the publication of Sapphire’s poem in The Portable Lower East Side Queer City.