Sapphire brings us The Kid: an interview
In her second novel THE KID, Sapphire rips the veil off what it’s like
to be a child caught in the social welfare system.
THE KID is Abdul, son of Precious from Sapphire’s novel PUSH.
(The film adaptation, PRECIOUS, directed by Lee Daniels, garnered Mo’Nique an Oscar win for her incendiary performance.) Abdul goes from abusive foster home to a Catholic boy’s school where he receives an exemplary education contaminated by sexual abuse at the hands of the priests. Caught between his thirst for knowledge and his rage, Abdul discovers the power of dance and begins to transcend not only his own damaged history, but also that of his people. In this tour de force, Sapphire takes on Abdul’s skin, writing from inside the boy’s heart, body and mind in a rush of raw feeling rarely seen on the page. Sapphire is among the bravest and most eloquent authors writing today.
In her second novel THE KID, Sapphire rips the veil off what it’s like
to be a child caught in the social welfare system.
THE KID is Abdul, son of Precious from Sapphire’s novel PUSH.
(The film adaptation, PRECIOUS, directed by Lee Daniels, garnered Mo’Nique an Oscar win for her incendiary performance.) Abdul goes from abusive foster home to a Catholic boy’s school where he receives an exemplary education contaminated by sexual abuse at the hands of the priests. Caught between his thirst for knowledge and his rage, Abdul discovers the power of dance and begins to transcend not only his own damaged history, but also that of his people. In this tour de force, Sapphire takes on Abdul’s skin, writing from inside the boy’s heart, body and mind in a rush of raw feeling rarely seen on the page. Sapphire is among the bravest and most eloquent authors writing today.
AB: The Kid is a dazzling work. I’ve always loved your writing. Push inspired me to write my first manuscript in first person present, and I’ve been a fan of your poetry as well… so to interview you is a thrill. I’d like to begin by asking where and how you grew up.
Sapphire: I grew up in a lot of different places because my father was in the military and by the time I had started first grade I’d already lived in Europe. We moved to various military bases around the country until he retired. One of the things that did was to break a certain provincialism for me. I had a deep sense of myself as American but it didn’t have a lot to do with a particular town or state. As early as first grade I knew America was powerful, we had military might… and the flag was a big thing. As you get older you begin to learn and understand words like imperialism, Granada, Vietnam, the so-called third world. That is something that came to me younger than other kids growing up in the inner city, where so much of their political analysis is totally black and white, the ‘police against us’.
AB: How do you think this has influenced what you choose to write about?
Sapphire: Well, that’s the big level it operates on… with The Kid, we’re still talking about a horrible, horrible imbalance of power. If I had grown up to be an essayist I’d be talking about how this country’s actions from the beginning have broken economies and broken whole races of people. In The Kid we look at how several different power structures deliberately malfunction and work to break Abdul. How they work obliquely in the way they have broken Precious. The Kid is not a sequel in the sense that it’s Precious’ story continued, it’s very much Abdul’s (her son’s) book. But we really look at how she died in poverty, how they padlocked her apartment… there are no provisions in the way there would be for a middle class or a rich child.
No one is there to take care of this child. Where is the safety net, where is the extended family? So even before we look at the rupture that is going to happen in Abdul’s psyche, we’re looking at the rupture that has happened in the culture. How this AIDS epidemic has hit so many people… the white privileged community has basically rebounded in a certain way but when AIDS moved into people of color and whole nations of color in Africa and the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, where AIDS has hit really hard, people have not rebounded in the same way. This is what happens when Precious dies. It’s not just her funeral, it’s not just a sentimental throw-in in the novel. It’s there to show the absolute devastation that is going to happen to this child. Precious had seen to it that his reading level at 9 is better than hers was at 16. She’s invested in her baby boy, that he might become something and that he might have all that she never had, which is the plight of many African-American women and many working class women all over the world. We see that literally dashed to nothing when Precious dies. We get a good look at how the social service system doesn’t not work for many children of color. The hardest group to adopt out are black boys, nobody wants them. I’m not trying to beat anybody over the head with that, but I’m trying to get people to look at it. Another thing is colorism. Dark-skinned black boys are the least adoptable. I really wanted to show that once the mother is gone, there are not a whole lot of people that are gonna love that child in early childhood and adolescence, at that time when they really need love and nurturing and someone to invest in them so that they can become full human beings. We’re really looking at what it is to be this powerless child. We’re looking at a boy who’s really intelligent, he’s driven, ambitious, he’s not a mean-spirited kid. The seed his mother planted in him will not die. He wants to be something. And so here’s this boy who’s been stripped of all power… how does he go about reclaiming power in the culture?
AB: It all comes back to power, the need for it and its abuse.
Sapphire: Yes, and we see him begin to appropriate the behavior patterns and the words of those who have stripped him of power. When the priest comes to him, he says “Show me some love”, and then Abdul goes to one of the smaller children to abuse him, and he says the exact same thing, “Show me some love”, and he duplicates the sexual behavior of the priest who has abused him. When we look at Jerry Sandusky’s victims, when we look at Sugar Ray Robinson, these men coming out and talking about what has happened to them… when we thought we had taken our sons, brothers, nephews to football practice and dropped them off and they’d be fine but it turned out the sportsmanship they were learning was something that would create, well, a Mike Tyson. What happened? What went wrong? We’re starting to hear in ways that we haven’t heard before, what has really gone wrong with some of these guys.
At the same time that Abdul is learning to be an abuser, he is learning to be a creator. He has that epiphany in the dance class and he realizes the power of music, the power of black culture, the power of dance... he’s given another way to become a human being, to experience power. He can do what the priest did to him, or he can learn in the dance world how to create, how to have power and control over his own body in a way that gives him power and control over an audience. We see eventually when he breaks down, he talks over and over again about if he can just get back to his dancing… he can choose to re-enslave, re-incarcerate himself or he can choose this other tool, he has another way of relating to the world, and he is going to choose to dance.
AB: It’s fascinating, this dichotomy. He appropriates the language of his abusers but he also takes on the language of art. Shakespeare, science. He’s hungry for art and knowledge.
Sapphire: Exactly. He really goes for it. He begins to look for role models he can identify with. He falls in love with Jean-Michel Basquait, reads black cultural criticism, Gregg Tate. He also falls in love with Shakespeare and Gerard Manly Hopkins and also begins to know this as part of the world of the Catholic brothers and the Catholic church and he’s going to have to find a new God. And art is going to be his God. He’s going to need, on some level, Charlie Parker. Billie Holiday. These were flawed people, these were addicts, problematic people. But they held close to their God, which is art.
AB: He reaches for his own humanity in art. Certain readers have problems with young characters like these being too ‘precocious’, too smart… like a kid in these circumstances would never know these things, which I find offensive.
Sapphire: I don’t know if that’s classism or racism or just plain ignorance. These kids are reading and writing, some of them have total command of the spoken language if not the written word. Precious spent the last years of her life educating herself and educating Abdul. Then he enters an accelerated academic environment at the catholic school. Catholic schools are serious at maintaining test scores at or above the level of public schools. He’s exposed to people, he reads. I did not want to portray a child who is intellectually limited. I wanted to show a child whose intellect and creativity is in no level stunted, and what we’re looking at is the way power has undercut his soul.
AB: It is racist and classist. Being gifted and mature for your years is perceived as unbelievable because you're working class or come from poverty? They don’t understand, there seems to be a disconnect. When you’re a kid and you have nothing, when you’re hurting that bad, you crave magic, you reach for the stars.
Sapphire: And also you create magic. People forget that in our time, some of our greatest singers were recording at 15 and 16 years old. And then when we talk about the dance world, even white kids are starting at 13 and 14 in American Ballet Theater and there’s this pretense of getting them tutors, but they really are dancing, they’re creating at an adult level. I think it’s ignorance on the part of the people who say that.
AB: Yes, art is a healing balm. When you’ve been victimized like Abdul, you’re willing to take risks. Growing up without a safety net bestows a certain type of bravery.
Sapphire: You have nothing to lose.
AB: Yes.
Sapphire: And what you have to gain is the re-making of your own self. You literally remake yourself in a new image. It’s that old cliché but true … artists are not trying to find themselves they are trying to create themselves. Abdul is not on an endless narcissistic quest for who he is. He knows who he is. He’s not confused racially, he’s not even really confused sexually. He is in that place where he’s asking, how do I become Charlie Parker? How do I dance like Basquait painted? How do I get that feeling in my body like Billie Holiday must have had to sing like that? This is where he’s at. Not only does he have nothing to lose, if he fails in this quest, we can expect to see him shaking a cup on the subway. He will not be able to survive.
AB: One of the most fascinating aspects of The Kid is how you write with such insight and unflinching honesty about how a child can go from victim to predator as a way of taking power back. That insidious mix of pleasure and shame that’s wrapped in the sexuality. Was that challenging for you?
Sapphire: That was really frightening for me. What I wanted to do in the book and what I’ve wanted to do in my work all along is show the cycle of abuse. In Push, we’re looking at 180 degrees. We’re looking at a victim, and Precious is someone who we can empathize with, and she becomes a survivor. She gets angry yes, and we can deal with her punching someone in the nose. But whatever it was in her, they couldn’t make her hate. She was a female child, so she sought a circle of women and a communal spirit to get back her power and healing. Abdul is a man. A circle of women is not going to make him feel better, in fact it would probably make him feel worse. He needs to feel the power that was taken away from him. I kept challenging myself to have the courage to tell the story that I knew was real. When I was on tour with Push, people would come up to me, social workers and psychiatrists, and tell me how they see stories like that every day, or people who actually went through similar paths as Precious. I wasn’t really having that experience with The Kid, and I can see why… I mean, how many people are going to come up and say “I’ve had experiences like that…” But two young professional women came up to me in Kansas City at a reading and said “My God, we hear these stories every day.” So of course my ears prick up and I ask where they work, and they say, “We’re death row lawyers. By the time we hear the stories, it’s too late. So we’re glad you’re telling it.”
AB: So am I. Both Push and The Kid are written in first person active. As a writer, I understand how challenging of a way this is to approach a story. You’re basically crawling into the skin of your protagonist and you’re going through those experiences with he or she, writing from the inside out, in the moment. It’s a long time to be looking out from someone else’s eyes, especially in such a dark room.
Sapphire: It’s a long time, and you know, honestly when I finished the Kid I said, it’s the last time (laughter). From now on I’ll be in third person and if I need to get in closer I’ll go into close third. This was really agonizing for me. Push was even harder because although there were no limits to Precious’ intelligence or creativity I had to confine myself to the limits of Precious’ language. She couldn’t read, but at least with The Kid he was a reader and a burgeoning intellectual. What was really hard for me was writing with someone who was so emotionally shut down in so many ways. That’s why you have the strong female characters, even though they’re coming apart themselves. The great grandmother, and Eli, the young dancer he falls in love with… they become the empathic parts of him that he needs to develop. The great grandmother, her feelings cannot be hurt! The love that she has for this kid is so great that he can act out until he gets tired of acting out and she just keeps coming back. “You’s the one I been waitin’ for, you’s the seed,” she tells him. He cannot alienate her. Of course, she symbolizes all the shame and pain he feels. He wants to be the new black man without the history. He doesn’t want his personal history of his mother dying of AIDS in poverty, and of course he doesn’t want his collective history of having been descended from slaves. But she’s there to remind him that without a history, without a past he is an empty, hollow man… he will go on to create plastic art, to be nothing. So she provides that for him, and it’s through her that he makes his first emotional leap. He’s lost everything, his mama, his home, his computer, but the end of the big interaction between him and his grandmother, the one possession he has that he cherishes, his kaleidoscope, he gives it to her. He feels for her, he’s able to open up to his collective history, and empathize… oh, the slavery days, the destruction of the black race in America. There’s a psychiatrist who writes about trauma and recovery, and one of the things she says in dealing with trauma victims, of war, of rape… you know when they have made a forward movement because their trauma has created a kind of narcissism around them and they have a right to it… but when that person can begin to open their eyes to other’s trauma, like oh, this person lost their family in the massacre at MyLai, or this person lost their eyes in Afghanistan, when they begin to be able to hold hands with each other and see the collective hurting of the world, they’ve made a huge step forward. We see that in Push. Precious is so empathic and open, so when she goes to the incest survivor meeting her whole world wakes up, oh my God, so many people have suffered! It takes a lot more than that for Abdul to understand how other people have suffered. It’s not until he’s dancing, improvising that he opens his heart enough to feel the pain… to feel the pain of the Vietnamese farmer who is thrown down the well by an African-American psychopath in Vietnam, to feel what it’s like to be blasted open… he begins to feel for other human beings. That is a reflection of him coming into the love for this woman.
AB: For me, when he gives the kaleidoscope to his great grandmother, its the most obvious yet most beautiful of metaphors… the moment of compassion when he begins to transcend his own damage. Because you go through such intense emotional journeys with your characters, do you have rituals to help you as a writer?
Sapphire: I think the big thing that has allowed me to go certain places is that I usually try to write in that nether space between wake and sleep. So I write first thing in the morning. Even if I have to do chores in the morning I try to stay in that morning space… and stay with my writing first thing in the morning. I think what people who are successful at going deep into human trauma do is compartmentalize, if they are not to go crazy themselves. Now I know of artists who have gone deep into human trauma and have not emerged… Paul Celan, who wrote poems about the holocaust, committed suicide. They go to bring forth the work and then they go back in. Lucille Clifton has a beautiful poem about it, about her mother who brought life to these children by bringing them out of the high grass and then wandered back into the high grass herself. Being able to compartmentalize, being able to use the tools that the culture gives us… we’ve got therapists, we’ve got 12-step programs, we don’t have to drink ourselves to death or live the lives of the artists of the 1940’s and ‘50’s.
AB: Yes, there’s a much greater awareness of self-care.
Sapphire: We now have information they didn’t have. Just like it would be silly for artists of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s to die of tuberculosis, like the Victorian artists did. Each generation of artists functions on a better level. Not that I necessarily function on a better level, but I have learned how not to totally get sunk. I know sometimes it has affected me because I go around people who do other types of work and other types of writing and I can see how, over the years my viewpoint, the way I live life, a certain kind of solitude I seek, I’m not the same as them. But at least I’m not shaking a cup on the subway, you know what I mean? I haven’t jumped off a bridge, I’m still able to function! There was a time in the middle of The Kid… I never thought that I’d commit suicide because my life impulse is too strong, but I did think that I might abandon the text, where I might have said F-it, let me go on and write a happily-ever-after. There was really a point where I said, can I stay in this? And than I started to imagine, well what are people gonna think? I mean, they really thought I was crazy with Push! One time I went to a reading in Alabama and the woman who was there to greet me said, “You just look so normal! Your writing is so abnormal, we didn’t know what to expect!” So I’m thinking if they had issues with Push, what will they think now with The Kid? (laughter)
AB: I for one am very grateful that you had the courage to persevere because it’s an absolutely brilliant and brave book, and the writing is spectacular. What writings inspired you when you were young?
Sapphire: My mother was a big reader and her favorite author was James Baldwin so I started reading Baldwin young… but I never really thought that I could be like him, didn’t think that I could do what James Baldwin was doing… it was a little bit over my head when I was that young. There was a pop psychology book my mother had called the 50 Minute Hour. It was a psychiatrist’s analysis of five or ten psychiatric patients. I remember reading that and thinking, I’m going to be a psychiatrist. It was in that text that I began to be obsessed with the workings of the human mind. So it was James Baldwin and then reading this book about psychiatric patients made me think how can I get more of this, how can I find out more about the functioning of the human mind? From then on I was always reading something about psychology. Then I began reading Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and at the same time reading Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. I think Alice Walker is much more of a psychological novelist than people give her credit for. She’s seen mostly as a social realist but especially in some of her short stories, she’s really delving into how the human mind works. I’m fascinated with how people think, why people do horrible things, good things, why will a woman sacrifice her whole life for another human being, why there’s a Ted Bundy… these fundamental questions invaded me early. Coming of age during the Vietnam war we were starting to hear about the atrocities over there… and that never left me. And then when I started seeing the boys come home… we didn’t use the word post-traumatic stress… in the African American community we were just seeing these people come home, how does the song go? I sent you a nice boy and you sent me back a junkie. What was happening? What is the societal secret? Some of the power of The Kid is that it unzips some of the secrets.
AB: What’s next for you?
Sapphire: I have two projects… one is a collection of poetry so I’d like to start sending out some of those poems. And I’m working on another novel, which I don’t really want to give away, but after Precious and The Kid I don’t want to write about kids ever again! (laughter) So I’m looking at parents now, the lives of adults… and issues like how can we be so rich here, and yet still have so much poverty? There are affluent countries that don’t have huge pockets of poverty! Why have we settled for that? The vast majority of our homeless population, they’re telling us now, are children who wish they had a home… so the abuse of power stays on my mind, with poverty as a manifestation of it.
AB: The statistics on homeless youth are staggering. I’ve had to learn how to compartmentalize while volunteering with homeless kids in Hollywood… it’s really difficult to see all these teenagers, some of them really young, and young with babies too, trying to make it on the streets.
Sapphire: And I think it’s intense for these kids in a very different way then it’s ever been. Back then, poor people didn’t even have TV’s, they didn’t have the internet. Here you have people who can get a drug store cell phone and go on the internet and still be homeless. And they’re looking at Kim Kardashian in $700 panties and they’re constantly exposed to this affluence. There’s a part of you that has to ask, why?
AB: I started spending time in Trinidad in 1987 and it’s a magical culture, a carnival culture that looks at art as a fundamental human right. Music, dance costumes, painting… everyone creative, everyone chill… beautiful people. When I first started going there they didn’t even have MTV, music videos, they had their own beautiful idiosyncratic culture. And then as American media started its noxious creep into that culture, with the thug music scene, the bling, the crazy money and gangster rap, the reverence for wealth at any cost... boy’s pants started hangin’ too low and the guns came over from Venezuela… it’s still a beautiful culture, but the country has became more and more violent.
Sapphire: The media kind of presents this obscene wealth as the norm, like the norm is to look like Mary J. Blige. We’re not all that gifted looking! Or Kim Kardashian. She has become famous for nothing. Paris Hilton. What have they done? When I grew up people became famous because they sang, they danced. In capitalism, knowing what will sell is about creating the desire.
AB: Yes, it's a wicked type of social engineering that's been going on for decades. It’s so great to talk with you! Thanks so much for your time… and work.
Sapphire: And thank you for taking the issues in the book seriously, as opposed to sensationalizing them or talking trash! It’s been a pleasure.
AB: One last question to ask… what did you think about the film adaptation of PUSH, PRECIOUS?
Sapphire: I loved it! Loved it. Monique took it to another level!
AB: Yes she did!
Sapphire: And Gabourey is a gift from the Gods. She’s an African American. Her daddy is Senegalese and her mommy is African American. They said to me, “There are no people like Precious in Hollywood.” And Lee Daniels said to me, “Don’t worry Sapphire, I’ll find her.” Lee said “It’s not going to be the book. You want the book, read the book.” And there was only so far we could go with certain issues if we wanted it to not be an X-rated film. So some things had to go. But hopefully people will do as I did when I went to see The Godfather. I went to see the film, and then I bought the book! We couldn’t have had a better Precious, we couldn’t have had a more beautiful, articulate, wonderful girl than Gabourey. And Monique brought some acting to the screen that has never been seen before.
AB: Monique was the most astonishing to me. Gabourey was incredible, yes, but Monique blew my head off. I can only imagine how excited you must have been when you were watching those performances for the first time.
Sapphire: It was thrilling. And it was so unexpected! That’s why Lee Daniels should have won an Oscar for directing. He was like a can opener, he opened those women up! They’ve all been in movies before… Mariah Carey, all those women. Lee took it to another level too, and I think he still hasn’t been given the credit he deserves for creating the environment that brought those actresses to the level they went to. He’s a genius.
AB: It’s true and I’m sure he’ll thank you for saying that, but you started it!
Sapphire: (laughter) Yes, as Abdul said, “I did plant the seed.”
Sapphire: I grew up in a lot of different places because my father was in the military and by the time I had started first grade I’d already lived in Europe. We moved to various military bases around the country until he retired. One of the things that did was to break a certain provincialism for me. I had a deep sense of myself as American but it didn’t have a lot to do with a particular town or state. As early as first grade I knew America was powerful, we had military might… and the flag was a big thing. As you get older you begin to learn and understand words like imperialism, Granada, Vietnam, the so-called third world. That is something that came to me younger than other kids growing up in the inner city, where so much of their political analysis is totally black and white, the ‘police against us’.
AB: How do you think this has influenced what you choose to write about?
Sapphire: Well, that’s the big level it operates on… with The Kid, we’re still talking about a horrible, horrible imbalance of power. If I had grown up to be an essayist I’d be talking about how this country’s actions from the beginning have broken economies and broken whole races of people. In The Kid we look at how several different power structures deliberately malfunction and work to break Abdul. How they work obliquely in the way they have broken Precious. The Kid is not a sequel in the sense that it’s Precious’ story continued, it’s very much Abdul’s (her son’s) book. But we really look at how she died in poverty, how they padlocked her apartment… there are no provisions in the way there would be for a middle class or a rich child.
No one is there to take care of this child. Where is the safety net, where is the extended family? So even before we look at the rupture that is going to happen in Abdul’s psyche, we’re looking at the rupture that has happened in the culture. How this AIDS epidemic has hit so many people… the white privileged community has basically rebounded in a certain way but when AIDS moved into people of color and whole nations of color in Africa and the Caribbean and Southeast Asia, where AIDS has hit really hard, people have not rebounded in the same way. This is what happens when Precious dies. It’s not just her funeral, it’s not just a sentimental throw-in in the novel. It’s there to show the absolute devastation that is going to happen to this child. Precious had seen to it that his reading level at 9 is better than hers was at 16. She’s invested in her baby boy, that he might become something and that he might have all that she never had, which is the plight of many African-American women and many working class women all over the world. We see that literally dashed to nothing when Precious dies. We get a good look at how the social service system doesn’t not work for many children of color. The hardest group to adopt out are black boys, nobody wants them. I’m not trying to beat anybody over the head with that, but I’m trying to get people to look at it. Another thing is colorism. Dark-skinned black boys are the least adoptable. I really wanted to show that once the mother is gone, there are not a whole lot of people that are gonna love that child in early childhood and adolescence, at that time when they really need love and nurturing and someone to invest in them so that they can become full human beings. We’re really looking at what it is to be this powerless child. We’re looking at a boy who’s really intelligent, he’s driven, ambitious, he’s not a mean-spirited kid. The seed his mother planted in him will not die. He wants to be something. And so here’s this boy who’s been stripped of all power… how does he go about reclaiming power in the culture?
AB: It all comes back to power, the need for it and its abuse.
Sapphire: Yes, and we see him begin to appropriate the behavior patterns and the words of those who have stripped him of power. When the priest comes to him, he says “Show me some love”, and then Abdul goes to one of the smaller children to abuse him, and he says the exact same thing, “Show me some love”, and he duplicates the sexual behavior of the priest who has abused him. When we look at Jerry Sandusky’s victims, when we look at Sugar Ray Robinson, these men coming out and talking about what has happened to them… when we thought we had taken our sons, brothers, nephews to football practice and dropped them off and they’d be fine but it turned out the sportsmanship they were learning was something that would create, well, a Mike Tyson. What happened? What went wrong? We’re starting to hear in ways that we haven’t heard before, what has really gone wrong with some of these guys.
At the same time that Abdul is learning to be an abuser, he is learning to be a creator. He has that epiphany in the dance class and he realizes the power of music, the power of black culture, the power of dance... he’s given another way to become a human being, to experience power. He can do what the priest did to him, or he can learn in the dance world how to create, how to have power and control over his own body in a way that gives him power and control over an audience. We see eventually when he breaks down, he talks over and over again about if he can just get back to his dancing… he can choose to re-enslave, re-incarcerate himself or he can choose this other tool, he has another way of relating to the world, and he is going to choose to dance.
AB: It’s fascinating, this dichotomy. He appropriates the language of his abusers but he also takes on the language of art. Shakespeare, science. He’s hungry for art and knowledge.
Sapphire: Exactly. He really goes for it. He begins to look for role models he can identify with. He falls in love with Jean-Michel Basquait, reads black cultural criticism, Gregg Tate. He also falls in love with Shakespeare and Gerard Manly Hopkins and also begins to know this as part of the world of the Catholic brothers and the Catholic church and he’s going to have to find a new God. And art is going to be his God. He’s going to need, on some level, Charlie Parker. Billie Holiday. These were flawed people, these were addicts, problematic people. But they held close to their God, which is art.
AB: He reaches for his own humanity in art. Certain readers have problems with young characters like these being too ‘precocious’, too smart… like a kid in these circumstances would never know these things, which I find offensive.
Sapphire: I don’t know if that’s classism or racism or just plain ignorance. These kids are reading and writing, some of them have total command of the spoken language if not the written word. Precious spent the last years of her life educating herself and educating Abdul. Then he enters an accelerated academic environment at the catholic school. Catholic schools are serious at maintaining test scores at or above the level of public schools. He’s exposed to people, he reads. I did not want to portray a child who is intellectually limited. I wanted to show a child whose intellect and creativity is in no level stunted, and what we’re looking at is the way power has undercut his soul.
AB: It is racist and classist. Being gifted and mature for your years is perceived as unbelievable because you're working class or come from poverty? They don’t understand, there seems to be a disconnect. When you’re a kid and you have nothing, when you’re hurting that bad, you crave magic, you reach for the stars.
Sapphire: And also you create magic. People forget that in our time, some of our greatest singers were recording at 15 and 16 years old. And then when we talk about the dance world, even white kids are starting at 13 and 14 in American Ballet Theater and there’s this pretense of getting them tutors, but they really are dancing, they’re creating at an adult level. I think it’s ignorance on the part of the people who say that.
AB: Yes, art is a healing balm. When you’ve been victimized like Abdul, you’re willing to take risks. Growing up without a safety net bestows a certain type of bravery.
Sapphire: You have nothing to lose.
AB: Yes.
Sapphire: And what you have to gain is the re-making of your own self. You literally remake yourself in a new image. It’s that old cliché but true … artists are not trying to find themselves they are trying to create themselves. Abdul is not on an endless narcissistic quest for who he is. He knows who he is. He’s not confused racially, he’s not even really confused sexually. He is in that place where he’s asking, how do I become Charlie Parker? How do I dance like Basquait painted? How do I get that feeling in my body like Billie Holiday must have had to sing like that? This is where he’s at. Not only does he have nothing to lose, if he fails in this quest, we can expect to see him shaking a cup on the subway. He will not be able to survive.
AB: One of the most fascinating aspects of The Kid is how you write with such insight and unflinching honesty about how a child can go from victim to predator as a way of taking power back. That insidious mix of pleasure and shame that’s wrapped in the sexuality. Was that challenging for you?
Sapphire: That was really frightening for me. What I wanted to do in the book and what I’ve wanted to do in my work all along is show the cycle of abuse. In Push, we’re looking at 180 degrees. We’re looking at a victim, and Precious is someone who we can empathize with, and she becomes a survivor. She gets angry yes, and we can deal with her punching someone in the nose. But whatever it was in her, they couldn’t make her hate. She was a female child, so she sought a circle of women and a communal spirit to get back her power and healing. Abdul is a man. A circle of women is not going to make him feel better, in fact it would probably make him feel worse. He needs to feel the power that was taken away from him. I kept challenging myself to have the courage to tell the story that I knew was real. When I was on tour with Push, people would come up to me, social workers and psychiatrists, and tell me how they see stories like that every day, or people who actually went through similar paths as Precious. I wasn’t really having that experience with The Kid, and I can see why… I mean, how many people are going to come up and say “I’ve had experiences like that…” But two young professional women came up to me in Kansas City at a reading and said “My God, we hear these stories every day.” So of course my ears prick up and I ask where they work, and they say, “We’re death row lawyers. By the time we hear the stories, it’s too late. So we’re glad you’re telling it.”
AB: So am I. Both Push and The Kid are written in first person active. As a writer, I understand how challenging of a way this is to approach a story. You’re basically crawling into the skin of your protagonist and you’re going through those experiences with he or she, writing from the inside out, in the moment. It’s a long time to be looking out from someone else’s eyes, especially in such a dark room.
Sapphire: It’s a long time, and you know, honestly when I finished the Kid I said, it’s the last time (laughter). From now on I’ll be in third person and if I need to get in closer I’ll go into close third. This was really agonizing for me. Push was even harder because although there were no limits to Precious’ intelligence or creativity I had to confine myself to the limits of Precious’ language. She couldn’t read, but at least with The Kid he was a reader and a burgeoning intellectual. What was really hard for me was writing with someone who was so emotionally shut down in so many ways. That’s why you have the strong female characters, even though they’re coming apart themselves. The great grandmother, and Eli, the young dancer he falls in love with… they become the empathic parts of him that he needs to develop. The great grandmother, her feelings cannot be hurt! The love that she has for this kid is so great that he can act out until he gets tired of acting out and she just keeps coming back. “You’s the one I been waitin’ for, you’s the seed,” she tells him. He cannot alienate her. Of course, she symbolizes all the shame and pain he feels. He wants to be the new black man without the history. He doesn’t want his personal history of his mother dying of AIDS in poverty, and of course he doesn’t want his collective history of having been descended from slaves. But she’s there to remind him that without a history, without a past he is an empty, hollow man… he will go on to create plastic art, to be nothing. So she provides that for him, and it’s through her that he makes his first emotional leap. He’s lost everything, his mama, his home, his computer, but the end of the big interaction between him and his grandmother, the one possession he has that he cherishes, his kaleidoscope, he gives it to her. He feels for her, he’s able to open up to his collective history, and empathize… oh, the slavery days, the destruction of the black race in America. There’s a psychiatrist who writes about trauma and recovery, and one of the things she says in dealing with trauma victims, of war, of rape… you know when they have made a forward movement because their trauma has created a kind of narcissism around them and they have a right to it… but when that person can begin to open their eyes to other’s trauma, like oh, this person lost their family in the massacre at MyLai, or this person lost their eyes in Afghanistan, when they begin to be able to hold hands with each other and see the collective hurting of the world, they’ve made a huge step forward. We see that in Push. Precious is so empathic and open, so when she goes to the incest survivor meeting her whole world wakes up, oh my God, so many people have suffered! It takes a lot more than that for Abdul to understand how other people have suffered. It’s not until he’s dancing, improvising that he opens his heart enough to feel the pain… to feel the pain of the Vietnamese farmer who is thrown down the well by an African-American psychopath in Vietnam, to feel what it’s like to be blasted open… he begins to feel for other human beings. That is a reflection of him coming into the love for this woman.
AB: For me, when he gives the kaleidoscope to his great grandmother, its the most obvious yet most beautiful of metaphors… the moment of compassion when he begins to transcend his own damage. Because you go through such intense emotional journeys with your characters, do you have rituals to help you as a writer?
Sapphire: I think the big thing that has allowed me to go certain places is that I usually try to write in that nether space between wake and sleep. So I write first thing in the morning. Even if I have to do chores in the morning I try to stay in that morning space… and stay with my writing first thing in the morning. I think what people who are successful at going deep into human trauma do is compartmentalize, if they are not to go crazy themselves. Now I know of artists who have gone deep into human trauma and have not emerged… Paul Celan, who wrote poems about the holocaust, committed suicide. They go to bring forth the work and then they go back in. Lucille Clifton has a beautiful poem about it, about her mother who brought life to these children by bringing them out of the high grass and then wandered back into the high grass herself. Being able to compartmentalize, being able to use the tools that the culture gives us… we’ve got therapists, we’ve got 12-step programs, we don’t have to drink ourselves to death or live the lives of the artists of the 1940’s and ‘50’s.
AB: Yes, there’s a much greater awareness of self-care.
Sapphire: We now have information they didn’t have. Just like it would be silly for artists of the ‘40’s and ‘50’s to die of tuberculosis, like the Victorian artists did. Each generation of artists functions on a better level. Not that I necessarily function on a better level, but I have learned how not to totally get sunk. I know sometimes it has affected me because I go around people who do other types of work and other types of writing and I can see how, over the years my viewpoint, the way I live life, a certain kind of solitude I seek, I’m not the same as them. But at least I’m not shaking a cup on the subway, you know what I mean? I haven’t jumped off a bridge, I’m still able to function! There was a time in the middle of The Kid… I never thought that I’d commit suicide because my life impulse is too strong, but I did think that I might abandon the text, where I might have said F-it, let me go on and write a happily-ever-after. There was really a point where I said, can I stay in this? And than I started to imagine, well what are people gonna think? I mean, they really thought I was crazy with Push! One time I went to a reading in Alabama and the woman who was there to greet me said, “You just look so normal! Your writing is so abnormal, we didn’t know what to expect!” So I’m thinking if they had issues with Push, what will they think now with The Kid? (laughter)
AB: I for one am very grateful that you had the courage to persevere because it’s an absolutely brilliant and brave book, and the writing is spectacular. What writings inspired you when you were young?
Sapphire: My mother was a big reader and her favorite author was James Baldwin so I started reading Baldwin young… but I never really thought that I could be like him, didn’t think that I could do what James Baldwin was doing… it was a little bit over my head when I was that young. There was a pop psychology book my mother had called the 50 Minute Hour. It was a psychiatrist’s analysis of five or ten psychiatric patients. I remember reading that and thinking, I’m going to be a psychiatrist. It was in that text that I began to be obsessed with the workings of the human mind. So it was James Baldwin and then reading this book about psychiatric patients made me think how can I get more of this, how can I find out more about the functioning of the human mind? From then on I was always reading something about psychology. Then I began reading Dostoyevsky, Kafka, and at the same time reading Zora Neale Hurston and Alice Walker. I think Alice Walker is much more of a psychological novelist than people give her credit for. She’s seen mostly as a social realist but especially in some of her short stories, she’s really delving into how the human mind works. I’m fascinated with how people think, why people do horrible things, good things, why will a woman sacrifice her whole life for another human being, why there’s a Ted Bundy… these fundamental questions invaded me early. Coming of age during the Vietnam war we were starting to hear about the atrocities over there… and that never left me. And then when I started seeing the boys come home… we didn’t use the word post-traumatic stress… in the African American community we were just seeing these people come home, how does the song go? I sent you a nice boy and you sent me back a junkie. What was happening? What is the societal secret? Some of the power of The Kid is that it unzips some of the secrets.
AB: What’s next for you?
Sapphire: I have two projects… one is a collection of poetry so I’d like to start sending out some of those poems. And I’m working on another novel, which I don’t really want to give away, but after Precious and The Kid I don’t want to write about kids ever again! (laughter) So I’m looking at parents now, the lives of adults… and issues like how can we be so rich here, and yet still have so much poverty? There are affluent countries that don’t have huge pockets of poverty! Why have we settled for that? The vast majority of our homeless population, they’re telling us now, are children who wish they had a home… so the abuse of power stays on my mind, with poverty as a manifestation of it.
AB: The statistics on homeless youth are staggering. I’ve had to learn how to compartmentalize while volunteering with homeless kids in Hollywood… it’s really difficult to see all these teenagers, some of them really young, and young with babies too, trying to make it on the streets.
Sapphire: And I think it’s intense for these kids in a very different way then it’s ever been. Back then, poor people didn’t even have TV’s, they didn’t have the internet. Here you have people who can get a drug store cell phone and go on the internet and still be homeless. And they’re looking at Kim Kardashian in $700 panties and they’re constantly exposed to this affluence. There’s a part of you that has to ask, why?
AB: I started spending time in Trinidad in 1987 and it’s a magical culture, a carnival culture that looks at art as a fundamental human right. Music, dance costumes, painting… everyone creative, everyone chill… beautiful people. When I first started going there they didn’t even have MTV, music videos, they had their own beautiful idiosyncratic culture. And then as American media started its noxious creep into that culture, with the thug music scene, the bling, the crazy money and gangster rap, the reverence for wealth at any cost... boy’s pants started hangin’ too low and the guns came over from Venezuela… it’s still a beautiful culture, but the country has became more and more violent.
Sapphire: The media kind of presents this obscene wealth as the norm, like the norm is to look like Mary J. Blige. We’re not all that gifted looking! Or Kim Kardashian. She has become famous for nothing. Paris Hilton. What have they done? When I grew up people became famous because they sang, they danced. In capitalism, knowing what will sell is about creating the desire.
AB: Yes, it's a wicked type of social engineering that's been going on for decades. It’s so great to talk with you! Thanks so much for your time… and work.
Sapphire: And thank you for taking the issues in the book seriously, as opposed to sensationalizing them or talking trash! It’s been a pleasure.
AB: One last question to ask… what did you think about the film adaptation of PUSH, PRECIOUS?
Sapphire: I loved it! Loved it. Monique took it to another level!
AB: Yes she did!
Sapphire: And Gabourey is a gift from the Gods. She’s an African American. Her daddy is Senegalese and her mommy is African American. They said to me, “There are no people like Precious in Hollywood.” And Lee Daniels said to me, “Don’t worry Sapphire, I’ll find her.” Lee said “It’s not going to be the book. You want the book, read the book.” And there was only so far we could go with certain issues if we wanted it to not be an X-rated film. So some things had to go. But hopefully people will do as I did when I went to see The Godfather. I went to see the film, and then I bought the book! We couldn’t have had a better Precious, we couldn’t have had a more beautiful, articulate, wonderful girl than Gabourey. And Monique brought some acting to the screen that has never been seen before.
AB: Monique was the most astonishing to me. Gabourey was incredible, yes, but Monique blew my head off. I can only imagine how excited you must have been when you were watching those performances for the first time.
Sapphire: It was thrilling. And it was so unexpected! That’s why Lee Daniels should have won an Oscar for directing. He was like a can opener, he opened those women up! They’ve all been in movies before… Mariah Carey, all those women. Lee took it to another level too, and I think he still hasn’t been given the credit he deserves for creating the environment that brought those actresses to the level they went to. He’s a genius.
AB: It’s true and I’m sure he’ll thank you for saying that, but you started it!
Sapphire: (laughter) Yes, as Abdul said, “I did plant the seed.”
