There hasn’t been a black women author, since maybe Alice Walker, who has inspired both praise from the mainstream literary establishment and blistering criticism, particularly from the black middle class, until Sapphire arrived on the scene in the mid-90s taking the world by storm with her underground urban classic, PUSH. The author’s recent novel, The Kid, picks-up where the novel PUSH leaves off with Clarice Precious Jones, an HIV-positive teenage mom (who was impregnated by her father), who by the close of the heart-wrenching 109-minute film is seen holding her baby boy, Abdul.
Navigating the hot-cold critical reception has been a point of frustration for the author, though it doesn’t seem to have deterred her from continuing to write unabashedly about taboo subjects like sexual abuse, the HIV-AIDS epidemic, and black life at the margins of society. Her work isn’t concerned with placating middle-class black folks who would prefer “uplifting” tales about the community. Rather her work unsettles, disturbs, and hopes to rupture any misplaced notions of security her reader may have as poverty and the AIDS epidemic threatens everyone, says Sapphire. If there’s one thing critics can agree on it’s that her work is not for the faint-of-heart, naïve, or indifferent reader.
theGrio caught up with Sapphire as she gears up for her biggest tour ever beginning this month.
In a telephone interview from the author’s New York apartment in the Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood, we discussed her new novel that gives a voice to the millions of orphans caused by HIV-AIDS, why sexual abuse is so prevalent in her work, and the heartbreaking reality that black children are last in line to be adopted.
theGrio: Is The Kid a sequel to PUSH?
Sapphire: I wouldn’t call it that.
Can we say a companion book, maybe?
This novel continues the journey of what it means to be young and black in the epidemic that we live in — In the AIDS epidemic, In the cutting away of social services. There are even less places for Abdul when his mother dies than there were for his mother, Precious. So I pick up right almost where I left off. But I’m not telling the same story emotionally because this is a whole different character. But some of the same social conditions do exist. We will see Precious die of AIDS. We see her generation will give birth to the beginning of AIDS orphans.
Do you have the galley or the hardcover?
The hardcover.
You know the dedication is to the millions . . .[the dedication reads: For Angela. And for the 16 million and still counting orphaned by HIV-AIDS.] It’s a continuation. I think I went where I needed to go with Precious. And I wanted to examine the world through Abdul.
Tell me a bit about how you birthed this character, Abdul. I was fascinated with the way his mind works. What was your source material?
Abdul was born like most of literature…from reading and reading. There were novels that were really important to me. I took a year seminar on the work of Richard Wright. I took another seminar reading, in an academic way, the works of Dostoevsky. And I’ve always been a person to read texts, the slave narratives, The Diary of Anne Frank, where people are writing and speaking in the first person.
In PUSH, while it was a difficult novel to write, I was in my own country, in the country of the female with language and words. For language to have been Abdul’s primary means of expression would have been a cop-out. He’s a boy. I really wanted to give him something physical, he was going to paint or dance, he was going to play basketball. I didn’t know what it was but I was going to have to tackle a medium other than having my character write letters. I wanted to give voice to an entity, a spirit that will manifest itself in deeply physical ways. Is Abdul an archetype for black men? How do we place this character?
He is not a Bigger Thomas [from Richard Wright’s Native Son]. He’s not James Baldwin’s Rufus. The thing that I didn’t feel with Rufus or Bigger Thomas is that I was always on the outside of them. And I think that most people who read this book will enter into Abdul. And they will perceive the world as he perceives it. And his actions will make sense. They won’t seem horrific. They will seem like psychological compensations for the horror that he’s experienced and they will seem like actions that allow him to survive and to keep his psyche intact.
He’s not an archetype or stereotype. I think he’s a unique child. When you read this story you’ll think yeah I’ve seen him before.
So he’s like every black man in some way.
I don’t think so. I think what we will encounter in many ways is that he will experience some of the things that every black man will experience. Before people know him they perceive him. Like being a Muslim or a Catholic. He’s large and he is black. He is perceived in a certain kind of way. He instills fear in people. In school people are shocked when he is the best in class.
Those two often don’t go together — being big and black and very intelligent.
Exactly! People aren’t anticipating that he has all the answers in earth science. That he will have read Hamlet in advance of the class so he can anticipate the teacher’s questions. So he has already, in his own way, been confronted already with stereotypes of who he is.
Let’s talk about the legacy of abuse in your work: Precious was abused and we see it happening to Abdul in the new novel. What made you continue with that thread of abuse with Abdul and why is that subject given so much real estate in your work?
People are missing [the point] because the abuse that happened to Abdul is so intense and the cycle had been broken. Precious does not re-abuse. She uses what little time, money, and energy that she has to take her little boy to the Schomberg, seeing that he has a computer, seeing that he has after school activities, does his homework, etc. Not until the social conditions, the safety net tears when she dies, does he fall.
And he has to go to multiple foster homes?
At the funeral, he is still an innocent. He is still in the top reading group, still on track to be the first member of his family to complete college and become a part of the black middle class. So when that women dies and there’s no safety net, there’s no social services, no extended family—he falls.
Wow!
And I don’t want people to forget that. And I don’t want people to forget that if he had been a pretty little white girl, he probably would have gotten adopted.
Yeah, you put that in the novel. Is that true? That biracial and light-skinned children are adopted first?
Umm hmm.
