"They Look Way Above Me, Put Me Out of Their Eyes": Seeing the Subjects in Precious: An Introduction in Two Parts

Upon the 1996 release of Sapphire's novel Push, a reviewer noted that it was "a fascinating novel that may well find its place in the African American literary canon." It has taken years for Push—a disturbing, demanding, and irrepressibly compelling assemblage of young, urban women's stories—to edge its way into American and African American critical spaces. And despite its similarity to, and dialogue with, an important body of black women's literature and film comparable in substance and scope, Push is not now part of the "African American literary canon."¹ It has been conspicuously silenced, marginalized, and sidelined—both there and not there, both seen and rendered critically invisible. In this regard it can be described as fundamentally an outlawed work with outlawed subjects—bodies and topics. Poignantly fugitive, it has nonetheless now been rendered even more crucial and haunting still, now more at large than ever, by Lee Daniels's powerful 2009 motion picture Precious, which is itself a momentous and unflinching work of courage and dramatic performance as significant as the novel in mining spaces of gendered violence, silence, and silencing that demand critical confrontation and attention. Neither Precious nor Push is a story of "the black family," "the black woman," "the black man," or "the black community." Both are, rather, powerful stories of injury, hope, the limits of hope, and relentless, sometimes faltering, determination, stories relevant to the lives and experiences of a broad racial spectrum of subjugated young women—American and not, black and not, heterosexual and lesbian— women who are differently situated, to be sure, but who are living, dying, hoping, and loving on the barbed edges of the social and the political.

What is the social and the ontological value of these female subjects in the realms where they must fight to live and where they survive and die in said fights? How are their existential realities and predicaments seen and felt by them, first and foremost, but also, if at all, by those who act upon them socially and politically to foster their life or death? What small threads hold out hope for positive transformation in the lives of these female subjects as they navigate the social, the economic, and the political—their being-in-the-world? What factors constrain slivers of hope, much less their positive transformation into being something other than the subjugated, something other than bodies in abjection, social beings who are produced, engaged, and understood as normative aberration? Are such matters simply a question of the subjugated and marginalized female subject working her way up, as it were, and choosing to defy her subjugation and what has been called by some a politics of victimization? Do such matters merely entail questions of subjugated female subjects choosing the right pathways, the right attitudes and dispositions, the higher ground that will usher them into visibility and into livable lives beyond zones of repression? Whose gaze is important, or should be privileged, when crucial questions of life and premature death are at issue for subjugated female subjects? In the contexts of assaults on young women's lives, unyielding circumstances of traumatic abuse and domestic violence, urgent predicaments of negotiating life with HIV or AIDS illness—in the contexts of these life-threatening exigencies, whose gaze upon the female subject is important and should ultimately be privileged in real scenes of life and in scenes on the film screen?² Whose mirror, whose eyes? Lee Daniels's film Precious studiously and unapologetically engages with these critical ethical questions. Further, the critical dialogues toward potential answers which the film articulates and which it has provoked among its viewers— these dialogues, and/or the protective silence they have instigated among some class publics—are as complex as the film's female subjects and as the film's contemporary viewers.

Critical responses to Precious that completely disregard and evade these crucial questions, or seek to silence them, are not simply indicative of empathetic viewers' emotional difficulty in watching the film's perplexing scenes. They...