Signifying without Specifying: Racial Discourse in the Age of Obama

Conclusion. The Demands of Precious

164 Conclusion The Demands of Precious Lee Daniels’s 2009 film, Precious: Based on the Novel by Sapphire, begins with the appearance of the words “LE DANS TINMIN” written in a red scrawl at the bottom right of a black screen. A moment later “(Lee Daniels Entertainment)” emerges in a standard font below the original phrase. Both titles are replaced by another pair, “IN ASHLAN WIT SMOKWD TINMANT,” again in the uneven red lettering and then “(in association with Smokewood Entertainment).” Once these two fade, the film’s title, “PRECIOUS,” appears in red, followed closely by “(BASE ON NOL BY SAF),” and finally, “(Based on the novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire)” again in standard font. The considerable critical discussion that Precious generated largely focused on the representation of its protagonist, Claireece “Precious” Jones, an overweight African American teenager who is pregnant for the second time by her father. However, the movie begins as a study in language whereby the script juxtaposes the idiosyncratic vocabulary of its functionally illiterate title character against standard English. The red print is the language of Precious, a kind of contemporary eye dialect or language that looks like dialect but does not necessarily sound different. George Knapp, who first defined the term in The English Language in America (1925), noted, “The convention violated is one of the eyes, not of the ear” (228). I emphasize this definition of eye dialect because, as the movie subsequently demonstrates , Precious speaks in standard, easily comprehended English. However , although her language is aurally familiar, the opening titles make her speech visually distinct. Unstable, tentative, and private, this is language CONCLUSION 165 that may have no intimate listener. Its uneven spelling—note the difference between “TINMIN” and “TINMANT”—suggests that no one can comprehend it without resorting to the parenthetical translations. Precious assumes that its audience will be disoriented by the language of its protagonist. Unlike Obama who speaks in coded tropes such that listeners can either read race in his speeches or instead hear calls for a generalized national unity, the movie’s opening titles instruct audience members how to read. The juxtaposed lines declaim: this is the language of Precious, and this is your language. Although Precious speaks familiar English, her printed speech encodes difference. Without the parenthetical translations, it is impenetrable. The sharp contrast between the paired lines may seem to invite a simplistic mapping of racial duality, but we cannot easily assume that the written language of Precious is black and its translation is white. To do so returns us to the racism “Recitatif” teases its readers to impose. Instead, the film’s opening titles announce the necessity of translation for audience members of all racial backgrounds. To see the words of Precious is to recognize her difference, a difference that marks her not as black but as lacking an audience fluent in her language. Precious combines seemingly every trope of otherness; she is black, female, overweight, dark-skinned, HIV-positive, and a victim of incest and physical abuse, but what the opening titles make most explicit is that she is a person without intimates. No one can understand the opening titles without the parenthetical translations. While Obama reaches out to audiences through the ambiguity of “race-specific, race-free language,” Precious’s written speech marks her as completely isolated from others. She cannot read her own translation, much less understand a world beyond the circumscribed streets of Harlem in the 1980s. If Obama performs intimacy to draw audiences of all racial backgrounds, Precious represents the absence of intimacy—not the unifying possibilities of blackness, but the abiding isolation of abjection. Released approximately one year after the 2008 election, Precious, in its sharp repudiation of the post-racial narrative attached to Obama, indicts racial transcendence as a narrow privilege if not a complete fiction. While he soared to victory, she seems to wallow in the intractable shackles of otherness, mired in speech that is barely comprehensible. However, just as Obama makes blackness safe by revealing familiar, affirming speech, Precious is also a study in the development of intimacy. The key difference between them is that while Obama constructs his listeners, no matter their particular racial identity, as already intimate, already fluent in his unifying rhetoric , Precious assumes that its audience is estranged from the experiences of its protagonist. Nothing about her language is familiar; nothing is safe and reassuring. Obama unified the country (if only briefly...