From Living to Eat to Writing to Live: Metaphors of Consumption and Production in Sapphire’s Push

“Wipe that look off your face or I’ll knock it off. Dry up,” he’d scream, “and eat.” —Toi Derricotte, “When My Father Was Beating Me”

(1997)

In “When My Father Was Beating Me,” Toi Derricotte recounts the two forms of parental abuse she endured—her father’s physical abuse and her mother’s silence and acquiescence. She writes, “I’d hear my mother in the kitchen preparing dinner. I’d hear the spoons hitting the mixing bowl, the clatter of silver falling into the drawer. I’d hear the pot lids clink and rattle.” She continues, “though her sounds could come to my ears, my screams and cries and whimpers, his demands and humiliations, the sounds of his hands hitting my body, couldn’t pierce back the other way” (13). In this instance, the image of a mother providing “beautiful food” yet withholding emotional sustenance illustrates a view contrary to that found in many black women’s writing on food, cooking, and kitchens. Though many African Americans find community bonding and self-expression in women’s space near the stove, sink, and kitchen table, the kitchen space (and by extension, food) can also subjugate and oppress. Such is the case in Sapphire’s Push (1996), a novel in which the protagonist, Claireece Precious Jones, has a destructive relationship with food and, like Derricotte, suffers from violence within the home.¹ Throughout her short life, Precious is raped and sexually abused; her body is exploited, misused, and beaten, and, in the end, diseased with HIV. To escape into numbness and achieve some sense of emotional safety, however illusory and precarious, Precious eats and overeats. Her unwholesome consumption of everything (everything her body ingests, digests, or absorbs, including but not limited to food, both involuntary and otherwise) is a result of a childhood and adolescence during which her sexuality is exploited and her human rights are suppressed. It is not until she stops consuming compulsively, radically alters her relationship with food, and begins “producing” (producing written words and literally producing and raising a child) that she acquires the tools needed to comes to terms with her mistreated and “diseased” body, and is able to achieve personal freedom.

Push brutally exposes multilayered issues affecting the black community and black women in particular: racism, poverty, sexual abuse, illiteracy, colorism, self-hatred, obesity, inadequate social institutions, and AIDS. Precious Jones is a victim of all of these problems. Her relationship with her body and her multiple diseases—social, emotional, and physical—all result from the brutality of patriarchal and matriarchal control over her body in her home, community, and society. Precious’s father, Carl Kenwood Jones, enacts sexual violence, forcing Precious to “eat” him, while her mother, an agent of patriarchy, forces Precious to binge: “Mama give me orders, Daddy porno talk me” (62). Outside of the home, Precious’s body continues to suffer under patriarchal “rules.” As Joan Jacobs Brumberg writes, society “treats women’s bodies in a sexually brutal and commercially rapacious way” (210). Precious fears the pain, humiliation, and dangers of sex and being sexualized, but having internalized societal standards of beauty, she still desires sexual acceptance. She describes a fantasy version of as “light skinned, thereby treated right and loved by boyz,” an indication of the extent to which her self-worth is dependent on male desire and beauty issues such as colorism (113).

Significant to Precious’s development is when she stops taking things “in” and pushes them out. The exception, of course, is when she takes in knowledge. Yet what her body and mind ultimately produce are the most important in terms of changing the downward spiral that her life has become. In short, as Precious learns language, writes poetry, and gives birth to a son she can love and protect (unlike her first child, whom she doesn’t raise), she “pushes out” the vileness in her past and “pushes out” words that reject the dangerous consumption of food and sexual perversion that have entrapped her in self-hatred and self-destruction...