by Mary Adams, AWC The Hague
We often think of the fight for literacy taking place in the halls of government or with human rights activists. Author Sapphire takes the fight for literacy into the boxing ring of real life. The main character, Precious Jones, is a sixteen-year-old girl living in a house of domestic and sexual abuse. She is living in a dark world of pain: overweight, illiterate, HIV-positive and pregnant (for the second time) with her father’s child. Her education and self-identity journey begins when she joins an adult literacy program. Quite frankly, this is the most shocking and brutal book I have EVER read. The unsinkable determination to learn, to read, is a lightning rod for Precious. This book challenges the concept that literacy simply means the ability to read and write. It proposes that literacy is the road to freedom. It may be labeled as fiction, but the author confided that Precious is a composite character created from the real-life stories she encountered while teaching from 1987 to 1993 in an adult-literacy program in Harlem. This is horrific yet hope-filled story is beautifully written in prose, illiterate dialect, poetry and storytelling.
(Push was the basis for the 2009 feature film Precious, which was nominated for six Academy Awards.)
(Photo courtesy of Mary Adams)
