Sapphire’s PUSH for Erotic Literacy and Black Girl Sexual Agency

Abstract

I place Hortense Spillers in conversation with Aaliyah and Precious to begin this analysis of Sapphire’s PUSH—and indirectly of Lee Daniels’s Precious. Spillers and Aaliyah represent the psychoanalytical, sociological, and cultural configurations important to Precious and to the telling of her story. The novel is a rewriting of a lopsided sociometry or Eurocentric psychomythology, as Spillers might note, while Lee Daniels movie is, as James Baldwin would say, “the Devil finding work.” Baldwin writes:

Now, obviously, the only way to translate the written word to the cinema involves doing considerable violence to the written word, to the extent, indeed, of forgetting the written word. A film is meant to be seen, and, ideally, the less a film talks, the better. The cinematic translation, nevertheless, however great and necessary the violence it is compelled to use on the original form, is obliged to remain faithful to the intention, and the vision of the original form. The necessary violence of the translation involves making subtle and difficult choices. The root motive of the choices made can be gauged by the effect of these deliberate choices … resulting in a willed and deliberate act—that is, the film which we are seeing is the film we are intended to see.

Why? What do the filmmakers wish us to learn? (107)

With Sapphire’s work, what gets lost in translation from novel to film is black girls’ sexual agency and the necessity of erotic literacy for that agency. The film does not wish us to learn this, while the book stresses this message.

Liyah’s got a thing for you … can’t let go ….

—Aaliyah featuring R. Kelly, “Age Ain’t Nothing but a Number”

Where my Color Purple? Where my god most high? Where my king? Where my black love? Where my man love? Woman love? Any kinda love? Why me? I don’t deserve this …. Why? Why? It’s a movie, splashing like swimming pool at Y, in my head.

—Sapphire, PUSH¹

This lopsided textual sociometry that eats up female difference and identity in notions of the ahistoric “Familius Aeternus” essentially reconfigures in fiction by Black American writers as a puzzle, not a closure. This articulated problematic comes nearer the “truth” because it plants ambiguity at the heart of an interpretation of the Father’s law.

—Hortense Spillers, “‘The Permanent Obliquity of an In(pha)llibly Straight’: In the Time of the Daughters and the Fathers”²