What will poet Ishmael Reed say to poet Sapphire if Precious brings home Oscars?

Sapphire, author of Push

With all the talk of the movie Precious having ruled the NAACP Image Awards and speculation about how cast members Gabourey Sidibe and Mo'nique as well as director Lee Daniels may fare at tomorrow night's Academy Awards, one would think there would be more interviews with Sapphire, the author of Push. The movie Precious is based on that novel.

The African-American Books Examiner, however, has found only two relatively recent interviews with the poet and novelist. One is from Ernest Hardy who blogs at Blood Beats, and the other is posted at St. Louis Today, which includes choice words from Sapphire to fellow poet Ishmael Reed.

Here's a brief excerpt from Hardy's interview, which he wrote for the LA Weekly. He begins asking the poet about the original fury over Push, which was published in the 90s.

LA WEEKLY: How much of the enormous controversy that greeted Push upon its initial publication was due to your taking on the sacred cow of the African-American community...

SAPPHIRE: Black motherhood. It was totally around that, I believe, because the other aspects brought up in the book had been dealt with before. We’d had The Bluest Eye. We’d had The Color Purple. And I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, which explicitly dealt with male/female sexual abuse. I think to show the mother as not a redemptive character, to show her as perpetrator, was in some ways to break the stranglehold of black female victimhood. Part of being fully human is that we are victimizers also. I had one older African-American woman tell me that the only reason white people paid me money for that book was ’cause I made us look bad. And she went on — I guess she had read a little Marx or something — to say that I was a tool of the oppressor.

When I look at rape, incest, I don’t look at this as being male behavior. This is human behavior. We know that this is what people will do to each other. We know that sometimes this is what women do to children. We unfortunately know this is what children do to other children. So this is not behavior that is totally gender-specific and it is not behavior that is age-related. I was trying to show the decayed soul, the soul that is past redemption. And some of us are. That’s just how it is — unless there is something really magnificent that happens. Many people ... first it’s the culture, but then they cooperate with the culture and become horrific people. (Read more here)

Telling the story of Precious Jones is Sapphire's attempt to do what writing artists have tried to do for centuries, tell the unvarnished truth about life. It's this honest telling that has caused her novel to be cast aside by some black critics concerned about positive black images and people like poet Ishmael Reed to lambaste the movie Precious. Sapphire's St. Louis Today/St. Louis Post-Dispatch interview, which courted controversy solely because of its ending quote in which Sapphire says she thinks Reed has lost his mind, is a light look at the poet, as you can see from the first question and answer from the interview:

On what she thought of the movie "Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire":

"I really love the movie, and I was really pleased with all the performances. (Director Lee Daniels) told me when he was filming it's not going to be the book, but he was going to stay true to the spirit of the book. There were a lot of changes that anyone who read the book would recognize. But five minutes into the movie I was totally engrossed in the life of Precious and not thinking about the book." (Read more)

But this is what the poet/novelist said about Reed:

On a recent column in The New York Times by poet-essayist Ishmael Reed critical of the movie (to which she sent in an official response):

"I think he's mentally ill. He's lost it. It's like he's departed from being a creative artist to being a basher. … He's a forgotten man, eclipsed by women ascending to new heights and getting prizes. Instead of applauding them, he goes on a rampage."

In his Feb. 4 op-ed piece for the New York Times, Reed asserts that Precious indulges black hate in a way that that can only be loved by white Hollywood and white critics who want to perpetuate negative black stereotypes. In response to Sapphire's calling him insane, he wrote a piece suggesting Precious did not deserve its NAACP kudos, worse he suggests Tyler Perry, one of the film's executive producers, bribed the organization for its Image Award wins.

Suppose the producers of a nominated picture like “Hurt Locker,” donated one million dollars to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and on the night of the Oscar presentations “Hurt Locker” received Oscars for best picture, best actress, best supporting actress and a special honor was awarded to the “producer.”

This is exactly what happened at the NAACP Image awards last Friday night. The film “Precious” received six awards as a kind of payback to Tyler Perry who donated one million plus dollars to the organization last November.

As a result, the NAACP gave segregated Hollywood the green light to admire this abhorrent, repellant movie. They must be gloating over at EW.com (Entertainment Weekly) sites with connections to the Oscars establishment and where my Op-Ed about “Precious” printed in The New York Times was the subject of criticism by Owen Gleiberman and Lisa Schwarzbaum. Their criticism was picked up by Sasha Stone at awardsdaily.com. They and the bloggers who weighed in about my state of mind and my low I.Q. and how I was connected to the part of the body that plays a key role in the elimination of wastes will probably use these NAACP awards as justification for their defense of the film and as evidence of the black community’s support for “Precious.” (Read more)

Mr. Reed pulls no punches.

Nordette Adams, the African-American Books Examiner, wrote a review of Push for BlogHer.com last year, "Sapphire's Push: Merciless Honesty" and appreciates Sapphire's ear for dialogue. She also published at the Examiner a round-up of bloggers taking on the novel as the movie gained attention, and blogger Megan Smith, writing elsewhere, reviewed the movie and called it almost too real to appreciate.

Unfortunately, not too long after Adams wrote her review of Push, the story of Shaniya Davis surfaced and the writer addressed the tragedy under "A Story Nearly as Ugly as the Movie Precious." The sad news echoed that Sapphire's novel is not a fantasy. Another blogger left a comment on the Davis post conveying that she had experienced abuse similar to the kind suffered by the character Precious in Push and the movie Precious with similarities to what little Shaniya allegedly experienced at the hands of her mother. The commenter said, "This is my story except I wasn't murdered."

Related: Blogger's novel, Orange Mint and Honey, becomes LMN's Sins of the Mother.