COVID-19, like all diseases, hits hardest the poor, people of colour, and the socially vulnerable-people who are incarcerated, who live communally, people living in nursing homes.”
And like 25 years ago, the people dying now and being dumped in unmarked, or mass graves were employed in professions like mine and looked like me and the people I taught. “The same challenges of race and caste which beset us 25 years ago beset us now when things should be so much better. Twelve years after the book was turned into an academy award winning film called Precious, starring Gabourey Sidibe, Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey, Sapphire says that like the HIV/AIDS crisis of the 80s and 90s: Mo’Nique and Gabourey Sidibe in Precious (2009)
In the book’s new edition, released on 24 June, Sapphire discusses stark parallels between the institutional racism and classism that trapped her protagonist into a cycle of academic underperformance and dependence on welfare and how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected Black people. Push was first published in 1998 by American writer Sapphire, who was simultaneously praised and courted controversy for her book’s graphic account of an illiterate inner-city teenager growing up in a cycle of abuse, violence and a welfare system designed to keep her in poverty. Placed in an alternative teaching programme, Precious learns to read and write, finding empowerment and community among the young women in her class. Push is the harrowing yet uplifting story of Precious Jones: sixteen years old, illiterate, pregnant by her own father for the second time and kicked out of school. Sapphire's work has been translated in eleven languages and has been adapted for stage in the United States and Europe.Twenty-five years after the release of Push, the agonising book exploring incest, rape and HIV/AIDS, its author, Sapphire reflects on how little has changed around structural inequalities around race.
About her last book of poetry, Poet's and Writer's Magazine wrote, 'with her soul on the line in each verse, her latest collection, Black Wings & Blind Angels, retains Sapphire's incendiary power to win hearts and singe minds.' Sapphire's work has appeared in The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Black Scholar, Spin, and Bomb. Push was named by TimeOut New York as one of the top ten books of 1996 and nominated for an NAACP Image Award in the category of Outstanding Literary Work of Fiction. Sapphire is the author of American Dreams, a collection of poetry which was cited by Publisher's Weekly as, 'one of the strongest debut collections of the nineties.' Her novel Push, won the Book-of-the-Month Club Stephen Crane award for First Fiction, the Black Caucus of the American Library Association's First Novelist Award, and in Great Britain, the Mind Book of the.
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