Precious is a 16-year-old Black girl in 1987 Harlem who is kicked out of school because she is pregnant for the second time. No matter how much damage she has endured, Precious discovers that she has value and deserves to be loved. Nevertheless, Precious learns that while the past cannot be erased or undone, she can-with some help-start where she is and pull herself up. Childbirth has permanently marked her body. She has a son to raise while she is still growing up herself. She is living with HIV and the knowledge that it will significantly shorten her life.
Precious works toward self-empowerment through education, community, and her own parenting, but the trauma of abuse and neglect leaves permanent scars, altering her life in indelible ways. In contrast, the ending of Push is more realistic. Rain, critiques The Color Purple for its idealistic happy ending. The teacher of the alternative class, Ms. Precious is a young woman who has fallen through the cracks of society, and she wonders constantly if others would see her or treat her like she mattered if she were whiter or prettier. Sapphire, however, was also a victim of childhood sexual assault by her father, and the world she depicts in the novel is one that she has argued needs to be made visible. During the production of the film, screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher was so upset about this depiction that he left the project.
The reception of Push echoed some of the controversy surrounding The Color Purple, with some critics arguing that the novel portrayed Black men in a negative light, offering no redemption for Precious’s abusive father. Set nearly 100 years earlier than Push, Alice Walker’s novel unfolds through the perspective of Celie, who is also repeatedly raped and impregnated by her father. Push resembles a modern-day The Color Purple, which Precious engages with as she learns how to read. In an alternative education program, Precious meets other women who have been victimized and forced into invisibility, developing a new family made up of people who see her, encourage her, and show her love for the first time in her life. Precious has always felt invisible, wearing her large body and attitude as armor while the education, social work, and justice systems fail to teach and protect her. The child is her second, conceived by her father after a lifetime of rape, molestation, and abuse. Push is narrated by Precious, a Black teenager whose school expels her at the age of 16 because she is pregnant. Sapphire continued the story with a 2011 sequel called The Kid, which focuses on Abdul, Precious’s son. She published her first novel, Push, in 1996 in 2009 it was adapted into the Academy Award-winning film Precious. Sapphire is the pen name of author Ramona Lofton.
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