Brittney Cooper
"Maybe 1*11 Be a Poet, Rapper*': Hip-Hop Feminism
and Literary Aesthetics in Push
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the number of mainstream blackfemale rap ardsts decreased drasdcally. In fact, by 2005, the Grammy Awards had
eliminated the award for best female rap ardst, due to the paucity of nominees.^
Simultaneously, hip-hop Kterature, known alternately as "street Ht," "ghetto ut,"
and "Ut hop," written by black women and marketed to young women and girls from
ages thirteen to thirty, exploded; ddes like Nikki Turner's A Hustler's Wife, sell yearly
in the hundreds of thousands (Marshall, Staples, and Gibson 28). It is not coinci-
dental that the entrepreneurial spirit that has characterized black men's rise to fame
in hip hop has been adopted by female street novelists, many of whom self-publish
their gritty urban tales. The rapid explosion of black female street-lit authors is a
cultural and literary phenomenon that demands the attendon of scholars who are
interested in the ways that black women use literature to ardculate black female
subjecdvity. It stands to reason, then, that if we want to locate narradves of women's
Mves in the hip-hop generadon, we must turn to hip hop's literature.
Sapphire's 1996 novel Push draws on the "gritty urban street chronicles" of hip-
hop aesthedcs to tell the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones, a teenager coming of
age in what William Jelani Cobb refers to as the golden era of hip hop, 1984 to 1992.^
This text predates the rise of hip-hop or street literature by several years.-̂ Sapphire's
effort to de Push, through implicit and explicit textual allusions, to the work of Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Pat Parker connects these seemingly
divergent "high vs. low art" approaches to black women's storytelling. Crides have
tended to ascribe literary value to texts based on their proximity to the aesthedc
qualides of works by more canonical authors, such as Zora Neale Hurston, Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones. Because these novelists have all drawn heavily
on blues and jazz aesthedcs in constructing their novels, literary crides idendfied
the blues and jazz as a significant unifying characterisdc of the African American
women's literary tradidon."^ This has tended to mean that African American literary
texts, pardcularly those of black women, must be beholden to the literary nexus of
jazz and the blues if they want to be considered "serious" literature.
Push acts as a bridge text between earlier generadons of black women's wridng
and the urban street dramas that predominate today. Sapphire's invocadon of hip hop
is an early portrait of a hip-hop aesthedc in prose form that offers relevance while
avoiding the pitfalls of presendsm. Further, the novel offers a cridcal model for
the ways in which hip-hop texts (might) engage with their literary forebears. Push
demonstrates the need for literary works to grapple with the polidcs, poedcs, and
aesthedcs.
Brittney CooperMaybe 111 Be a Poet, Rapper Hip-Hop Fe.docx
1. Brittney Cooper
"Maybe 1*11 Be a Poet, Rapper*': Hip-Hop Feminism
and Literary Aesthetics in Push
In the first decade of the twenty-first century, the number of
mainstream blackfemale rap ardsts decreased drasdcally. In fact,
by 2005, the Grammy Awards had
eliminated the award for best female rap ardst, due to the
paucity of nominees.^
Simultaneously, hip-hop Kterature, known alternately as "street
Ht," "ghetto ut,"
and "Ut hop," written by black women and marketed to young
women and girls from
ages thirteen to thirty, exploded; ddes like Nikki Turner's A
Hustler's Wife, sell yearly
in the hundreds of thousands (Marshall, Staples, and Gibson
28). It is not coinci-
dental that the entrepreneurial spirit that has characterized black
men's rise to fame
in hip hop has been adopted by female street novelists, many of
whom self-publish
their gritty urban tales. The rapid explosion of black female
street-lit authors is a
cultural and literary phenomenon that demands the attendon of
scholars who are
interested in the ways that black women use literature to
ardculate black female
subjecdvity. It stands to reason, then, that if we want to locate
narradves of women's
Mves in the hip-hop generadon, we must turn to hip hop's
literature.
2. Sapphire's 1996 novel Push draws on the "gritty urban street
chronicles" of hip-
hop aesthedcs to tell the story of Claireece "Precious" Jones, a
teenager coming of
age in what William Jelani Cobb refers to as the golden era of
hip hop, 1984 to 1992.^
This text predates the rise of hip-hop or street literature by
several years.-̂ Sapphire's
effort to de Push, through implicit and explicit textual allusions,
to the work of Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, Audre Lorde, and Pat Parker connects
these seemingly
divergent "high vs. low art" approaches to black women's
storytelling. Crides have
tended to ascribe literary value to texts based on their proximity
to the aesthedc
qualides of works by more canonical authors, such as Zora
Neale Hurston, Toni
Morrison, Alice Walker, and Gayl Jones. Because these
novelists have all drawn heavily
on blues and jazz aesthedcs in constructing their novels, literary
crides idendfied
the blues and jazz as a significant unifying characterisdc of the
African American
women's literary tradidon."^ This has tended to mean that
African American literary
texts, pardcularly those of black women, must be beholden to
the literary nexus of
jazz and the blues if they want to be considered "serious"
literature.
Push acts as a bridge text between earlier generadons of black
women's wridng
and the urban street dramas that predominate today. Sapphire's
invocadon of hip hop
4. which are generally characterized as issuing from and being
informed by black male
experiences, informed and shaped by the stories of African
American women?
Sapphire offers preliminary thoughts on how we might answer
these quesdons in an
interview with Literary cride Wendy Rountree, who attempts to
read Push as a blues
novel. Whereas Rountree argues that "Sapphire creates a young
blues woman.
Precious, who conquers physical and emodonal abuse, reclaims
her voice, and tells
her story by masterfully weaving her painful experiences into
blues expression" (133),
Sapphire characterizes the text as a "blues/hip hop/jazz novel."
She notes that in
addidon to the themes of acceptance, submission, and
transcendence that issue
from the blues, "it is in hip hop, the music of Precious'
generadon, that we find the
open defiance, visibility of the formally invisible (ghetto
youth), and the movement
from the periphery of the culture to it's [sic] center" (Sapphire
qtd. in Rountree 133).
Although Rountree acknowledges the hybrid nature of the
novel, hip hop retains
import only parenthedcaUy in her reading. However, Push
acdvely resists a singular
reading through the blues tradidon, because the social concerns
of the hip-hop
generadon primarily inform the protagonist's negodadon of age-
old quesdons
about motherhood, sexualit)', family, and racism.
Instead, Push foregrounds and is informed by a hip-hop
aesthedc. This aesthedc
5. issues from a generational confrontadon with economic lack,
privadon, and the
realides of civil rights-era and Black Power-era dreams
deferred, and takes three
primary forms. First, it uses a kind of social alchemy that
transforms lack into
substance. Lacking access to formal musical training in
increasingly underfunded
public schools, urban youth made their own minimalist
instruments. In the beginning,
hip-hop musicians had three basic instruments: two turntables, a
microphone, and
a person who could beatbox, a technique in which a person blew
air rhythmically
through his or her mouth to create percussion. By the early
1990s, rapper Tupac
Shakur had cemented this pervasive social alchemy by famously
lamenting the expe-
rience of "trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents." Second,
hip-hop music and
cultural expression privilege a well-honed facility for defiance;
in fact, hip-hop
expression could be said to issue from a set of cultural
experiences that pivot upon
a dialecdc of deviance and defiance. By deviance, I refer to the
ways that larger cul-
tural narradves and structures of power sought to demonize and
pathologize black
and brown communides from without. The cultural response to
these condidons
among hip-hop youth was not uplift or respectability polidcs,
nonviolent direct acdon,
or armed polidcal resistance, but open culmral defiance. The
goal of such open
defiance was to demand visibility, recognidon, and voice, if not
access to better social
6. condidons. Finally, hip-hop aesthedcs privilege street
consciousness and cultural
literacy. Hip-hop music and texts celebrate protagonists who
know how to survive
in the mean streets of the city, and these texts issue tests of
one's cultural and street
knowledge, by references to history, current affairs,
geographical locadon, popular
culture, old music, new music, and current slang. Thus, hip-hop
texts provide a
smorgasbord of cultural references, and the reader's or listener's
degree of knowledge
determines the extent to which he or she can make meaning out
of the text and/or
navigate the neighborhood.
Those Are the Breaks: Hip-hop Aesthetics and Literary
Technique
Precious begins her story with a shocking confession: "I was
left back whenI was twelve because I had a baby for my
fahver," (3). Her precarious social
situadon makes her unsure if her story is "even a story," but she
presses on, tesdfying
that she is "gonna try to make sense and tell the truth, else
what's the fucking use?"
5 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
Precious's confrontadonal style reflects the street lit that
emerged after Push, in
which "authors tell their stories boldly, without nuance, and
with pride over and
over again. It's as if street-lit authors are saying, as rappers did
7. in the beginning of
hip hop, 'We are here. This is how it is. Make of us what you
wül' " (Smith 192).
It is September 24,1987. Precious has just walked into "I.S. 146
on 134* Street
between Lenox Avenue and Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. Blvd" in
Harlem (4). This
vivid descripdon of her exact locadon is part of a hip-hop ethos
where physical
locadon, a marker of social locadon, is everything. Two anchor
points situate the
narradve of hip-hop progress: "where ya from" and "where ya
at." School is a
space of contendon for Precious. She is condnually in conflict
with her teachers.
After one pardcularly heated exchange with her teacher, she
refuses to leave class,
telling him, "I ain' going nowhere motherfucker till the bell
ring. I came to learn
maff and you gon' teach me." In a self-reflexive moment.
Precious indmates, '"N I
really do want to learn. Everyday I tell myself something gonna
happen, some shit
like on TV. I'm gonna break through or somebody gonna break
through to me—
I'm gonna learn, catch up, be normal" (5). She even gets mad
when other students
become disrupdve, nodng that when "the other nadves get
resdess I break on 'em"
(5). It is significant that Precious thinks of her classmates as
nadves, which auto-
madcaUy denotes the school as a colonized space. Pregnant with
her second child,
on the verge of being seventeen, and in eighth grade, she gets
expelled from school
8. for being pregnant and for having "an atdtude of total
uncooperadon" (8). Precious
definitely needs a break, though she cannot seem to catch one.
The repeddon of the word break is useful for thinking about the
aesthedc con-
tours of breaking within a hip-hop context, in which "the
breaks" refer to bad luck
or unfortunate circumstances as they do in the classic song by
rapper Kurds Blow.^
Precious not only needs a break, but she is also willing to
"break bad" or get violent
with her classmates. However, more so than all of this, she
proclaims her own need
for a hrea.k-through. Instead, the school expels her. Luckily,
her school pdncipal Mrs.
Lichtenstein, referred to as "the white bitch," takes enough of
an interest in Precious
to suggest that she consider enrolling in an alternadve school.
Her mother is livid.
"Go down to welfare, school can't help you none, now" (22).
Now that she is pregnant
with her second child by her father, that is. Precious's home life
is its own site of
brokenness.
Reflecdng on her mother's refusal to acknowledge her father's
abuse. Precious
concludes that "that sdnky hoe give me to him [because]
Probably thas what he
require to fuck her, some of me." Precious then has a flashback
to one of their many
encounters: "He climb on me. . . . I fall back on bed, he fall
right on top of me."
In the midst of such horrendous abuse. Precious "change[s]
stadons, change[s] bodiei'
9. (24). "I be dancing in videos!" she tells us. "In movies! I be
breaking, fly, jus' a dancing.
Umm hmm headng up the stage at the Apollo for Doug E. Fresh
or Al B. Sure!
They love me! Say I'm one of the best dancers" (24).
In this understandable "break" from, or suspension of reality.
Precious not only
changes her metaphoric radio or television stadon but also
changes bodies, shifdng
corporeally and temporally. The change in stadon signals a shift
from a set of cultural
resources that no longer works. She changes to a stadon that she
can understand,
in which she can be a version of herself that she desires.
Tellingly, she changes to a
hip-hop stadon. On that stadon, the music she hears conjures
visions of being a
video girl and a breakdancer for the likes of hip-hop pioneer
Doug E. Fresh. She is
not "flying away" but rather "breaking fly," or dancing with
skiU, flair, and alacrity.
Though Precious is the vicdm of many bad breaks, and though
she deals with those
traumas by taking intermittent breaks firom reality, her
fantasies, configured in the
nexus between breaking away from reality and breaking fly on a
hip-hop stage,
invite us to see these "breaks" and the brokenness of her life as
spaces that allow
for joy and creadvity along with cridque and lament.
"MAYBE I'LL BE A POET, RAPPER": HIP-HOP FEMINISM
AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 57
10. Kurds Blow deploys "the breaks" as a metaphoric double
entendre that signifies
the precarious social circumstances that characterize the lives of
urban youth in the
1980s, and the aesthedc generadvity awi/expectadons of the
musical break. For
instance, when the chorus moves from explicadng what exacdy
"are the breaks" to
proclaiming "break it up" three dmes and then telling the
audience to "break down,"
there is an extension and repeddon of this part of the beat,
which acts as an invita-
don for listeners to really start dancing. Blow's muldvalent use
of "the break(s)"
reveals it to be a germinal cultural metaphor for discussing hip-
hop literary aesthedcs.
Alonzo Westbrook defines the break as "the part in an old
school song where the
singer would pause for an instrumental part. During the break,
deejays would rap and
b-boys would break dance" (Westbrook 18). The "instrumental
part" is known as
the breakbeat. Breakbeats could also be parts of a song that a
deejay finds especially
compelling, at which point he or she manipulates the turntable
to cause that part of
the record to repeat, much like a broken record, but with more
intendonaUty and
flair. The break is not only cridcal in the immediate moment of
a hip-hop event,
defining as it does a deejay's skill for getdng the part)' started
and keeping it going,
but is aiso literally one of the most important germinal moments
for developing and
showcasing hip-hop ardstry. The engagement of hip-hop ardsts
11. with the breakbeat
centrally influenced the development of breakdancing and
rapping. That moment
celebrates the creadve use of voices and bodies in a joyful
engagement with the
corporeal.
Though hip-hop musicians and fans have their own mode and
manner of using
the break to create music, the break is not unique to hip hop.
The break has been a
significant component of the blues and jazz. Cheryl Wall,
drawing on the work of
James Snead, argues that the "cut" or the "break" "is [a] salient
characterisdc of
[blues] music" (16). She explains that "the cut," which she
alternadvely refers to as
"the break," "accentuates the 'repeddve nature of the music, by
abrupdy skipping
it back to another beginning which we have already heard' "
(16). For Wall, the cut
or the break provides a useful metaphor for thinking about the
condnuides and
discontinuities, the fractures, and the erasures that help to
consdtute a black women's
literary tradidon. Henry Louis Gates, Jr. also extols the
significance of the jazz-
inflected break and the blues-inflected break to the African
American literary tradidon
in his now-classic formuladon of Signifying. In jazz, the
musician often "signifies
the beat" by "playing the upbeat into the downbeat of the
chorus," thus rendering
the downbeat "present by its absence" (Gates 123). In contrast,
the blues tries to
stretch pardcular phrases, making them "elasdc" according to
12. Gates (123). Wall would
suggest that this process of making phrases elasdc happens by
"worrying the line,"
a reference to the ways blues singers use their vocal instrument
to accentuate or
extend different parts of a verse of song. Whereas jazz
musicians used musical
instruments to signify the beat, and blues singers used their
voices to worry the
musical une, hip-hop deejays used vinyl records, two turntables,
and a microphone
to extend the breaks of their favorite songs.
Gates and Wall use the break as a literary technique and a
cridcal metaphor to
demonstrate the importance of blues and jazz aesthedcs within
the African American
literary tradidon. These scholars are also concerned with how
literary texts use jazz
and blues music, in content and form, to engage with the
literary past. For Gates,
the way jazz musicians "signified upon the beat" is analogous to
the way that black
writers Signify upon prior literary texts through parody and
pasdche.*^ For Wall, the
way blues singers worried a verse of song is analogous to the
ways that black women
writers have forged a literary lineage with prior black women
writers (Wall 13). In a
subsequent secdon, I wiU demonstrate how Push worries its
literary line and creates
a kind of pasdche, or "literary echo," within a hip-hop aesthedc
frame to engage the
novel's literary past (Gates xxvii). I argue that Push's
transformadon of the breaks
through Precious's references to hip-hop culture, and use of hip-
13. hop slang consdtutes
5 8 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
a formal Uterary revision of the break as trope, a move that
ushers in the formal use
of hip-hop aesthetics within the African American Uterary
tradition.
Like many canonized African American novels. Push is
concerned with
acknowledging and buüding upon its Uterary past. Hip-hop
deejaying in its earUest
form demanded a specific engagement with history, for
partygoers were dancing
and rapping over instrumentais from earUer records. The deejay
who could mix a
particularly brüUant, but Uttie-known or hard-to-locate
breakbeat into a mix garnered
and stiU garners much respect in hip-hop circles. Consequentiy,
hip hop's manipula-
tion of the breaks, not only within rap music but also within
hip-hop texts, tells us
much about hip hop's manner and method of engaging with its
musical and cultural
past. As Adam Mansbach argues, hip hop "understands history
as something to
backspin and cut up and cover with fingerprints in a particular
kind of way" (93).
Informed by a material engagement with the Uteral vinyl record
of hip hop's musical
past, hip-hop artistry pivots upon a direct, and often Uteral,
connection to the genre's
musical and Uterary antecedents.
14. One key Uterary antecedent of Push is Toni Morrison's 1992
novel Jazz. Because
I argue in Une with Cheryl WaU that Push is a bridge text to the
works of more
canonical black women writers, I want to worry the Uterary Une
between these two
seemingly unrelated texts, to demonstrate the ways that Toni
Morrison's contemporary
novel uses the social concerns of the Jazz Age to confront
chaUenges and anxieties
relevant to the hip-hop generation. Though Jazz is about 1920s
New York in the
Jazz Age, I argue that as a cultural document, the novel mirrors
larger social anxieties
in the early 1990s about the role of hip-hop culture and rap
music in African
American culture. Jazz attempts, in Morrison's words, to
"represent the anarchy, the
originaUty, the improvisation, the practice, the anger, the
daring of the [jazz] music"
that emerged in the 1920s in response to the massive migration
of African Americans
to urban areas from rural areas (Morrison and West). Though
Morrison speaks of
jazz music, in the early nineties hip-hop music is being haüed as
anarchic, angry, and
daring, if not entirely original.
Morrison's attention to the ways in which the broader jazz
aesthetic informed
the poUtical and cultural environs of 1920s New York ülustrates
a larger point about
the importance of music for capturing the aesthetics of place.
Whereas northward
migration, rapid industriaUzation, and access to unskilled and
15. semiskiUed labor gave
rise to jazz and the blues, reverse migration (which began in
1970), rapid deindustrial-
ization, and the loss of unskilled and semiskilled labor
characterized the emergence
of hip-hop music (KeUey 46). Importantiy, jazz, blues, and hip-
hop aesthetics aU
emerged as a response to the often turbulent shifts in social
conditions that African
Americans experienced throughout the twentieth century. I want
to offer a brief
reading of Jazz that illumines these connections, while
demonstrating how the novel
foreshadows and beckons the kind of hip-hop aesthetic
procUvities that wül charac-
terize Push and later novels.
Jazz tells the story of Joe Trace, a married man, who has taken
up with and
subsequentiy murdered his young mistress, FeUce, after she
loses interest. Dorcas,
FeUce's friend, takes it upon herself to faciUtate reconciUation
between Joe and his
wife Violet, by visiting them and using their shared love of jazz
to make peace. The
novel's unnamed narrator presupposes at the beginning of the
story that Dorcas's
visit with Joe and Violet, issuing as it does from a certain kind
of intergenerational
infideUty and trauma, wiU assuredly come to a violent end, as
had Joe's relationship
with Felice. However, Morrison signals through Dorcas, named
for a bibUcal char-
acter who dies and is resurrected, that this wiU not be the case;
the three opt for
dialogue and dancing rather than violence. The narrator, so
16. "sure that one would kiU
the other," is shocked to discover that "the past is," in fact, not
"an abused record
with no choice but to repeat itself at the crack" (Morrison 220).
The narrator's
ambivalence about whether a new generation could engage the
past in anything
"MAYBE I'LL BE A POET, RAPPER": HIP-HOP FEMINISM
AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 5 9
odier than the most violent and profane terms echoes the
general disillusionment
with hip-hop music and culture at the height of the gangsta rap
era.
The material symbol of the larger stories being passed between
these two gen-
eradons of people brought together by a blues/jazz culture that
inspired boldness
and audacity in the old and the young is the Okeh race record
Dorcas brings to share
with the Traces. Certainly, the hip-hop pracdce of "scratching"
old records to extend
the break, a process which often ruined the vinyl, seemed to
some to be a literal
abuse of the past. However, as Violet, Joe, and Dorcas dance
and commune, the
narrator is disabused of her belief that "no power on earth could
lift the arm that
held the needle," locking them into an inescapable conclusion
(Morrison 220). With
audacious intensity, or depending on whom you ask, a certain
unmidgated gall,
17. members of the hip-hop generadon have dared not only to lift
the needle, but also
to see the possibility within the break to capitalize on that
possibility through the
producdon of a new sound and mode of being, and finally to
culminate the act by
dancing and "walking all over" anyone who attempted get in the
way (Morrison 220).
Dorcas's visit to the Traces does not end violendy, which
signals that a trace of the
past, resurrected and transformed in a new generadon, wiU
remain.
Jazz, then, on the one hand, portends the advent of, and on the
other, beckons
a new future, one in which cracks, breaks, and fissures
consdtute not erasure but
instead a trace of the past, refigured into a new present. Jazz
acknowledges through
the presence of Felice and Dorcas the potendal for violence, but
also the potendal
for survival and transformadon. The novel also signals the
inevitability of new
generadons confrondng and interacdng with their past. The
novel pushes through
its anxiety to suggest that these encounters can indeed be
fruitful and generadve.
Consequendy, by invidng readers to come to a different
conclusion about how
younger generadons engage with the cultural materials of the
past, Morrison creates
literary space for Sapphire's project in Push.
"A Closed Mouth Don't Get Fed": Recognition and the Hunger
for More
18. Rgarding the development of black female subjecdvity in the
hip-hop era, theoncept of the break is essendal because it allows
black women to transform
generadonal traumas from a broken record, condemning them to
a violent end, into
a "breakbeat," which becomes an opportunit}' for play, for joy,
for improvisadon.
The transformadon of the break represents hip-hop aesthedcs in
a way that "brings
together dme and race, place and polyculturaUsm, hot beats and
hybridity" (Chang,
Can't Stop 2). Push translates these conjuncdve pairs to the
written page. For instance,
when Precious and her friend Rita attend their first meedng of
an incest survivors
group. Precious writes a poem about literal change in physical
landscape as she
travels to a different part of the city:
bus wheel turn me through time . . .
. . . (I am homer on a voyage
but from our red bricks in pues
of usta be buildings
and windows of black
broke glass eyes
we come to buildings bad
but not so bad
street cleaner
then we come to a place
of
6 0 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW
19. everything is fine
big glass windows
stores
white people
it's a different city. (126-27)
The vivid imagery of Precious's poem is characterisdc of a hip-
hop aesthedc ever-
attuned to the connecdons of race, place, and cultural exchange.
She nodces that
one of the key markers of her being in a different city is the
pervasive presence of
white people. Through her actual travels and her imaginary
travels using the subway
map on her bedroom door. Precious gains a "sharper
understanding of the unevenly
developed and racialized order of her city" (Dubey 63). As the
physical landscape
becomes cleaner and more prisdne, the racial makeup of the
space changes.
Like earlier hip-hop songs. Precious also provides vivid word
pictures of her
spadal landscape. The poem itself is reminiscent of the 1982
hip-hop hit "The
Message," by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. In "The
Message," the first
commercially successful polidcal rap song. Grandmaster Melle
Mel raps about seeing
broken glass all around and people urinafing on the stairs.
These condidons register
a lack of care and a sense of nihilism about the urban blight in
which many black
New Yorkers are forced to Hve. Precious and Melle Mel
confront urban blight, each
20. using the imagery of broken glass to signal the broken condidon
of the social order.
Both wonder how it affects their humanity. In the chorus, MeUe
Mel compares the
condidons to a jungle that could just take him or any of these
residents under.
Whereas Melle Mel muses on the struggles of black manhood
within this uneven
racial order, Precious's despair is infused with the gendered
struggles of being a
poor black girl in the 1980s inner city. Precious comes to
understand that the abuse
of women knows no race or class bounds: "all kinda women
here. Princess girls,
some fat girls, old women, young women. One thing we got in
common, no the thing,
is we rape" (130).
Sapphire's direct and often confrontational portrayal of "the
breaks" that Precious
faces—poverty, premature motherhood, incest and sexual abuse,
LUiteracy, HIV—
serve as a pardcular kind of hip-hop generadon truth telling,
because colloquially,
"the breaks" stiU indicate the presence of unfortunate
circumstances. The vivid
portraits of privadon, violence, and survival exemplify what
William Jelani Cobb
refers to as "asphalt naturalism, a literary landscape where
characters are modvated
by hunger—both physical and metaphorical—and shaped by the
unyielding forces of
the surrounding world. . . . At the core of hip hop's being, its
radonale for existence,
is this refusal to exist as unseen and unseeable" (109).
21. Precious is indeed driven by physical and metaphorical hunger.
Reflecting on her
first day at Each One Teach One Alternadve School, she is
ashamed and angry at her
failure to perform well on various standardized tests: "The
tesses paint a picture of
me wif no brain. The tesses paint a picture of me an' my
muver—my whole family,
we more than dumb, we invisible." Precious Likens her
existence to the vampires she
has seen on television:
I big, I talk, I eats, I cooks, I laugh, watch TV, do what my
muver say. But I can see when
the picture come back I don't exist. Don't nobody want me.
Don't nobody need me. I know
who I am. I know who they say I am—^vampire sucking the
system's blood.
She wants to react, resist, and change this narradve desperately:
"I wanna say I am
somebody. I wanna say it on subway, TV, movie, LOUD" {Push
30). More than any-
thing. Precious wants to be seen, acknowledged, recognized.
Cobb notes that in hip-hop culture, recognition and more
specifically the verb
to recognize take on significant levels of meaning widiin the
culture. In the 1990s,
the phrase "you better recognize" was pervasive in Liip-hop
vernacular. It was a
"MAYBE I'LL BE A POET, RAPPER": HIP-HOP FEMINISM
AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 6 1
22. way for a speaker to demand acknowledgement and respect for
their personhood,
pardcularly when someone was on the verge of being
disrespectful. Melissa Harris-
Perry argues that the problem of recognidon is fundamental to
black women's
experiences in America. According to Harris-Perry, black
women often find them-
selves "attempting] to stand upright in a room made crooked by
the stereotypes of
black women as a group" (Harris-Perry 35). These stereotypes
of …
