Sapphire, Author of Push and The Kid: AIDS Has Hit African Americans "as Hard as Slavery"

​Last week SF Weekly interviewed Sapphire via e-mail about her new novel The Kid, which hit stores yesterday and follows the life of Precious' son, Abdul Jones. We were surprised to see that in her responses Sapphire labeled Daily Beast blogger Andrew Sullivan a racist who once endorsed a near-eugenicist agenda for the distribution of AIDS drugs. A little Googling revealed a further surprise: that Sapphire had leveled exactly the same claim, with exactly the same phrasing in at least two other interviews in the last week.

And we mean exactly the same phrasing. As in, it might be copy-and-pasted. (The rest of her responses to us seem unique.)

Anyway, here's our e-mail interview with Sapphire, which may resemble your e-mail interview with Sapphire. SF Weekly has contacted Sapphire and Penguin Press for a response.

Your books are challenging -- both in terms of the dialect as well as in some graphic and raw content -- do you worry that readers will be discouraged too early?
It was Rilke who said, "An art object is ruthless and has to be that way." To explore the issues and the particular characters I choose to write about I take risks and experiment. Hence I am expecting my readers to be risk takers. I seek courageous readers willing to challenge themselves.

In The Kid, there is not a gratuitous use of graphic and raw content but a calculated exposure of this kind of content for the express purpose of allowing a reader to see into the soul and circumstances of the characters I create.

How did the film success of Precious affect the process of writing the sequel? Did one medium affect the other?
First, the question of a "sequel": The Kid is not a sequel in a traditional sense in that we don't enter into and follow up on the life of Precious Jones. It is a sequel in the sense it continues to look at the profound and devastating effects of AIDS on the African-American community.

I would posit that AIDS/HIV has hit us as hard as slavery in some ways and that the way AIDS has been dealt with in the black community has been directly related to our disenfranchised position in American society. African-American women who were diagnosed with AIDS at the time Push was being written were many times more likely to be dead within a couple of months of their diagnosis than white men who were diagnosed at the same time. I believe that was the result of racism as people like the gay white male activist Andrew Sullivan said things to the effect of, if there is to be a triage for the dispensing of antiviral drugs they should go first to gay white men who have and do contribute so much to society as opposed to poor blacks who don't even know what has hit them.

One reason I wrote Push was to show how "precious" those poor blacks might be if given an opportunity to live. Hence The Kid resonates on many levels and has many reasons for being and indeed one of them is to show the continuing impact of the loss of our "precious" ones.

As far as the film affecting the writing of this book, for the most part it didn't. But that was because most of this text had been conceived and to a large part written before the movie. The movie did however make me aware that I had a much larger audience than I had dreamed was possible and I became eager to finish my book in a way I had not been before.

Push was hailed by many as a feminist novel (or at least a novel that focuses on female issues), and certainly female characters are predominant in the book. How was it different this time writing about a growing boy in a mainly male world?
One of the themes I was exploring in Push was the use and abuse of power. This particular theme continues in The Kid and a male milieu allowed an even deeper exploration of this theme. Abdul is a much more complicated character than his mother. And we have to remember that at nine he reads better that his mother did at eighteen. A lot of the challenges here were those that came with the capturing of his unique voice, and not so much the challenge of "writing in a male voice" as many people have commented on.

In this book we stay with Abdul much longer than we stayed with Precious. In Push the reader sees Precious change because she becomes literate. What the reader sees with Abdul is a young man grow through his exposure to art and other artists; he, as we say in the African American community, "runs the streets"; he observes life, he reads biography, fiction, black cultural criticism: Greg Tate. He goes to art exhibits. He is involved in interracial relationships.

So, as his experiences expanded I had to allow his voice to change. He is comfortable in the black English his mother spoke but disdains the deep southern dialect of his greatgrandmother. He speaks easily being somewhat of an autodidact with upper- and middle-class kids who are wanna be artists like himself. He is an educated young urban artist. I didn't want to back away from that aspect of his being either. Writing Abdul was so much more than "getting inside the head of a male."

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