Two parts of this

Literary Analysis Discussion

1. Read up on the expectations for college writing and  argument

College Writing

Argument

2. Analyze the writing in Brittany Cooper’s “Maybe I’ll Be a Poet, Rapper: Hip Hop Feminism in Push”.

3. Answer the questions below, using examples from Cooper’s article to support your answers. 

a. How does Cooper organize her argument? Is this effective? Why or why not?

b. What techniques does Cooper use to persuade the reader to agree with her? 

c. What can you learn from Cooper about writing about literature? What         techniques can you use in your own Analysis Essay?

Literary Analysis Essay (1500 words essay)

Purpose

This essay continues the work we’ve been doing on critical thinking and composition by asking you to analyze a novel using the facts and ideas you find in your secondary research. Imagine you are writing to an audience similar to Brittany Cooper’s – educated and probably familiar with the novel. You can summarize the theory and/or novel, but only briefly: focus quickly on the analysis.

Questions

Choose ONE of the following prompts. Write a 1500-word essay in MLA format that uses examples and support from the primary text (Jitterbug Perfume) and secondary research (critical texts and theories) to defend a thesis. Use at least three (3) scholarly secondary sources to frame and support your argument.

Research Tom Robbins’ life and identity. Present and defend an argument that answers the following question: To what extent do Robbins’ experiences, values, and beliefs influence the plot, characters, setting, and style of Jitterbug Perfume? Use evidence about Robbins’ identity as a lens through which you analyze the novel. OR

Research the classical traits of the god Pan. Present and defend an argument that answers the following questions: What is the significance of Pan to the plot and meaning of Jitterbug Perfume? Why is he the appropriate Greek god to play this role in the novel? Use evidence about the classical traits and mythological characteristics of Pan as a lens through which you analyze the novel.  OR

Research the values and literary aesthetic of the Beat Generation. Present and defend an argument that answers the following question: how does Jitterbug Perfume exhibit aspects of the Beat values and aesthetic. Argue how the beat movement might have influenced Robbins. Use the principles of the Beat Generation as a lens through which you analyze the novel.

Note: Your secondary sources will not necessarily be about Jitterbug Perfume. You have to do the critical thinking to figure out how the facts and ideas you find in your research relate to the novel.

Writing Instructions

Use specific pages references, passages, and quotations from the novel to defend your thesis.

Refer to at least 3 scholarly secondary sources to defend your thesis

Review and meet the expectations of college-level writing set out at the start of this class.

Include a title that indicates what the essay is actually about (e.g. not Analysis Essay).

Underline your thesis statement.

Format your document according to MLA standards: headers, spacing, titles, etc. Use section 34 of A Pocket Style Manual if you need help.

Use MLA format for in-text citations. Use sections 31, 33, and 34 of A Pocket Style Manual if you need help.

Include a Works Cited page in MLA format with at least 4 entries, including the novel.

Use a font like Helvetica, Calibri, or Arial in 12pt.

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 of hip hop, while remaining connected with these prior works. Moreover,
Push calls into existence a new generadon of black women’s stories, stories that
consider age-old of quesdons of family, motherhood, friendship, sex, and love, but
in the context of hip-hop culture, the AIDS epidemic, the conservadve backlash of
the 1980s, and the deindustrialized city confrondng urban blight.

Thus, two quesdons inform my examinadon of the use of hip-hop aesthedcs in
Sapphire’s 1996 novel Push. First, given the centrality of blues and jazz music to the
African American literary tradidon, how does contemporary African American liter-
ature—and in pardcular, work by African American women—encounter and engage

African American fiewew46.1 (Spring 2013): 55-69 _ _
© 2014 Johns Hopkins University Press and Saint Louis University 55

hip-hop culture and its aesthedc contours? Second, how are hip-hop aesthedcs,
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
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
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 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
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’
(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

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 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 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-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.

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 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 “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,
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

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

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
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).

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

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 hypersexuaHzed
welfare queens, angry black women, and supernaturally strong sisters consdtute a
kind of severe wwrecognidon of black women’s humanity. One result is that black
women often feel shame, for “it is psychically painftil to hold an image of yourself
whue knowing that others hold a different, more negadve image of you” (96).

Precious is acutely aware of the ways that the educadonal and social welfare
systems conspire to make her invisible. Repeatedly she expresses distress and shame
as she encounters people with power who puU out her “file” and begin to interpret
her existence. She is so mad she “almost spit[s]” to fmd out that her fde has preceded
her at Each One Teach One. She wonders.

What do file say. I know it say I got a baby. Do it say who Daddy? What kinda baby?
Do it say bow pages the same for me, how much I weigh, fights I done had? I don’t know
what Ble say. I do know every time they wants to fuck wif me or decide something in my
life, here they come wif the mutherfucking file. Well, OK, they got the file, know every
mutherfucking thing. (28)

Precious chafes at the nodon that a file could define her, and at a more fundamental
level, she is disturbed to be defined by her shortcomings. This is an example of the
kind of shameful misrecognidon that Harris-Perry argues is central to black women’s
experiences in the United States.

After Precious reaches a funcdonal degree of literacy, her first act is to steal her
file from her welfare caseworker. She categorically rejects the caseworker’s conclusion
that her “obvious intellectual limitadons” wiU relegate her to a career as a “home
attendant”: “A home attendant? I don’t wanna be no motherfucking home attendant!”
(119). She is also livid to discover that the caseworker has recorded her HlV-posidve
status after promising not to do so. By allowing Precious to speak back to the case-
worker. Sapphire invokes a pracdce central to black women’s wddng by creadng what
Mae Henderson calls a “dialogic of difference,” that challenges the assumpdons of
hegemonic racial and gender discourses (Henderson 351). Moreover, Precious’s act
is one of open defiance of a social narradve that seeks to pathologize her and cast
her as deviant.

In addidon to her metaphorical hunger for visibility and recognidon. Precious
is also often physically hungry, requiring a degree of street skills and ingenuity in
order to survive. She awakens one morning with a hunger headache and no food at
home. On her way to school, she steals a basket of chicken from a local eatery and
eats all of it. In the text’s vividly rendered urban landscaping, she tells us that she
tosses bones at the corner of 126*^ Street and Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard,
“wipe[s] the grease off my mouth with the roU, stuff rest of roU in my mouf, run
across 125*, and I’m there” {Push 38-39). In this moment, her physical and
metaphoric desperadons coUide; although the image of a fat black girl running down
the street with a stolen bucket of chicken may arouse all of our historical sensibiüdes
about stereotyping and caricature, the reality is that she is running to make it to
school on dme. This is the kind of hip-hop-influenced street savvy that it takes to
survive in 1980s New York. Though Precious has struggles similar to other female
protagonists in the black women’s literary tradidon, like Walker’s Celie or Morrison’s
Pecóla, her life opdons are influenced by the historical moment in which she finds
herself Thus, the contextualized narradve of failing schools, extreme poverty, a
burgeoning welfare system, and the conservadve backlash to its existence provide a
hip-hop context that refuses us the opdon of “wridng Precious off or out,” despite
how much her life may trouble us.

6 2 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

Without the benefit of hip hop’s context, black women of the hip-hop generadon
and their stories can be dismissed. In fact, that dismissiveness and disdain for hip-hop
generadon characters emerge in Toni Morrison’s Love (2003). A brief reading of the
novel demonstrates the pitfalls of not grounding characters in their proper aesthedc
context. Love opens with the ruminadons of L, the former head chef at Cosey’s
restaurant in a town called Silk. The story centers on Heed and Chrisdne Cosey,
childhood friends who are torn apart when Chrisdne’s grandfather takes Heed as
his twelve-year-old child bride. To trouble the waters between the two friends,
Morrison introduces Junior Viviane, an eighteen-year-old woman of shady origins
who comes to work as a secretary for Heed. Junior’s entry into the text is framed by
L’s ruminadons on the state of gender reladonships, race, and community in general.
L declares that she has been forced into a state of silence since “the sevendes, when
women began to straddle chairs and dance crotch out on television, when all the
magazines started featuring behinds and inner thighs as though that’s all there is to
a woman” (Morrison, Love 3). Though she no longer speaks, she hums: “the words
dance in my head to the music in my mouth.” She is now “background—the movie
music that comes along when sweethearts see each other for the first dme” (4). But
her hum is not invasive; rather it is “below range,” acdng as a “way of objecdng to
how the century is turning out.” L also speaks of contemporary women, “ninedes
women,” with a certain cynicism and “disappointment”:

naturally all of them have a sad stor̂ -: too much notice, not enough, or the worst kind. Some
tale about dragon daddies and false-hearted men, or mean mamas and friends who did them
wrong. Each story has a monster in it who made them tough instead of brave, so they open
their legs rather than their hearts where that folded child is tucked (Morrison, Love 4-5)

Danyel Smith argues that the self-righteous indignadon that animates black high-lit-
erary authors’ disdain for street-lit writers is not so much anger but distress

that the stories street-lit authors tell are so much the same as our “Black” stories were
seventy years ago.

Regardless of the marches and assassinations and rallies and hard work . . ., being Black
in the United States since the Harlem Renaissance has not changed as much as we would [J
have it in our collective dream. This sameness . . . is depressing and hurtful. (191; emphasis
in original)

L’s atdtude betrays this kind of disdain for Junior, who seemingly has not benefited
from the struggles of her forebears to give her a better ufe. Junior’s failure to realize
the hopes of prior generadons of black women renders her dangerous to L, who
sees Junior as a literal threat to whatever inheritance Heed and Christine Cosey might
pass on:

They live like queens in Mr. Cosey’s house, but since that girl moved in there a whñe ago
with a skirt short as underpants and no underpants at all, I’ve been worried about them
leaving me here with nothing but an old folks’ tale to draw on. I know it’s trash: just another
story made up to scare wicked females and correct unruly children. But it’s all I have.
(Morrison, Love 10)

Indeed, L is very aware of her gatekeeping, correcdve impulses, and the parochial
nature of her concerns, and yet she presses forward with them.

Junior enjoys an ambivalent reladonship with the women in the house, for she
“saw both Chrisdne’s generosity and Heed’s stinginess as forms of dismissal. One was
‘take what you need and leave me alone.’ The other was ‘I’m in control and you are
not.’ Neither woman was interested in her—except as she simplified or complicated
their reladonship to each other” (119). Morrison suggests that Junior “had no past,
no history but her own,” which meant she had no loyaldes to Heed or Christine (169).
Hip-hop protagonists do struggle to find their place in the generadonal lineage
handed down by African American women writers, of whom Morrison is chief.

“MAYBE I’LL BE A POET, RAPPER”: HIP-HOP FEMINISM AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 6 3

Junior’s ambivalence about the past is characteristic of the post-soul generation,^
which “came to maturity in the age of Reaganomics and experienced the change
from urban industriaUsm to deindustriaUsm, from segregation to desegregation,
from essential notions of blackness to metanarratives on blackness without any
nostalgic allegiance to the past” (Neal 3). Much Uke generational schisms between
older and younger women about the poUtics of respectabüity. Love metatextuaUy
reveals its own Umitation, namely, that Junior functions in the text for what she
reveals about the fractured relationships of the prior generation, rather than for
what she might say about the complexity of her own generation. In other words,
Morrison uses Junior as a vehicle to reconcüe Heed and Christine, but because
Junior does not have a usable past upon which to draw, her character, and the
generation she represents, remains unredeemed.

“Where’s My Color Ptxrple?”: Sampling as Intertextual Practice

Although members of the hip-hop generation do not have nostalgic allegianceto the past, they do tacitiy acknowledge it. As I have remarked above, Cheryl
WaU invokes the blues trope of “worrying the Une,” an expression that refers to
“altering the pitch of a note in a given passage,” (Henderson qtd. in WaU 8), to
characterize how black women forge a connection to the past, even when their
“genealogical search is frustrated by gaps in the written history and knowledge” (9).
Although worrying the Une is one useful way that Push engages the past, a more
precise metaphor is necessary, given the status of the blues as a generational artifact
that emerges in a specific historical moment, and speaks most powerfully to those
who can access its history, metaphors, and references. Although blues was “heaUng
music” for multiple generations (Cole and Guy-Sheftall 189), contemporary charac-
ters Uke Precious speak and demand a new idiom as they emerge in Uterature by and
about African American women.

Push worries its Uterary Une by using sampUng as a hip-hop form of pastiche.
As previously noted, Gates’s notion of pastiche refers to Uterary texts that offer
unmotivated forms of Signification, which in the case of hip-hop texts take the form
of Uterary homage. Although Push indeed revises Uterary texts such as The Color
Purple and The Bluest Eye, the novel does not draw upon jazz and blues idioms or
metaphors to do so. Instead, in the mode of hip-hop aesthetic improvisation, the
novel samples from its Uterary foremothers, directiy referencing their works, having
Precious read the texts and engage with the impUcations of the characters’ stories in
her Ufe. Within hip-hop music, this is akin to a deejay taking a vinyl record of an old
song, and then cutting or scratching the record to make a new song. The referent is
neither hidden nor obUque, but extremely direct and tacitiy identifiable. Mansbach
argues that the hip-hop novel is a kind of “mix-board,” the instrument rappers use
so that on

any given song, layers of musical and vocal samples overlap each other and abut each other,
swirling in and out of the mix at the glide of the fader. The listener’s degree of appreciation
for the collage is related . . . to his or her degree of familiarity with the elements of the
collage. Resonances, echoes, homages, and subversions bubble up . . . . (94)

In other words, a hip-hop text includes several samples whether musical or written,
and readers and critics must excavate the various layers of meaning, much as prior
African American Uterary critics have done, by teasing out the ways in which
African American novels create intertextual conversations with each other through
the process of revision. SampUng, as an authorial technique, produces texts “studded

6 4 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

with a range of references and echoes, flips and homages. Conversant with race
literature and real-life struggle, the characters ate able to posidon themselves in
reladon to these tradidons both playfully and seriously” (Mansbach 95).

Push’s most sampled text is AJice Walker’s The Color Purple, a book in Precious’s
growing library. The intendonal discussion of The Color Purple forces us to make the
connecdon between Precious and Celie, who Precious indmates causes her to “cry
cry ay you hear me, it sound in a way so much like myself” (81). However, Precious
indicates that unlike Celie, she “ain no butch” {Push 81). Precious attributes her
thinking about sexuality—and race, for that matter—to the gender and race polidcs
of Louis Farrakhan and the Five Percent Nadon, a sect of the black Muslims.
Precious is such a fan of Farrakhan and in pardcular his cridques of structural racism
that her son’s middle name is Louis. However, her teacher Ms. Rain thinks he is a
“jive and-Semidc, homophobe fool” (74), and she refuses to tolerate Precious’s
diatribes against gay people.*^

Precious’s repeated invocadons of the Five Percent Nadon and Louis Farrakhan
squarely situate her within the black Muslim-influenced hip-hop cultural milieu of
the 1980s. Hip-hop scholar Charise Cheney notes that the Five Percenters and the
Nadon of Islam were significant to the development of nadonalist consciousness in
rap music in the 1980s (121). Acknowledging Ms. Rain’s vaHd cridque and her lesbian
idendty. Precious concedes.

Too bad about Farrakhan. I sdll beUeve allab and stuff. I guess I sdll believe everything. Ms
Rain say homos not who rape me, not homos who let me sit up not learn for sixteen years.
. . . It’s true. Ms Rain the one who put tbe cbalk in my band, make me queen of the ABCs. (81)

Precious begins to grasp the limitadons of black nadonalist rhetoric, especially its
unapologedc homophobia and clearly mascuHnist polidcs.

For example, when Ms. Rain informs the students about the widespread black
male backlash to the book and the füm adaptadon of The Color Purple, Precious
affirms her love for the book because it gives her “so much strength,” and disagrees
that it’s an “unfair picture of nigger men.” “Unfortunately,” Precious declares, “it is
a picture I know, except of course Farrakhan who is real man. . . . He says problem
is not crack but the cracker. I go for that shit.” Precious’s views on racism coupled
with her love for the womanist community presented in The Color Purple place her
squarely at the crossroads of the polidcs that define contemporary black feminism.
On the one hand, her black nadonalist sensibilides are being shaped by the same
figures shaping the nadonaUsm so prevalent in hip hop in the 1980s. On the other
hand, for all her agreement with Farrakhan, Precious seems to know the world is
not merely contained in the arc between “crack” and “crackers.” When Ms. Rain
asks her feelings about The Color Purple’s fairytale ending, she responds, “well shit
Hke that can be true. life can work out for the best somedmes.” Ms. Rain counters
that “realism has its virtues” but Precious mentally retorts, “I don’t know what
‘realism’ mean but I do know what REALITY is and it’s a mutherfucker” (83).

Madhu Dubey argues that “although Precious here seems to reject her teacher’s
realist criterion, she is in fact reinstadng it in heightened form by asserdng that her
own experience as a poor black woman consdtutes realit}? in capital letters” (Dubey
94). I think, however, that Precious makes an important disdncdon between realism,
which is about the attempt to achieve authendc Hterary representadon, and lived
reality, which Precious hopes can be reimagined in texts that are not wed to recreating
her story. Unlike her male hip-hop generadon counterparts. Precious is not interested
as much in stories that “keep it real” as in stories that allow her to dream of new
possibilides and to see beyond her current lived realit)?.

Just when Precious is beginning to dream, her mother reveals that Precious’s
father Carl has died of the AIDS virus. Precious wonders if perhaps Carl is not
really her father, just like the “Man rape CeHe turn out not to be her daddy.” As she

“MAYBE I’LL BE A POET, RAPPER”: HIP-HOP FEMINISM AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 6 5

faces the possibility of being HIV-posidve, Precious’s world, which she has deHber-
ately been making anew, begins to crumble. The song that is “pla3dng in her head
now, not rap,” is playing perhaps because rap’s realism is too much for her to bear.
Sitdng on her bed, she looks at her pictures: one of Alice Walker, Harriet Tubman,
and Farrakhan. Wall argues that images appear in black women’s texts evoking
“word pictures,” which “conjure memory and produce the storytelling that both
recollects and reimagines the past” (Wall 17). Though Precious acknowledges these
figures as a part of her cultural past and present, she proclaims that their stories are
insufficient for her current realides: “But [Alice Walker] can’t help me now. Where
my Color Purple? Where my god most high? Where my king? Where my black love?
Where my man love? Woman love? Any kinda love?” {Push 87). In this moment,
Precious’s acknowledgement that neither rap music nor black feminist literature can
comfort her represents a kind of textual break with the past.

Eventuaüy the song in her head comes into focus, and “It’s Aretha. I always did
wish she was my mother or Miss Rain or Tina Turner . . . singing, ‘Gotta find me an
angel gotta find me an angel in my liiife’ ” (88). Sapphire texmally samples soul music
to facilitate Precious’s abilit}’ to cope, though Precious uldmately wiU reclaim rap,
Alice Walker, and Farrakhan in the narradve. Precious’s maternal respect for Aretha
Franklin and Tina Turner again squarely posidons Precious as what Neal calls a “soul
baby.” The presence of a post-soul aesthefic, however, does not preclude this text’s
placement as a hip-hop novel. Rather, hip-hop music and culture are one outgrowth
of the post-soul moment. Her invocadon of the Queen of Soul creates space for a
hip-hop narradve that flows out of other stories of blues and soul. By sampling
from Aretha Franklin (Queen of Soul) and Tina Turner (Queen of Rock ‘n’ Roll),
Precious remixes a narradve that works for her.

Although Sapphire does not expHcidy aHude to The Bluest Eye within the text,
the elemental “gibberish” that characterizes Precious’s preMterate wridngs certainly
are a remixed homage to or pasdche of Pecola’s repedtive references to the Dick and
Jane stories in The Bluest Eye. Sapphire invokes this gibbedsh with repeated somewhat
incoherent references to the alphabet, which are supposed to demonstrate Precious’s
iLliteracy “A Day at the Beach Shore A Day A Day ABC Alphabedcal order CD
ABCD. I grab my notebook.” The alphabedcal refrain remains on repeat in Precious’s
head until she finally gets it. As she moves from chaos to order, she writes acrosdc
poems for each letter. “A is fr Afr” which means A is for Africa. “M frknka rl m”
which means “Farrakhan real man” and Q qee Htee which means Queen Ladfah
(65-66). Her acrosdc poems do not rhyme, but through the gibberish that becomes
form and the content of cultural references in the acrosdc, the poems invoke all
the pracdces that characterized Liip-hop literary aesthedcs: “coUaging, sampHng,
dislocating, and reconfiguring” (Mansbach 100). In fact, this text samples and layers
muldple genres and forms of wridng, such as the epistolary novel, poetry, and the
“book-within-a-book,” creadng ficdon that works like a rap record, diat “builds layers
of reference and meaning and plot and dialogue and character” (Mansbach 94) with
muldple points of entry into the text depending on one’s point of reference. Push
becomes a complex and muld-layered remix of muldple texts, musical tradidons,
and polidcal tradidons.

Precious’s Emergent Hip-hop Feminism

One result of Push’% eclecdc sampUng of texts and figures is that Preciousbegins to cuLl these texts and figures to ardculate an emerging hip-hop
feminist consciousness. For example, in her acrosdc alphabet. Precious invokes

6 6 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

Queen Ladfah, a popular female rapper. Queen Ladfah demonstrates her nadonalist
and feminist sensibilides on early tracks like “Ladies First.” Precious’s reference to
Ladfah suggests not only that hip hop speaks to her, giving her “a culture and a lan-
guage” (Pough xiii), but also that she has found a way to blend her love for herself
as a young woman and her affinity for black nadonalist polidcs. In fact, her acrosdc
bespeaks the various cultural layers that compose hip-hop culture, music, and polidcs.
Precious’s later asserdon that “One thing I say about Farrakhan and Alice Walker
they help me like being black” (96) also suggests the emergence of a ldnd of nascent
feminism, forged in the fires of Alice Walker’s feminist/womanist polidcs coupled
with the race consciousness proffered by Farrakhan. Joan Morgan argues that

more than any other generation before us, we need a feminism committed to ‘keeping
it real.’ We need a voice Hke our music—one that samples and layers many voices, injects
its sensibilities into the old and flips it into something new, provocative, and powerful. . . .
We need a feminism that possesses the same fundamental understanding held by any true
student of hip-hop. Truth can’t be found in the voice of any one rapper but the juxtaposition
of many. (Morgan 62)

Thus, Precious tells us that she “sdU believes everything”: the truths that Ms. Rain
illustrates for her about Farrakhan and the truths that he helps her understand
about racism. These muldple voices, fused with insight from Precious’s hip-hop
context, consdtute an emerging hip-hop feminism.

The text ends with an anthology of stories produced by Precious’s class, the Each
One Teach One crew. These stories are important because they suggest different
narradve preoccupadons in hip-hop literary aesthedcs from the ones William Jeiani
Cobb examines in the work of black male rappers. Cobb asserts that “the MC’s
specific ability to tell the stories of the anonymous cit)’ dweller is the contemporary
extension of the blues tradidon” (112). The gritt}’ “curbside chronicles” and their
always-male protagonists, who consdtute much of hip-hop ardstry, are the “folklore
of the twenty-first century” (Cobb 112). Cobb condnues, “The stories told in that
folklore, inherited by the blues and bequeathed to hip hop, relay the doings of
strong men who, by their brute strength or brute wit, muscle their way beyond the
parameters . . . that constrain the rest of us” (111). I do not disagree with Cobb’s
account of hip hop’s blues inheritance. In fact, much of women’s street lit follows
this paradigm, leading to representadons of blackness and femininit)’ that resist and
reinscribe dominant stereotypes of black womanhood (Marshall 31). However,
female emcees have been present since hip hop’s beginnings, and the stories that
women tell in hip hop are very different. As Wall notes of black writers, subject
matter has tradidonally differed between men and women, such that black men tend
to focus more on “healing the fractured bonds between men, whether fathers and
sons or son and brothers,” whereas black women writers focus more on the rifts
between “men and women, mothers and daughters” (Wall 10).

Although the blues bad man and trickster figures might be origin stories for
men’s hip-hop tales, women in hip hop have a range of origin stories, including the
sexually provocadve narradves of blues women and the empowering stories offered
in texts such as The Color Purple. Thus any formuladon of hip-hop aesthedcs that
relies primarily on men’s “gritty” street narradves should be treated as only a pardal
and limited account. As the history of the global cultural movement that is hip hop
is being written, scholars have an intellectual obligadon to make sure that women’s
lives are treated as fabric and thread in the narradve arc. Black women are not an
addendum to any hip-hop narradve that we might tell. We are not merely hip-hop
cheerleaders relegated to the “sidelines of a stage we built” (Moore).

Precious confirms this sendment in her contribudon to the class anthology.
In her closing poem, she celebrates the fact that she “can see” and “can read,” and
she indicates that though “nobody can see now,” “I might be a poet, rapper.” It is

“MAYBE I’LL BE A POET, RAPPER”: HIP-HOP FEMINISM AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 6 7

important that a comma rather than a conjuncdon conjoins these terms, because they
are the same thing for Precious. However, her desire to rap squarely situates her
within a hip-hop cultural frame, so that she desires to express her poetry according to
the cultural dictates of hip hop, rather than the blues or jazz. Importandy, however,
she does not jetdson her past. In her final poem, she samples from three key figures,
Hughes, Farrakhan, and Walker, taking the messages “hold fast to your dreams,”
“get up off your knees,” and “change,” respecdvely Her choice of cultural references
is a hip-hop sample of the best messages from the blues/jazz tradidon, the black
nadonalist tradidon, and the black feminist tradidon. These three aesthedc and
polidcal arcs have most dominandy and profoundly influenced the art and culture
of hip hop in the twendeth century.

The novellas that round out Push are protot}’pes for the urban literature that
comes to full bloom a decade later. Push’s stories and characters are on the whole
more complex, dealing with issues of sexual abuse, queer sexual idendty, poverty,
and 7\IDS, among other things. But the stories themselves are raw, unpolished, and
unapologedcally heavy-handed. They foreshadow the stories to come, and indeed
beckon those stories into existence. Push stretches the boundaries of the literary so
that the space wiU exist for Sistah Souljah and others to write the kinds of stories
not being told among the African American literad. Although Push challenges the
insularity of the Old Guard regarding the hearing of contemporary stories of the
urban poor. Sapphire also challenges the New School to create complex and diverse
stories of black female subjecdvity. Even so. Push bridges the gap by using hip-hop
aesthedcs to worry the literary line between black women writers in generadve ways.
Furthermore, the novel takes the stories of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison as origin
stories for female hip-hop protagonists, a move that challenges masculinist impulses
in the scholarship on hip-hop aesthedcs. Finally, Precious emerges as the prototype
of a hip-hop feminist, who draws upon race and gender polidcs in ways that will
help her negodate her status as an unwed, HIV-posidve mother and survivor of
abuse, while projecdng the possibility of a future as a poet and rapper. Push thus
challenges the African American women’s literary tradidon to embrace the future,
while demonstradng unequivocally that emerging hip-hop literature also has a
useable past.

Notes 1. Though rapper Nicki Minaj has risen to prominence since early 2010, winning multiple Grammy
Awards, the awards show still does not give awards in the best female rapper category. The BET (Black
Entertainment Television) Awards show does.

2. Here I’m using Cobb’s periodization: “the Old School, 1974-1983, the Golden Age 1984-1992, the
Modem Era, 1992-1997, and the Industrial Era, 1998-2005” (41).

3. Although Qmar Tyree is considered an early novehst in the street -it tradition, Sistah Souljah’s novel
The Coldest Winter Ever (Siraon & Schuster, 1999) is considered the inaugural text in black women’s street
literature.

4. There has been a longstanding debate among black feminist hterary critics about whether a coherent
African American women’s literary tradition exists. For further reading, see Barbara Smith, “Towards a
Black Feminist Criticism,” Conditions: Two 1 (October 1977): 25-44, and Hazel Carby’s response in
Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman as Novelist (New York: Oxford UP,
1987). A range of texts also clarified the importance of jazz and blues to African American literary traditions.
See Houston A. Baker, Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1987). See also Deborah McDowell, The Changing Same: Black Women’s Literature, Criticism,
and Theory (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1995).

5. Complete lyrics atKurtis Blow, “The Breaks” (1980), Lyrics Depot, 2008, Web.
6. Parody is an (often indirect) reference to and revision of a prior text with the intention of disagreeing

with and or critiquing the premises of the text. Pastiche eschews the negative critique (Gates xxvi). Unlike
parody, which is a “motivated” form of Signification, pastiche is an “unmotivated” form of Signification
that “can imply either homage to an antecedent text or flituity in the face of a seemingly indomitable mode
of representation” (xxvii).

68 AFRICAN AMERICAN REVIEW

7. Post-soul aesthetics encompass hip-hop music and culture but is not limited to hip hop. Because
Push draws on soul music, using post-soul here fits within the aesthetic trajectory of the novel, while not
precluding a primarily hip-hop analysis. For further discussion of the post-soul aesthetic, see Neal 1-22.

8. Precious’s spelling of Ms. Rain’s name is inconsistent in the text, due in part to her progress toward
literacy. Sometimes the name is spelled “Mz. Rain,” or alternately “Ms Rain” or “Miz Rain.”

9. Queen Latifah actually would not have been a major rap figure based on the timeline given in the text.
She released her first album in 1989.

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— , ed. TotalChaos: The Art and Aesthetics of Hip-Hop. New York: BasicCivitas, 2006. Cited
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New York UP, 2005.
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2007.
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American Communities. New York: One World/Ballantine, 2003.
Dubey, Madhu. Signs and Cities: Black Literary Postmodernism. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2003.
Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York:

Oxford UP, 1988.
Harris-Perry, Melissa V. Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes and Black Women in America. New Haven: Yale UP,

2011.
Henderson, Mae Gwendolyn. “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Women Writer’s

Literary Tradition” African American Literary Theory: A Reader. Ed. Winston Napier. New York: New York
UP, 2000. 348-68.

Kelley, Robin D. G. Yo’Mama’s Disfunktional: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America. Boston: Beacon,
1997.

Mansbach, Adam. “On Lit Hop.” Chang, Total Chaos 92-101.
Marshall, Ehzabeth, Jeanine Staples, and Simone Gibson. “Ghetto Fabulous: Reading Black Adolescent

Femininity in Contemporary Urban Street Fiction.” Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy 53.1
(September 2009): 28-36.

Moore, Jessica Care. “I’m a Hip Hop Cheerleader.” YouTuhe. 5 Jan. 2011. Web. 2 Jan. 2014.
Morgan, Joan. When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down. New York:

Touchstone, 1999.
Morrison, Toni. Jazz. 1992. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
— . Love. New York: Knopf, 2003.
Morrison, Toni, and Cornel West. “Blues, Love, and Politics.” The Nation 278.20 (24 May 2004): 18-28.
Neal, Mark Anthony. Soul Babies: Black Popular Culture and the Post-Soul Aesthetic. New York: Routledge,

2002.
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Boston: Northeastern UP, 2004.
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Aggression. Ed. Nandita Batra. Spec, issue o(Atenea 24.1 (June 2004): 133-43.
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Smith, Danyel. “Black Talk and Hot Sex: Why ‘Street Lit’ is Literature.” Chang, Total Chaos 188-97.
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North Carolina P, 2005.
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“MAYBE I’LL BE A POET, RAPPER”: HIP-HOP FEMINISM AND LITERARY AESTHETICS IN PUSH 69

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