Push de Sapphire : de l’invisibilité mutique au récit-témoignage, ou comment se reconstruire après le chaos

Abstract

An introspective and interactive narrative written on the confessional mode, Push relates the reconstruction of Precious, an obese and illiterate teenager. The victim of incest by her own parents, she gives birth to two children –including one with a trisomic disorder. The (anti)heroine resorts to “scriptotherapy”, a strategy that notably echoes that of Celie in The Color Purple or Jefferson in A Lesson Before Dying. Her living, phonetic and rhythmical writing brings back traumatic memories, while her coarse language reveals the sordid character of the abuses she has endured. By giving voice to the narrator, this palimpsestuous text testifies to her chaotic life, both on the formal and thematic levels, as the novel blends pure narration, dialogue, naïve sketches and poems on a sometimes blacked-out page –symbolic of this female survivor’s “working-through”, which is still only a laborious, yet promising, “work in progress”.