Reading Travels: Precious Harlem

Each time I plan a trip to New York City I realize that Harlem never makes it to my list. There are many things to see –and my vacations are too short and Harlem seems like a part of the city that does not entice the visitor much…
But I had been to Harlem twice this month – as an imaginary traveler that is. First was the movie: Precious. Than it was the book: Push.

Push is poetry. True, Sapphire is more of a poet than a novelist, but it is in the way Precious carries you through the dark reality of her life that poetry is born. There is in each of us, no matter what, that grain of humanity, beauty, love which is our most precious gift. As in a poem.
Precious is what I call a beautiful person. So is Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe . When beauty is not measured in inches and pounds. Or kilograms and centimeters.
Her mother troubles more the movie viewer, in the book she lost any grain of humanity so it is the movie that makes her terrifying – there she only fell at the bottom of this continuum we may call human nature, but she did not step over the border. She could be one of us and that is hard to accept and internalize…
Ms. Rain –I imagine her more as the book depicts her on the rough, boyish side rather than the angelical, almost emaciated character played by Paula Patton. I imagine that it takes guts to work in the environment she did…

So…there is the story, as told by the book, poetic but not cosmetic (the movie had to bring in some serious makeup touches). The story of a world we do not see. The story of a city we never visit. Not because it is too far or because there is some wicked totalitarian force to build an wall and drop an iron curtain between us and them…But because we draw our own blinds to this world. We tend to notice what we would like to notice –and this is not something we wish to see. There is a curtain between us and Harlem, between us and a child called Precious. A child who becomes pregnant at twelve and nobody asks too many questions on how did it happen, and who is pregnant again at sixteen and the only consequence is that she gets kicked out of school. After all it is only another overweight girl on welfare. And what else can we expect form an overweight girl on welfare?

The assumption of a whole culture: the ones that are at the bottom of the pit are there because they deserved it. One does not need dignity for the mere fact that one is a human being. We are no longer preciously priceless but well priced. Or not...


Sadly but it is not just us, the ones living in the visible world, who are drawing the curtain.They are doing it too. The story of the people that assume the worst about themselves and then they become it. The story of children growing beyond this curtain and who never know that there is help. That there is a Ms.Rain. Or other children like them, the ones who live invisible lives in the visible world.


And the system, the sum of us and a little more, which is too concerned with self preservation. Systems do work the best when in a state of balance between us and them. And you, my reader, from the visible world are not really complaining about the system. Are you? After all, we are fortunate enough that even though we may have dark skin or we are overweight or we do have an invisible story beyond us -at least we were not born in Harlem and do not have to live on welfare. And we go on believing that no one, but no one, can have that much bad luck...