For avid readers who prefer their own imagination to someone else's interpretation, audiobooks can detract rather than enhance. Recently I've enjoyed re-visiting Rebecca and The Castle of Otranto if only because my imagination dictated the first impression.
But In regards to Sapphire's "Precious", well, that's a different gig entirely.
I can't fathom competing with Bahni Turpin's rendering and I'm not even sure I'd breeze through the novel, specifically due to the slang, what I know as ebonics. Listening to the main character felt similar to initially opening my ear to Italian and French or could be compared to traveling to Quebec where one might argue their version of French is dramatically different, even bastardized but it's equally as important and certainly integral to the local community imparting information, so all things relative as language is a fluid mode of communication.But you know Sapphire the performance poet is going to take it to another level, and she does and I am impressed and spent.
So I download the novel and take a seat along the banquette in our salon, overlooking the stagnate black water with Colette and Godot peacefully at sleep on either side. I've turned off all the overhead lights and desk lamps, everything, wishing to listen in the dark, relieved of all reality and sense of protocol. I want complete immersion into her brutal life, I want to see who this child is, this black, obese, illiterate being, sexually abused by both parents, impregnated by her father, twice, by the time she's 16. I want to understand what it's like to have never ever been given the chance to broker a deal with Faustus, what it's like to be born directly onto Dante's inferno.
And so I do. I follow Precious Jones along the yellow brick road and witness in horror as the last lifeline of mainstream life floats away. I'm so grateful by the time the good witch arrives in the form of a wizard, a teacher named Blue Rain who happens to be a lesbian, arriving just in time to gently guide Precious from the flames towards sanity.
This is where its important to note and appreciate the author as performance poet. The words flow from the character, so economic and yet with a particular force so fierce that each syllable, every letter demands to be heard. I even found myself imitating Precious as she recites the alphabet, had I forgotten the order of the alphabet? I leaned forward, I had a moment, so many moments while listening to Precious recite her life to me. There were other students, other stories and I was surprised how important the other stories became to me, in such a short time frame, their lives in just 5 minutes, a clever mechanism as each student had to recite their own story to complete the course.
You begin to believe, at least I did, that Precious could and would want to remove her victim status, erase every 'why me' from her daily prayers and just forget about the fact the world conspired to make such wistful thinking practically impossible.
Language, yes, a tricky proposition indeed. It's amazing some of us can communicate at all. I miss speaking English to those around me, it's primal. The other nite I went out with my local galpal, Elise, as she tried to teach me Italian slang, please, and not 10 minutes ago, my husband sent me a pic on his iphone from Geneva; this particular niece speaks 5 languages and she's not even 5 years old, in an Israeli accent for heaven's sake. But the world's conspired to make it easy for her, to learn and live amongst many people, but Precious, well, she's going to inspire millions, she's certainly made an impact upon me, deep into my psyche, a second reading will not be on this weeks' itinerary....whoever you are Sapphire, you are something otherly, indeed.
