“Precious” – In Quest of Some Friendly Niceness

“Precious” – In Quest of Some Friendly Niceness
By
Joseph E. Mulligan, SJ

“Precious,” in the 2009 Lee Daniels film by that title, is a sixteen-year-old in Harlem who from infancy had experienced at home a degree of psychological, verbal, and physical abuse (including the most extreme sexual violence by both parents) rarely seen on the screen. Very overweight, she experienced constant ridicule and insults from her peers. Passing a group of young men on the sidewalk, they issued a series of put-downs, and then one hit her hard from behind and she fell.

With all the trauma she was suffering, Precious was scared and unresponsive in school. “There’s always something wrong with these tests. These tests paint a picture of me with no brain – of me and my mother and my whole family as less than dumb – just ugly black grease to be wiped away. Sometimes I wish I was dead.”

Her self-hatred and lack of self-esteem primed her to lash out violently at others. A boy in class who smarted off to the math teacher got hit by Precious. When a little neighbor girl asked to see Precious’s baby, she was abruptly pushed and thrown on the ground by Precious; toward the end of the film, Precious gives a red scarf to the girl.

Her wound begins to be healed by the nonviolent, compassionate, active love shown by the principal of her school, by a teacher in her alternative school, and by a male nurse who shows kindness and affection while helping Precious when she is in the hospital for the delivery of her second child. Precious gradually begins to feel some kindness and solidarity from the other girls (also from very tough backgrounds) in her alternative education program.

The first of these healers – the principal of the school from which Precious was suspended – proved capable of absorbing some very harsh verbal violence, including physical threats, from Precious and (in the background) from the girl’s mother when she arrived in the lobby of their apartment house with the intention of inviting Precious to consider an alternative school program. But this woman, with her nonretaliatory concern for her former student and belief in the girl’s potential, kept talking through the intercom, managing to plant the seed of hope and self-confidence in Precious, mentioning that the math teacher saw a real potential for math in the girl.

In her early days in the program, Precious was still untrusting and violent. When she tried to write a letter on the blackboard, one of the girls laughed at her; and Precious hit her in the face as if it were the most natural thing to do.

When the teacher asked the students to share some basic facts about themselves and to tell what they do well, Precious declined to take her turn, but later summoned up the courage to state her name. Teacher: “something you do well?” Precious shook her head and said “nothing.” “Everybody’s good at something.” Precious shook her head again but then said: “Well, I could cook, and I never really talked in class before.” “How does that make you feel?” “Here, it makes me feel here.”

Gradually she began to feel love and care from her teacher and to experience friendship from the other girls. Thanks to Ms. Rain’s ability to teach and to encourage, Precious began to learn the sounds of letters and then to recognize words.

At the age of twelve Precious had her first child, fathered by her own father. “Mongo,” a girl with Downs Sindrome, was raised by Precious’s grandmother. When Precious gave birth to Abdul (also the fruit of incest) during her first year in the alternative school, she was proud, happy, and determined to be a good mother. In her baby she saw her own beauty and goodness.

Precious now has the strength, confidence, and joy in living to be able to face the next challenge: she is diagnosed HIV positive. But upon learning this, she turned on her teacher: “F___ you, you don’t know nothing of what I been through. I ain’t never had no boyfriend….Nobody loves me.” Ms. Rain: “People do love you, Precious. Your baby loves you. I love you.” Precious keeps on keepin’ on.

Her mother, Mary, is the epitome of meanness in her unrelenting verbal and often physical aggression against her daughter, but toward the end of the film she begins to reveal the hurt and rejection she felt. When her husband preferred his daughter to his wife, Mary felt rejected. “That was my man, and he wanted her. So that’s why I hated her. She let him have her. So those things she told you I did to her, who else was gonna love me?” She ended her confession to the social worker in tears: “I didn’t want him to hurt my baby.”

The film ends with Precious walking with her two children, and smiling.

Sapphire, the author of the novel Push on which the film Precious is based, has said: “One of the myths we’ve been taught is that oppression creates moral superiority. I’m here to tell you that the more oppressed a person is, the more oppressive they will be" -- Bomb, Fall 1996, as cited in the reader’s guide in Push.

The most extreme and offensive egotists may be, in fact, those who have the weakest and most wounded egos. Desperate to buoy up their self-concept and status with others, they will step on others in an effort to stand taller themselves. The only way to heal the frail egotists’ wound is by nonviolent, suffering, forgiving love – to convince them that they are somebody and are lovable. Then, forgetting and transcending self, they will be capable of loving others – as Precious experienced.

Just today Adela, a member of one of our Christian Base Communities in Managua, shared with me her very difficult experience of working as a live-in maid with a family consisting of a single mother, Alicia, and two children – Juan, 8 years old, and Lupe, 4. Juan is very disobedient not only towards Adela but also to his mother, to whom he tells lies about Adela. He is also physically aggressive toward Adela. In many ways Lupe is following her brother’s lead.

I asked Adela, who is frustrated and saddened by this situation, to tell me something of the family history. It turns out that Lupe’s father hanged himself in the home when the girl was two, and that Juan’s father deserted the family when the boy was three and visits his son only occasionally. Alicia has a full-time job outside the home to support her family.