The Language of Violation

Abstract

In this chapter, ugliness is observable as conceptual and textual in Sapphire’s underground performance poetry and subsequent body of work. Physical, verbal, and sexual abuse operates as a distinctively disquieting poetics that transvalues racial and sexual ugliness for a recognition of the role that abuse plays in conceiving of minority difference. This chapter locates the violated body in and through the Black-Arts–inspired explicit and experiential language of violation in poems from Sapphire’s American Dreams (1994) and Black Wings & Blind Angels (1999). Legacies of survival, abuse, and the pejorative surface as reinscriptions of violence on the queer black body in Sapphire’s related texts: Push (1996), its film adaptation, Precious (2009), and its follow-up novel, The Kid (2011).