Precious - a really difficult experience

Mo'Nique as the Mother in "Precious"

I could not help wondering, while watching this movie, about the story behind Gabourey Sidibe herself - the person who plays “Precious” in the film. Because, I suppose, that is the point behind this rather harrowing film.

Our society looks at a fat person, and judges them fairly mono-chromatically, against the backdrop of acceptably thin people. They are almost never judged on their own terms.

The film is about Precious’ “own terms”. About the fact that she was raped repeatedly by her father. It is about the extreme and extraordinary violence of her mother. About the shocking realities of the kind of circumstances in which she grew up. And about the titanic struggles she engaged in to take herself out of those horrific circumstances. It is about the fact that there was no-one to protect her when she most needed it.

To see her in the street, she would present as only one thing, in the kind of society which we term “normal”. You would see her as fat. Perhaps, you might also see her as “black” and fat. (Let me not disengage here. Let me not say “you”. Let me say me. I would see her thus).

And to do so would be to radically miss the person she is – or the person she has become, by being the person she is. Her size, like her colour, is at once her defining characteristic and the most irrelevant thing about her.

It was a difficult movie, not only because of its content. It was difficult because of the fact that Precious mumbles a lot, in an accent so strong that it is sometimes incomprehensible to a non-American. Her acting is fairly indifferent and she is, both willingly and unwillingly, completely overshadowed by her Oscar winning “mother” – who goes in real life by the curious name of Mo’Nique (no surname – like the author of the book on which the film is based - Sapphire. The book is called “Push” – also one word – and I would be grateful if someone would explain its relevance to me – along with Mo’Nique and Sapphire!)

The bleakness of the social setting is something extremely difficult to relate to, if that is not something you already know. It is a bit like watching Martians going about their Martian daily business. But I realized, while I was watching, that the fact that I have not experienced that kind of life doesn’t mean for a second that it is not commonplace. The grinding poverty. The collusion of silence. The unspeakable perennial horror of child abuse within the family. These are commonplace realities of our society, just as much, if not more so than in America.

What is surprising, is the generosity and tolerance of the middle-class teacher in the film. And that is a harsh criticism of the rest of us, who are not tolerant – who can’t (or don’t, or won’t) see through the fat and the illiteracy. The fact that the tolerant and sacrificial teacher also happens to be a Lesbian, was, to my mind, slightly gratuitous – besides the fact that it showed up how Precious’ mother could hold both moralistic positions on others, while deftly ignoring her own morally abandoned circumstances.

Mo’Nique’s acting in this role was quite extraordinary, both in her rage and in her silences. The horror, for me was that I could see some of her anger mirrored in some of my own performances on the home front. I could hear snatches of myself, bits and pieces in her dismissive sarcasm, in the way she sneered. It wasn’t in the overt stuff. Not in the “get yer Muthafuking fat arse down here” stuff. No, it was in the kind of harassment of accusatory questions, which a parent will pile up, one on top of the other, reducing the child to silence. And suddenly, there it is, spewing from your mouth. There you recognise the echo of words and phrases your parents used, and which were used on them, presumably by their parents. But even worse, I really battled to see anything of myself in the kind, understanding, yet highly focussed teacher that was set in counterposition to the brutal mother. That is who I would have liked to identify with. But sadly, not.

Much as one may not like it and much as one may want to act out a different parental role, the truth is, your parents rise from the dead in you. Both for her mother (and for me) that kind of thing lies waiting in your synapses. What is extraordinary beyond measure, if that it did not rise up in her.

I could identify with Mariah Carey, who played the social worker. Ever so slightly prissy, trying not to be judgemental, deeply professional. She managed to be professional, yes, but she was also completely ineffective. It was the school mates. It was the children of the incest. It was sheer character and courage that got Precious through it all. The social worker had only one thing to offer – the threat or the withdrawal of the welfare cheque. If that were to be removed from her arsenal, she had nothing to offer. And all the cover-up games, the wigs, the children bouncing on the knee to appease her and her cohorts, were paper-thin in the face of what was really there and what she and the system managed to miss completely.

So, it is a difficult movie for me. Not least, because of the extraordinary levels of violence, but more because or the recognition in myself, of my own prejudices; my own “violence”; my own lack of care for others. That is not the kind of movie one can easily recommend.

Children at risk during the Soccer World Cup

The Soccer World Cup in 2010, is going to bring with it a range of (what do we call them these days?) … “challenges” to our already over-challenged society. Like on our roads, and infrastructure, challenges to our police services and our drug teams and our tourism operators. But consider this. All schools will be on holiday for the entire month. Most of the big matches are going to be played at night and, in my now fairly extensive experience of Fan Parks, kids will be either brought to these Fan Parks and dumped, or they will just arrive there and be there, completely unsupervised. That has got to be a rather large “challenge”.

More, there will be child predators on the loose in a way in which we have just not experienced before – so we are led to believe by the National Intelligence Agency. It is, apparently, a feature of major events such as this, the world over.

Several years ago, that eminently sensible director of Childline, Joan van Niekerk, was interviewed in television. She was asked, in a leading kind of way, whether she thought it would be a good idea to start a register of “known pedophiles” so that “these people could be exposed”? A night or two earlier, we were shown footage of a house in the UK (where such registers are kept), having been attacked by a crowd because the crowd wanted quick justice for someone who had been “named” on the register.

Joan van Niekerk said that all the research had shown that keeping a register of known offenders appeared to have no effect whatsoever on either the dissemination of child pornography or on instances of abuse. And surely, those are precisely the things one would want to have an effect on. But what the evidence (rather than the emotion) seems to show is that keeping such a register appears to have no effect at all, except in perpetuating the fondly held myth that this kind of “punishment” is an effective deterrent. The evidence does not back up the belief. But, I suppose, like with the generally held beliefs about capital punishment, the evidence shouldn't deter us, should it? I mean, who bothers about things like that?

The other points which she made were, to my mind, of real importance to the issue. She said that behind every instance of child porn, there is an abused child. A child who has been, perhaps, physically held down and forced into sex acts by people who exercise power over that child. A child who, most likely, will be damaged psychologically or alternatively, a child whose social circumstances are so awful that in order to survive, they have no alternative but to allow themselves to be abused in this way. It is a sad reality that it is often the very people who shout loudest about exposing and punishing pedophiles that care least about the condition of children in the broader society, abused or otherwise.

Another point which Joan van Niekerk made (and it is a well known one) was that it is frequently the case that child abusers were themselves victims of abuse, and so the terrible cycle perpetuates. This is not to condone their actions, for goodness sake, but it is to at least acknowledge some societal, and not simply individual responsibility for the whole thing. The cycle of abuse will continue in the kind of social conditions which encourage it and you won't stop it by putting a few people here and there on a register.

We need to ask ourselves, though, why there is such a big reaction when children get abused sexually? What about all the other forms of abuse we seem quite happy to live with, like poor education? And forced underage labour on our farms? And social conditions which force children into sex, just to eat? These seem to elicit considerably less rage and angst in South Africa. In fact they are frequently just ignored.

The 2010 soccer event is proving to provide something of a magnifying glass to some aspects of our rather damaged society. The risk posed to our children is one of them. But let us not suppose for one single moment, that the risk is primarily external, nor that it is an isolated risk. Children are raped and abused on a daily basis in our society. Children live in absolute poverty and have very poor access to anything like a good education. For some reason, these things seem to be of less concern to people.