Our Abuse

I had a disturbing conversation with a young lady recently.  She was distraught over the fact that she caught her boyfriend of three years cheating on her with a transsexual.  Sounds like something from Jerry Springer, right?  Turns out she was depressed, quit her job, gave up her apartment, and was going to move back to her hometown to be with her family.  While it seems that her entire identity was wrapped up in this man, and she was having homicidal thoughts because he had the nerve to change his password to prevent her from snooping in his e-mail account any longer, I found out that she and her boyfriend of three years had never had sex.  Interesting, you may say?  But wait, it gets curiouser and curiouser.  Not only had she and her boyfriend of three years never had sex, he was her Dom, meaning their interaction was based on him beating and controlling her and her being “sexually” submissive to him.  Strange you say?  But wait, there's more. 

When I inquired why they had never had sex in three years of their relationship, she said it was because she had been a lesbian all her life and she didn't know how relationships with men worked.  Like any reasonably sane person would do, I sort of asked her if she thought her life and her choices were just a tad bit out of control.  She told me without a doubt that she was just fine.  It was obvious to me without even asking that she had been the victim of abuse when she was a child, so much so that her choices as an adult were extremely dysfunctional.  Without needing validation of my suspicions, I asked her if she had ever gotten any counseling for the sexual abuse she had been subjected to as a child.  She told me of being raped at 10 years old and how she had gotten counseling once or twice back then but she didn't need it any more because she was fine now, that she didn't have any problems at all.  When I made the decision that I couldn't help her and I politely ended the conversation with her, she became incensed that I was doing something to her and I somehow became the enemy and she verbally attacked me.

Black women are so used to abuse, so accustomed to it, so conditioned to swallowing our pain that we don’t even understand how damaged we are from it.  We pass down our abuse to our children and justify it because we think abuse is normal.  I had a conversation with a young lady once who told me her mother let her get raped by her uncles and her mother’s boyfriend.  Her reaction, as an adult, was to defend her mother’s actions and blame herself.  She was suffering from extreme depression and all she could do was blame herself for seducing these men when she was nothing more than a child. 

It seems inconceivable in this day and age when you can turn on the TV and see Dr. Phil and a host of other shows that discuss mental health that a grown woman would not be able to grasp the concept that being raped at 10 years old had some sort of negative effect on her life.  She doesn’t grasp the concept because we as a community can’t even face our own demons.  We rape, abuse, and molest our girl children and tell them that it is natural and normal.  We socialize our sons to use women for sex, we tell them that women are nothing more than objects to be screwed and thrown away like garbage in search of the next woman who looks better.  We validate our pain by holding on to some ridiculous Christian notion that it’s noble to suffer and that when we die we won’t have any more pain.  We sexually abuse our children and sweep it under the rug while pretending that it’s no big deal at all. 

Well, I'm not going to be quiet about it.  I'm going to keep bringing it up until we can discuss our molestation, rape, and abuse without shame.  I'm going to keep working with the abused to help them heal and I'm going to be all up in the faces of the abusers in order to stop this pain.  I'm going to fight for the man that was raped as a boy and who is so afraid of feeling powerless and emasculated again that he forms strings of empty and abusive relationships with women in an effort to suppress the pain.  I'm going to fight for the woman that thinks that she has to dress sexy every day because the only attention she gets is from men that want to fuck her when she shows off her body, a little bit of knowledge she learned at an early age from older men that tried to steal her innocence.  I'm going to fight for the spirit of the young girl that was raped at 10 years old that has no touch with reality and thinks that pain is normal.  You can stand in silence if you want but I will scream and fight and I will not let it go. 

I Am a Colored Girl

I am a Colored Girl

I am a colored girl.  I am a colored girl who has considered suicide when my life seemed cloudy and gray.  I am a colored girl who has been raped more times than any woman should, given her body and her love to undeserving men, and who has been a mother to an unborn baby whose life I chose to terminate.  I am a colored girl who has had to suppress, deny, and internalize my pain because I’ve been told that I don’t have a right to express my angst, that to be a good colored gal is not to be uppity but rather to be a sassy, one-dimensional caricature.  I am a brown woman who has been blue in a white world that is responsible for spilling the red blood of my black ancestors. 

Ultimately, however, this little missive isn’t about me, it’s about Tyler Perry’s For Colored Girls and its impact and impression on the Black community.  The fact that the movie speaks to me, to my artistic spirit, to my personal struggles and survival as a Black woman beyond the offensive and incessant deluge of Basketball/Rapper/Housewives gold-digging, materialistic, shallow depictions that flood the media is almost irrelevant.  I get that most Black women are entertained by their own objectification, that the more degrading the image, the higher the ratings.  What shocks me most is that I am almost singular in my praise of the movie among my peers.  Of all of my feminist, womanist, academic, like-minded friends, I stand essentially alone as a fan of the movie, its message, and its execution. 

I went to the movie on its opening night with a sweet gentleman who had more baby momma’s than can literally be counted on two hands.  The theater was packed to capacity with loyal Madea fans who really don’t give a damn if their entertainment is buffoonery or comes at the cost of their degradation.  They laughed at inappropriate places and yelled homophobic taunts at the screen as if the actors could actually hear them.  When I cried, my companion held my head to his shoulder to comfort me and whispered to me that everything was going to be okay.  As we all filed out of the packed auditorium, I heard the same sentiment echoed throughout the halls, “Yo, that movie was deep.”  

It wasn’t until I sought solace and comfort among my contemporaries that I found this, what I can only call bizarre critique of the film.  I fully anticipated that Black men would hate the film, that was no shock.  Any discussion of Black men that doesn’t proclaim them flawless and unfairly maligned is going to be met with a unanimous proclamation of, “Male Basher!”  I never once thought white people would get it, the cadence and rhythm, the subject matter is truly beyond the scope of what they deem to be acceptable Black entertainment.  Hollywood only loves Black movies when we are criminal, degenerate, or ghetto so I knew not to expect praise from The Academy.  It was only when I turned to the women who I thought would see the beauty and innovation of the project that I felt alone.  It seemed to me that almost every woman I thought would love it, said she hated it or wasn’t moved by it.  It was from my inner circle that I heard the critiques that it was nothing more than of unwarranted male bashing, that it was simply another typical Tyler Perry flick with no substance, that it was . . . too poetic.  The very same women who lament almost daily that there are no stories that tell our tales are the women who said that they couldn’t stand the movie.  I heard everything from contrived critiques that Perry only made the movie to hide his sexuality to he didn’t stay true to the original author’s vision.  One has to ask themselves exactly how hypercritical one must be not to take note of the fact that there were good black men in the movie, that the poetry remained essentially in tact, and that there was a beautiful story woven around Ntozake Shange’s words that had absolutely nothing to do with Mr. Perry’s personal life but the original play. 

I am not a Tyler Perry Fan.  My critiques of his movies falls more along the lines of Spike Lee’s assessment than those who have a collection of bootleg Madea DVDs they’ve purchased before the movies even come out.  That didn’t prevent me however, from going to the movie with an open mind and seeing the beauty, artistry, and genius of this film.  From the way it was directed, filmed, the exquisite way the stories were interwoven and interpreted, to the fact that it wasn’t watered down but that Perry maintained the integrity of the poetry, For Colored Girls was nothing less than brilliant.  Young and old, rich and not so rich, the movie gave voice to the myriad of women who have been socialized in a society that was not created for them. 

It’s almost as if the movie’s harshest critics were the same women who have dedicated their lives to fighting for our stories to be told, but when they actually saw their stories, with all their blemishes, they didn’t like what saw; they saw something ugly and it looked a little too close to what was reflected in their mirror.  In a day and age when what passes for artistry in the African American community are rap songs with the rhyming skill of a third grader, unscripted “reality” shows that have nothing whatsoever to do with any sort of reality, and plays with the exact same you-don’t-need-a-man-you-need-Jesus storyline rehashed time and time again, this jewel, this rare gem was cerebral, earthy, and genuine.  It’s a very sad commentary that the people who appreciated the movie the most probably have no clue what Sister Shange was attempting to do with her seminal choreopoem. She, like Perry, wasn’t trying to bash men or put out a work that was too sophisticated for the average Black person to grasp, she was telling the tales of colored girls who have considered suicide when the rainbow is enuf . . . like me. 

Scottie Lowe copyright 2011