“He beat me when you not here, I say. Who do, she say, Albert? Mr. ____, I say. I can’t believe it, she say. She sit down on the bench next to me real hard, like she drop. What he beat you for? she ast. For being me and not you.”  Walker, Alice. The Color Purple (pp. 78-79).

Recently, I attended the off-Broadway show of The Color Purple. Though insufficient as a robust review, I will say it was brilliant and mesmerizing.  It sent me home hungry to watch the movie and read the novel again so I could commit to memory Walkers words as if memorizing sacred text.

Laying here I recall the scene and sacred words of literature in which Ceilie recounts how Mr.____ beats her for being her and not Shug. Those lines resonate in me because I think about how much violence I have experienced in my life because I was me and not some other idealized, concatenated version of what others’ desires have created (which are often themselves cheaply imitative).

Ceilie said, “He beat me for being me…” Beatings are: The words on insult and slight that are whispered, situated in the gaze or the lack thereof while you acknowledge the thinner one walking beside me. The words and tunes inscribed in the lyrics of the song, I can’t see myself in your videos, commercials or advertisements and I’m mentioned in the margins of your social media profile…as what you definitely don’t want.  Brutal beatings manifest in the invisibility when you speak or more commonly the absence thereof in your greeting. The celebration of virtues but rejection of the body they come enmeshed within…I have experienced them all as violence against my personhood. I remember once being told on a date that I was exhausting because I wanted to talk about the stolen legacy of classical music and so many other artistic forms, and because I wanted to ask meaningful questions that challenge the philosophy of therapeutic practice. I expected to hear this from a vacuous individual, but not from someone who I perceived had the intelligence to absorb the discourse.  All of this was because on a date, I wasn’t supposed to challenge and probe.

“He beat me because I’m not you.” What might throw me into the deepest of psychological turmoil and tailspin is that it really is true, as several accounts reveal in pithy cliche: that hurt people hurt people; people who are abused sometime become abusers. I too have enacted violence upon others because they are not what I had idealized or at least what i had been TOLD and indoctrinated to believe was the ideal.