Chapter 1

The First System Was the Body

Condensed Sample

There is a photograph of me as a child where I look like I have not yet learned what the world wants from me.

That is the thing I notice now.

Not my face first. Not my clothes. Not whether I was cute, pretty, sweet, awkward, or any of the other words adults love to place on children like little decorative cages.

I notice the absence of performance.

I notice a child who has not yet been told how much of herself will become public property.

A child who still believes the body is just a body.

A place to live.

Not evidence. Not invitation. Not warning. Not prophecy. Not a problem someone else gets to solve.

I look at that child and feel a grief so specific it almost becomes weather.

Because I know what she does not.

I know the body will be the first system.

Before school. Before work. Before church doctrine could fully take root. Before doctors could learn to distrust me in polished clinical language. Before algorithms could sort me. Before lovers could project whole mythologies onto me and call it attraction.

Before I knew what race was, before I knew what gender was, before I knew what desire was, before I knew what danger was, my body was already being read.

And not by me.

That was the first theft.

The body became a text everyone else felt entitled to annotate.

Black girlhood was my first user experience problem.

The interface was society.

The task was personhood.

The error message was always my fault.

Too loud. Too grown. Too sensitive. Too angry. Too needy. Too strange. Too Black. Too female. Too illegible.

Try again. Try smaller. Try prettier. Try quieter. Try grateful. Try less.

A preposition can become a prison if placed correctly.

For a Black girl.

That “for” did so much work. It created distance between me and the supposedly universal. It made my beauty conditional. It made my humanity comparative. It turned recognition into an exception.

The body is where abstraction ends.

You can philosophize about identity all day, but the body is where the bill arrives.

The body is an archive with terrible search functionality.

I do not trust clean endings. They smell like branding.

What I have is less glamorous. I have moments.

Moments where I remember that being watched is not the same as being known.

Moments where I refuse to become smaller just because someone else has a limited interface.

The first system was the body. The first failure was not mine. The first reconstruction begins here.