Quasi-Corporeal

I needed to extract my body: to dismantle it and to fragment it. It was the only way to wake myself up. As I stood there, my nude body being photographed by a man operating this scanning device, I felt a loss of agency. A resignation and submission that made me somehow feel domesticated, comfortable and . . . familiar.

The results of looking at my body through a computer screen were cathartic. She became a surface to dissect and divide and analyze. She needed to be sectioned and the sections then reconfigured and nested onto another space. An icosahedron. A structure with the highest form of symmetry, as is said in Euclidean geometry. But it’s also a three-dimensional structure that Buckminster Fuller projected the world map on. The addition of each one of these horizontal body slices would form a whole. The violent and nonchalant aspect of plane sectioning a body speaks to a similar detachment and separation that occurs in diasporic peoples. But it was also something I needed to do as a woman. The depiction of these cross sections eliminated the “social” in the body for me and reduced it to mere function: object and flesh. It erased the embodied sociocultural experiences that I feel are contingent on our perceptions and views of the world. And so I needed to cleanse my body with water and scrub it down. I needed to erase my old body, and I needed to restore and rebuild it after waking up. Never will I let myself sleep as my brown skin grows back again.