My Body Is an Archive

I’ve published articles on examining the archive’s margins and gaps to recover women’s stories, but that won’t help me understand that girl who left her family when she could no longer live in shame.

I broke into my own home on a Sunday afternoon when I was twenty years old, while my family was at church. Technically, it wasn’t my home anymore; my mom had kicked me out two weeks earlier.

I parked around the corner and waited in the South Carolina heat until I was sure she was gone. Even at nine a.m., the humid air settled onto my damp skin, leaving me flushed.

I snuck in through the kitchen—not even technically breaking in, just entering through the back door that was never locked. I wasn’t welcome here anymore, but my body felt at home. It smelled like home, always freshly cleaned with lingering scents of bacon and biscuits. My mother’s collection of chicken-themed decor cluttered the kitchen. Her bright landscape paintings covered the walls with pastel colors. My favorite kitchen stool waited for me, the seat worn from years of propping my feet up. My mother was never able to train me to sit properly in chairs.

Everything was in its usual place, except for me. I had been erased.

Walking from the kitchen to the dining room, I noticed the changes: The wall was blank where it once held a black-and-white photo of me as a baby. The shelves were less cluttered, relieved of my childhood pinch pots and graduation photos. My awful painting of a bird that my mother had displayed on the shelf since I was thirteen was gone, replaced with a glass vase. In the hallway, my brother’s and sister’s faces still smiled at me, but there were gaps on the walls—tiny nail holes were the only traces left where my school photos had once hung.

I was raised as a Jehovah’s Witness, a fundamentalist Christian religion that warns of Armageddon, denies pleasure and celebrations, and abides to a strict hierarchy in which men make all decisions. When I was twenty, I confessed to having sex. I had been taught to repress or even fear desire, but my body was not so easily ignored. When I refused to repent for listening to my body, the male elders of the church excommunicated me, declaring me dead to the congregation. My mother followed suit. As I walked through the house wiped clean of my life, I felt as if I had lost myself, too.

I tapped a few keys on the piano before opening the piano bench. To my relief, it was still stuffed with sheet music, proof of the years I spent practicing. I gathered the Bach, Beethoven, show tunes, and scale books, even though my body remembered the notes perfectly.

I entered my bedroom looking for more possessions that could help me fill the life I would need to build. I stuffed my shirts and short-shorts into a plastic bag, leaving the modest church dresses hanging in the closet. I put on the Weezer baby tee-shirt with Kermit the Frog playing the drums stretched across my chest, leaving most of my stomach visible. I used to wear that shirt when I snuck out of the house after curfew, and now I had to sneak back in to retrieve it, along with the last few remnants of my life. I had no choice but to move forward.

*

A decade later, I prepared to spend much of my summer in archives sifting through boxes, folders, and indices of the National History of Computing Archive at Manchester University. I was in a PhD program across the country from my mother’s home, teaching at the University of California Santa Barbara and researching the forgotten histories of women who worked together to break through glass ceilings. I would spend my summer looking for women who had been erased from the history of computing. When I began pursuing this research, I was not self-aware enough to realize what drove me to seek out women who had been forgotten. I went about my archival research with an earnest need to right a historical erasure, oblivious to the lingering pain of my own.

I boarded a twelve-hour flight from my home in Santa Barbara to Manchester, England in the middle of summer. I was shocked by the grey, wet weather. Manchester was colder in June than Santa Barbara is in January. Chilled and damp, I walked past ancient gothic buildings to the modern library that held the archives, with a cup of instant coffee to keep my hands warm.

The archivist was friendly, for an archivist. He briskly apologized as he searched my bag for contraband—a water bottle or a pen, the archivist’s primary enemy—before admitting me to the reading room. It was even colder inside, to preserve historical documents.

When I refused to repent for listening to my body, the male elders of the church excommunicated me, declaring me dead to the congregation. My mother followed suit.

I sat alone looking at one document at a time, under constant observation. The room was odorless, white, and sterile, with a hard wooden chair that I would sit in for hours, searching for signs of women’s work. I wanted to be their archival hero. At one time, a computer was a woman—typically a white, young, middle class professional woman. I imagined her with a bob haircut and red lipstick. All of those descriptors could have applied as easily to me as to Cicely Popplewell, one of the women I searched for.

Popplewell was an assistant to Alan Turing, a man who is often called the father of digital computing. In the history of computers, you won’t find Popplewell, even as a footnote. Like thousands of other women, she has been erased. When she is mentioned, the story is consistent with what’s listed in Wikipedia: “a British software engineer who worked with Alan Turing on the Manchester Mark 1.” Given that she worked in the Manchester University Computing Lab for over a decade after Turing’s death, I felt sure there was more to the story.

Memory doesn’t work like a snapshot. Instead, it needs storytelling to take shape. Memory needs reminders.

I remember my first date with my husband and have forgotten so many other first dates, not because our date was so special, but because I’ve told our story a million times.

“How long have ya’ll been together?” people will ask.

“Five years,” I’ll answer, adding “I bought us our first round of beers, and then he spilled the whole pint on me.”

My life before I was twenty is lost because I haven’t rehearsed those stories. Because my mother won’t talk to me, I don’t hear her stories of teaching me to read or ride a bike. My brother won’t reminisce over the trouble we got into during high school. I have no way to contact my best friend, Angel, who could tell innumerable stories of embarrassing crushes. I can’t ask her if she knew that she was the only one I really had a crush on.

I’ve read books about archival research and feminist historiography, trying to recover the lives of other women. But what methods or theories can help me recover my own? I’ve published articles on examining the archive’s margins and gaps to recover women’s stories, but that won’t help me understand that girl who left her family when she could no longer live in shame. My body remembers being that girl, but I lack the stories that would bridge her actions and my life.

As I attempted to recover Popplewell’s work, I was supported with research funding, a quiet room, and the robust infrastructure of a well-maintained archive. I wouldn’t have the same resources for my own recovery.

Instead, I have a few articles of clothing, a couple of photographs. And I have thick leather-bound bible with my name embossed in gold on the front, which sits on my bookshelf. My mother gave it to me when I was baptized. Jehovah’s Witnesses subject members to a long indoctrination program involving months of performing acts of obedience, studying the bible, and passing lengthy oral examinations. Elders ask questions regarding doctrine, values, personal experience. The exams last for hours.

At thirteen, I worked hard to outshine and outperform my older brother and all of my peers. I completed the tasks, passed the tests, and was baptized unusually young. My mother beamed with pride. I cherished the bible she gave me, using it to maintain the daily routine of preaching and study.

After I left, I turned that same zeal toward a different kind of study. I was in a state of acute culture shock, having moved from a closed, repressive religious community to the secular, liberal academic community at Georgetown University. And yet, the innumerable hours I’d spent reading, writing, and teaching as a girl served me well as I entered graduate school.

Popplewell was an assistant to Alan Turing, a man who is often called the father of digital computing. In the history of computers, you won’t find Popplewell, even as a footnote.

In my Master’s program, only one of my professors was a woman. In my PhD program, there were three. I was the only woman who graduated from my PhD cohort. I took classes that assigned thousands of pages of reading, not a single page by a woman. I felt deeply how women were marginalized from intellectual work, not altogether different from the community I had worked so hard to escape. After graduation, I learned to build and trust a community of feminist scholars. These women listened to my stories and made space for my voice. In turn, I invested in making space for women’s stories in my own writing. I searched for them in the archives so that I could then remind readers: Look, these women have been here the whole time, working, writing, building. Their work mattered. Their lives did, too.

In that cold room in the history of computing archives, Cicely Popplewell’s name was easy to find. She managed the lab, advised users, and programmed the computer. She rewrote the manual because the version that Alan Turing wrote was unintelligible. Her body must have retained the muscle memory from innumerable hours spent manually operating one of the first digital computers, the Mark I, and its intricate set of wires and switches. Soon, I learned to recognize her handwriting on margin notes across documents that had been attributed to men. The material artifact is evidence. I can lift it up as if to say “here was a life, she must have mattered because traces of her have been preserved.”

Without an archive, where is my evidence? What can I point to and declare: Those first twenty years of my life mattered?

The objects that I recovered from my mom’s home do not explain how I learned to trust my body more than the men who demanded my unquestioned loyalty. Jehovah’s Witnesses coerce loyalty with detailed rules, strict hierarchies, and through the threat of excommunication. I long for a story or artifact that explains where I got the courage to question their doctrine and embrace a world I knew little about. I want someone to tell a story of an outspoken little girl, willing to take risks. But I’ve lost those memories and I have no family to tell me those stories.

I am left with a body as an archive. My body lives, carrying my history. I can point to the scar on my right elbow where the doctors pulled out the pin holding together bones that were crushed when I fell from my banana seat bicycle. I can complain about my creaky knees, just like my mother’s, which needed to be replaced after twenty years of waiting tables. I look into my own dark eyes and see my grandmother’s looking back.

I can’t point to the ache from that day I discovered my own mother erased me from her home. I can feel the wound, but I can’t hold it up as evidence of who I am and where I’ve been.

My husband and I live in a small, bright California condo that we’ve filled with artifacts of our life together. Bookshelves cover most of the wall in the living room. We grow succulents in broken teacups and old tins. Photos of our wedding, my PhD graduation, and our cats ascend the wall along the stairs.

There are also small traces of that life I lost. Like my mom, I have a chicken painting hanging in my kitchen. My favorite stool is entirely worn out from my feet always propped up on the seat. I don’t eat bacon, but my home smells of biscuits each weekend. My dusty piano displays my old sheet music alongside photos of my best friend’s baby. That old bible with my name on it has traveled with me from South Carolina, to Washington DC, through graduate school, and into ten different moving trucks. Through all these years, it still maintains that delicate smell of ink and leather reminding me of so many days spent studying in church.

When the pain of erasure creeps up, reminding me of what was lost, I look around, hold, dust, and rearrange my new collections that testify to my life well-lived. I remind myself that this body of mine carries an archive of wounds, and much more than that. I trusted my body when I felt I could no longer live in shame. I trusted my body when I refused to repent for pursuing pleasure. I can pull from these past experiences and trust my body as I age, grow into whatever direction my own story will bring me next.