This extract is taken from the essay collection On Being Legible by Amara Osei.

On Being Legible (extract)

There is a particular violence in being misread, and it is not the violence of malice. Malice, at least, requires you. The violence of misreading is impersonal: you are replaced by an idea, and the idea does not require your presence to be maintained.

I have been replaced many times. I have been, in the reading of others, a representative 5 of a country I have not lived in since I was six. I have been the embodiment of a cause I support but did not choose to represent. I have been an exception (to what rule, no one says) and I have been evidence (of what thesis, again, unclear). The most well-meaning of these replacements carried the most weight.

We speak of representation as if it were always a gift. And sometimes it is. To see 10 yourself in a story is to understand that your existence was always imaginable, even in the years when it was not imagined. But to be made into a symbol is to be made into a surface: reflective, useful, and two-dimensional. Surfaces do not have interiors. They catch light, and they are used.

I am interested in the question of who gets to be legible on their own terms, and who 15 is legible only as data. The answer, when you trace it, follows the usual fault lines. This is an essay about language. It is also an essay about power. These two things have never, in my experience, been separate subjects.

How and to what effect is the writer's voice constructed in this text?