It was a review posted by @thestackspod that had me adding this to my TBR. I really hadn't, and haven't, seen it anywhere else. But I am grateful that that review is one that popped up on my feed because, having just finished this, I am so grateful for reading it. This was really something special. 

 

In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharpe gives readers a profoundly moving literary experience. As per Goodreads, Sharpe "explores profound questions about loss and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 notes that gather meaning as we read them, Christina Sharpe skillfully weaves artifacts from the past--public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal--with present realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. The themes and tones that echo through these pages, sometimes about language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, art, photography, and literature--always attend, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life." What I know is that, by like 20 pages in, I was already blown away by it. 

 

The writing is poetic and rhythmic and gorgeously painful as it cuts to the quick with its messages about the myriad violences of anti-Black racism and how so little has changed over the years (the fact that the “past” that is slavery/segregation/institutional and systemic racism has failed to stay in the past and is, in fact, very much the reality of the present). I was awe-struck by the insights and connections that Sharpe makes, as well as the brevity of language with which she accomplishes it. She brings together a chorus of voices historical and present to help paint this literary, analytic, critical, rhythmic, incredibly discerning picture. And the way she layers concepts and words and art/artist references in a way that mimics layering of music in composition (where we see the multiple layers of meaning in the title come through strongly as well), is stunning. This is all combined with emotional remembrances of her own - experiences from her youth, memories of and grief for her mother - that enhance and demonstrate, with personal touch, the messages the more generally observational and anthropological notes make. It's these snippets of memory that, with a few short words of commentary/insight/reflection, become more, symbolic or educational or indicative of a wider pattern or simply…more, that take what is a set of academic points (though not less important or necessary for being that) and make them something that takes the reader's breath away with the intensity of the delivery. Amazing. 

 

Sharpe questions frameworks and breaks down concepts and exemplifies truths/explanations of so much of the reality of ani-Black racism in the US, historically and today and in all the ways those are actually the same, a looping and folding over and repetition of time. Where does our sympathy/empathy land? What does it do/achieve? A call to action to recognize the pervasive and incorrect narrative of the ‘history’ of the US that frames violence as “anomalous and intermittent and not foundational and ever-present.” A call to lean into cognitive dissonance in our families/communities, to interrogate our 'best intentions,' and do something, to build towards a future that is not just a slightly different version of the same. 

 

At one point, Sharpe notes "There was a time when I would answer people's questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself." and if I am being honest, this is exactly what I felt while reading this. I took so many notes while reading this (I'm not a tab-er, but this work almost made me want to) and part of me wants to write them all here, to tell you what stood out to me, what I learned, which aspects/points landed hardest. It's all so essential, indispensable, and part of me feels like trying to sum it up, or give highlights, here will make more people read this. That's what I want. And yet, I know my words cannot do justice to Sharpe's words. I know that this is a book you have to pick up and experience in full, for yourself, to appreciate it and absorb it to the depth it deserves. And so, I will refrain. And I will simply repeat: read it yourself. 

 

This is poetry and philosophy and history and sociology and social justice and current event commentary and more It's an expansive and philosophical attempt to capture in words what the Black experience is: what it's grown from, shaped by, seen as, means to those who live it, is attempted to be communicated through words/visuals/artistic renderings and expressions, and more. One of the back blurbs says readers will be forever changed who “grapple with its disquiet and beauty” of Ordinary Noets. And hot damn if that isn’t true. 

 

 

“...the lessons that an institution imagines is it imparting - or the ones that we imagine the institution imagining it is imparting - like racism is bad or look how far we've come - is not the only, or even, perhaps, the primary, lesson or note to take hold. The imagination of whiteness is also at work, undoing the lesson, restructuring, and constantly renewing antiblack racism.” 

 

“There is the violence of the baying crowd and there is the violence of reasonableness, each part necessary…” 

 

“Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.” 

 

“Not lost to time. Hidden. Their names are not lost to time, they are hidden in time, hidden in the work of the US, hidden in towns, in cities, in consciousness, and in lies. They are hidden and enjoyed, loved, adorned, and breathed in like air.” 

 

“What if white visitors to a memorial to the victims of lynching were met with the enlarged photographs of faces of those white people who were participant in and witness to that terror then and now? What if they had to face themselves? Might they not be a different endeavor? Might that not hit a different note?” 

 

“...the ghost of a past that is not yet past...” (our present) 

 

“That grammar of 'mistakes were made' is one in which terrible acts are committed and yet no one is assigned responsibility for them.” 

 

“Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such.” 

 

“Time collapses in on itself; it is not linear; it is a boomerang” 

 

“The torturer insists that he cannot remember. The tortured insists that he cannot forget.” 

 

“This is how the docile cultural subject is made, through a violence material, metaphorical, continuing, and ordinary, perhaps couched as interest, care, or tenderness, and displaced onto others.” 

 

“Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it. Spectacle is a relation of power. It has a long life and a big sound. The photographer doesn't just see the thing but also amplifies it, doubles and trebles it.” 

 

“So much of Black life and work and resistance goes missing. Black people work to hold all of this information in our heads, oftentimes unbolstered by institutions, oftentimes against such institutions' purposeful forgetting. We have to function as a living library: as an institution.” 

 

“I live through the steady onslaught of these occurrences.” 

 

“Books - poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays - have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped em to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times.” 

 

“The machinery of whiteness constantly deploys violence - and in a mirror-register, constantly manufactures wonder, surprise, and innocence in relation to that violence. That innocence-making machine rubs out violence at the very moment of its manufacture.” 

 

“Border authoritarianism. The forced withdrawal and criminalization of any modicum of care.” 

 

"There is no set of years in which to be born Black and woman would not be met with violence." 

 

"The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones. Return the photographs. Repatriate the statues. Empty the museums." 

 

"I write these ordinary things to detail the everyday sonic and haptic vocabularies of living life under these brutal regimes."