Ordinary Notes
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
A singular achievement, Christina Sharpe's Ordinary Notes explores, with immense care, profound questions about loss, pain and beauty; private memory and public monument; art; complexity; and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent notes that cumulatively gather meaning, artifacts from the past – both public ones and the poignantly personal – are skilfully interwoven with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.
At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. 'I learned to see in my mother's house,' writes Sharpe. 'I learned how not to see in my mother's house . . . My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words.' Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, a chorus of voices and experiences is summoned to the page. Sharpe practices an aesthetic of 'beauty as a method', collects entries from a community of thinkers toward a 'Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness', and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a brilliant new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sharpe (In the Wake), a Black studies professor at York University, Toronto, lays bare the brutality of anti-Black racism through 248 brief "notes" on history, art, and her personal life in this poignant and genre-defying triumph. Recounting a visit to the Whitney Plantation in Louisiana, Sharpe contends that its decision to feature statues only of enslaved children instead of adults suggests that the curators thought generating empathy for the enslaved children "was an easier task than seeing all Black people, everywhere/anywhere, as human." Her wide-ranging analysis is penetrating, as when she links a journalist's comments calling a neo-Nazi a "good father," Francis Galton's dubious honorific as the "father" of eugenics, and the remarks of a sheriff who said the 2021 Atlanta mass shooter who targeted Asian women had "a really bad day," arguing that white supremacists are "extended the grammar of the human" often denied to people of color. Throughout, Sharpe returns to the supportive influence of her mother, who encouraged her "to build a life that was nourishing and Black" and instituted a family tradition of reciting excerpts from Black authors over tea, making Sharpe feel "accomplished and loved." The fragmentary dispatches are rich with suggestion and insight, generating meaning through juxtaposition and benefiting from Sharpe's pointed prose. Moving and profound, this is not to be missed. Photos.
