Ordinary Notes

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.

A powerful vision of American life, drawn from the Black intellectual history and aesthetics that Sharpe has cultivated as the means to her own liberation, so that she might offer it to others.’ Alexander Chee

‘Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements and the violence of antiblackness and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility . . . Ordinary Notes is an exquisite text. It demands everything of the reader and, in turn, offers us a vocabulary for living.’ Saidiya Hartman

‘Every person is asked to face their present, and to see and feel and think without innocence. Ordinary Notes will forever alter each reader who grapples with its disquiet and its beauty.’ Madeleine Thien

‘Extraordinary . . . It explores, with formal daring and analytical aplomb, history, society, politics, and culture, particularly where and when they intersect with Black lives, including the writer’s own . . . [It shows] how one might combine memoir, memorial, literary criticism, political and cultural critique, and theoretical accounting in order to imagine a new model, suffused with grace, subtlety, rigor, and care, for how to read and think with and against, which is to say, to produce true and lasting knowledge.’ John Keene