Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe
Christina Sharpe's experimental visual poetic work Ordinary Notes is a profound rumination on knowledge, loss, Black American life and memory
A profound rumination on knowledge, loss, Black American life and memory, Christina Sharpe’s masterful Ordinary Notes is structured across various thematic chapters, each grappling with a different definition of a 'note' – 'to consider or study carefully' or 'to make, or have the effect of a note' – examining the ways in which these work to punctuate our lives.
The book itself is written in short-form notes, creating a long-form non-linear narrative that meanders through various topics, crafting a sense of deep intimacy, as if we have been invited to freely roam through Sharpe’s personal observations and private memories. By placing precious and cherished memories of her mother alongside academic criticism of the African American canon, Sharpe offers an imaginative scholarly work that does not draw a hierarchy between the individual and collective experience.
Sharpe continually points out white violence as a continuous violent note which strikes through the lives of Black Americans. She is unflinching in her observations that, even in attempts at reconciliation, white violence merely reconstructs and bolsters itself. In one striking moment, Sharpe interrogates the function of museums dedicated to preserving the memory of slavery in America, lest the country forget its brutality or destructive legacy, arguing that these museums merely permanently situate Black people in a narrative of victimhood, cruelty and passivity. Sharpe questions what effect these museums would have if they were structured around the violence of white perpetrators, rather than the suffering of Black people. Sharpe’s writing is not intended to always sit comfortably, but is instead a note to her own memory, intertwined with an unforgettable collective narrative.