Ordinary Notes
by
86/99
Critics' Rating Index
94/99
Readers' Rating Index
98/99
Scholars' Citation Index
66/99
Volume of Reviews
52/99
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About This Book
A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes 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. 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, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to the page. She 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.
Reviews
"Ordinary Notes makes full use of its form, finding in fragmentation a way to propose and to elaborate, eddying back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy."
"Sharpe does present terrible scenes of subjection from her childhood and professional life, but her self-portrait is oblique, even opaque ..."
"It is a testament to Sharpe's artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally."
"She integrates heartfelt personal anecdotes; stories about her family members, particularly her mother and grandmother; and lessons that she has learned from her relatives about seeing beauty in its many dimensions."
"The fragmentary dispatches are rich with suggestion and insight, generating meaning through juxtaposition and benefiting from Sharpe's pointed prose."
"The sections of Ordinary Notes that occupy domestic, private, and imaginative spaces are warmer, less cruel-to-be-kind, more tropical with their truths, and devastating because with that candor they enter the storm and not its carefully curated aftermaths."
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