Reviews

Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

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amandalina's review

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emotional informative reflective medium-paced

4.5

kassiani's review

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4.5

QUOTES:

Note 51: beauty is a method
"Beauty is not a luxury, rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much. " SAIDIYA HARTMAN
"what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds."

NOTE 58: about stories & power
"I’m not arguing that there are wrong stories or wrong ways to tell them. Stories in and of themselves aren’t right or wrong. Who writes, how one writes—as in from what subject position—and what one writes matters. It matters because while films, novels, plays, and poems are works of imagination and are not collapsible into the narrowly political, all work arises out of particular spaces/places/needs/and times, all works are produced and received within a context, all works are political"
"Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, stories are “really dependent on power.” Certainly, the power of publishing, financing, and distribution, but also of course representational power, the power of stories to shape realities—to shape how we see each other and ourselves"

Note 205:
"In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes that “[b]ooks leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”
Books—poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays—have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me 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.

Note 208:
"In “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” Audre Lorde writes that poetry is “the skeleton architecture of our lives…. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” [169] We predicate our hopes and dreams. The grammar of a possible life made in the sounding of it. The work of words—opening into possibility."

Note 217:
"A culture of surprise is:
a way of marking the ways that through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.) one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned as, or to be, “surprised” by events (traumatic or otherwise), instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, or aware;
a culture of refusal and disavowal, and the national as well as personal ability to maintain innocence in the face of knowledge and/or evidence to the contrary to be found in all aspects of juridical, social, economic, political, and everyday life;
one in which, through the processes and politics of remembering and forgetting (history, narrative, lived experience, etc.), one (a person, group, nation, faction) is continually positioned to be surprised by events, traumatic or otherwise, instead of, for example, prepared, knowing, aware of, or producing them."

Note 234:
"Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future."

Note 243:
"I have a practice I call beautyeveryday where I take photographs of flowers, trees, the light, clouds, the sky, moss, water, many things, in order to try to insist beauty into my head and into the world"

emma_b_rhodes's review against another edition

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challenging emotional informative reflective sad medium-paced

5.0

Saidiya hartman meets billy ray belcourt. Very poetic. I want to get a physical copy to read - this one was difficult as an audiobook.

Content Warnings

schmub's review

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challenging emotional informative inspiring reflective medium-paced

4.75

jenna0010's review

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emotional hopeful reflective slow-paced

4.0

Christina Sharpe has this way of getting to the beauty and harm all at once. These 'notes' articulate the beauty of Black livingness in an antiblack world. The photographs and scanned objects throughout are so tactile and tangible.