Ordinary Notes

By: Christina Sharpe

Narrated by: Christina Sharpe

WINNER OF THE 2023 HILARY WESTON WRITERS' TRUST PRIZE FOR NONFICTION • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD

A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.

“I wanted to write about silences and terror and acts that hover over generations, over centuries. I began by writing about my mother and grandmother.” —from “Note 18” in Ordinary Notes

A singular achievement, Ordinary Notes explores with immense care profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. In a series of 248 brief and urgent 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-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence. Through the striking images and words in these pages, themes and tones echo: sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature—but always attending, 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 and other gifts and ways of seeing, Sharpe steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method,” collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a “Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness,” and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

©2023 Christina Sharpe (P)2023 Knopf Canada

Critic reviews

“A deft blend of memoir, theory, archival documents and lyrical reflections. . . . [Ordinary Notes] build[s] into a mosaic that holds the relentless terror of Black life as well as its undeniable beauty. . . . By turning her gaze inward, Sharpe offers a framework for understanding how to move forward, even when burdened by all the knowledge of the world’s cruelty. . . . [Sharpe’s] most liberating and poetic experiment yet.”—The New York Times

“[Ordinary Notes] paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America. . . . With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves between an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. . . . It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally. . . . An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“[A] poignant and genre-defying triumph. . . . [Ordinary Notes is] 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.”—Publishers’ Weekly (starred review)