Description

This program is read by the author

The critically acclaimed author of In the Wake Christina Sharpe is a brilliant thinker who attends unflinchingly to the brutality of our current arrangements and yet always finds a way to beauty and possibility Saidiya Hartman

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 pastpublic ones alongside others that are poignantly personalwith 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 literaturealways attend with exquisite care to the ordinaryextraordinary dimensions of Black life

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the authors mother Ida Wright Sharpe I learned to see in my mothers house writes Sharpe I learned how not to see in my mothers 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

A Macmillan Audio production from Farrar Straus and Giroux