Author Christina Sharpe uses beauty as a path to liberation
The author of Ordinary Notes and In the Wake tells us about finding inspiration in Toni Morrison
When writer and York University professor Christina Sharpe presents her work in person, she often reads from a familiar keepsake: a copy of the great Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, gifted to Sharpe by her mother, Ida Wright Sharpe, decades previous. Even from afar, one can see the array of multi-coloured tabs, some more worn than others; the extensively annotated margins; a depth of notations that have been made and remade for half a lifetime.
It's a beautiful reminder of the revolutionary worlds that exist within acts of care. Morrison's transformative work is an offering to her readers, just as Ida Wright Sharpe's generosity in sharing her affection for art, music, and literature is an offering of love and affirmation to her daughter. Both of these gifts open up a cosmos of possibility.
It's fitting then, that Sharpe's much-anticipated follow-up to her brilliant 2016 text In the Wake should devote itself to attending to the same kind of beauty — its material gestures and movements — and the resistance it makes possible.
Released in April of this year, Sharpe's newest work, Ordinary Notes, is many things. It is, firstly, a striking collection of 248 brief notes. It is poetry, it is criticism, it is record. Most clearly, it is a love letter to Sharpe's mother and the way in which she modelled beauty as a means and method of existing otherwise.
In Note 51 Beauty is a Method, Sharpe offers the wisdom of peer and collaborator Saidiya Hartman who, in her stunning 2019 text Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, writes, "Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art 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."
For Sharpe, beauty is both guide and material for freedom making, for pleasure, for joy. Alongside this, Ordinary Notes traces personal and public histories, reflecting on the ways in which certain kinds of consciousness may or may not be cultivated or called upon in space and time. Memory, embodiment, and ways of relation pattern Sharpe's work, reorienting us toward the restorative practice of, in her words, regard and radical acts of imagination. Likewise, language here acts upon itself as a form of kinship. Notes accumulate and intersect with one another, expanding in form and meaning as they collectively trace the paths through which freedom is possible. It's a mosaic of Black thought that refuses the unlivability of our current world.
Given the opportunity to sit down with Sharpe, I spoke with the author about the influence of Morrison on her work, the role of beauty in liberation, and the way in which we must live in radical excess of the violence that structures our present.
You speak in Ordinary Notes of In the Wake and the ability to write beyond the academy. To me, your writing has such life to it and witnesses the personal in a way that unburdens itself from the academic expectations of writing. What intentions shape the way that you share language?
In graduate school, people tried very hard to make me know that the way that I thought and wrote was not acceptable. In that sense, it's good that in some ways [I continue to be] a "bad" student because I refuse to learn that lesson. It's really difficult for me to write and think any other way.
Beginning with In the Wake, it was important to me to write in ways that people across educational backgrounds can access the text. There's a way that you can talk with and about complexity and not be obfuscating. That doesn't mean that you diminish complexity or that you don't use specific terms relevant to the work that you're doing; it means that you try to make those complex thoughts and ideas as clear as possible.
My mother didn't go to university — she didn't go past the 12th grade — and neither did my father. I wanted people like some members of my family, if they chose to, to be able to read the work. When I was writing In The Wake, I spoke to my editor Ken Wissoker and — channeling Julie Dash — I said, "My first audience for this book is Black women, my second audience is all Black people, and my third audience is everyone else." I wanted to write a book in a language that could move in that way.
It's not that I'm not dealing with things that I would deal with in a more standard academic monograph, but that I wanted the work of argument to come through via form, accumulation, and juxtaposition.
There is a lot of engagement with "we" in your work — how the curation of history or memory functions in public space and as public record; how it works upon us, without us, against us as Black folks. How does that engagement with "we" shape the way that you write?
On the one hand, I am speaking and writing to Black people. That's always my "we." [On the other,] I don't mean to speak for all Black people. I am speaking from the position of a Black person in the West who reads and thinks about Black life everywhere in the world. That shapes how I try to attend to the ways that we are constituted — the things that we do to interrupt particular kinds of violence, and the lives we try, and do, make in the face of unrelenting violence.
In some sense, I mean Ordinary Notes to be a kind of public record of the conversations [we as] Black people have amongst ourselves. We attend to the kinds of violences, large and small, that we encounter every day; we have critiques of it, [and] we have ways of navigating it. We take note. We regard each other in the midst of all of this. This is a public record of my understanding of what that might look like, what that might sound like, what we work against in relation to that, and how we attend to each other.
Something that I return to repeatedly — a sentence I repeat three times in In the Wake — is:
"To be in the wake is also to recognize the ways that we are constituted through and by continued vulnerability to overwhelming force though not only known to ourselves and to each other by that force." (16)
And I truly believe that. The other word that we might also use for how we are known to and by each other is "regard." I wanted this to be a book that took note of that [force] and also make manifest that kind of regard.
Your evocation of "beauty as method" and your practice of beauty every day (which you share online) have been such an important model in terms of my own freedom practices. But still, there are moments of such urgency — often underscored by structural violence — that feel in excess of beauty's capacity for imagining otherwise. I've been thinking a lot about Note 226: "There is every possible reason to be overcome with an awful grief." What might our recourse be when beauty as method — even in its expansiveness, even in its most transformational dimensions — feels like it's not enough?
It may very well not be enough. It's like [the characters] Paul D and Hi Man in Beloved: it doesn't end their capture, but it creates the possibility for them to see each other and trust each other enough that when the moment comes, they can make the break for freedom.
The practice of regard creates the conditions by which we might bring others and ourselves together to something like freedom — it's a practice of attending that we can extend to others in a way that makes something more than individual freedom possible. If you can extend [that] to those around you, then that seems to me the beginning of building ways in which we might not only conceive of but make some other kind of world possible — one that is antithetical to the one in which we currently live.
Certainly, the world is terrible in so many ways. This current world order is one that must be brought to an end and, in that bringing of it to an end, we must simultaneously build something else in its stead — the present world that we want. [My thinking in that way is] aligned with the work of Mariame Kaba and Ruth Wilson Gilmore who [speak of] abolition as a practice of making something: making some other kind of inhabitation of the world possible, making some other set of relations with the human and more-than-human possible.
You speak often about the influence that Toni Morrison's Beloved has had on you and your work. Her book feels like a presence that lives within so much of what you do — in Ordinary Notes, Beloved is this beautiful reference for your conception of the note itself. What lessons in beauty — in the knowledge of beauty and in envisioning freedom worlds — from Morrison continue to guide you?
There are three things I think of. First is the epigraph to Ordinary Notes which comes from Beloved, "... and when I tell you you mine, I also mean that I'm yours," which is in the midst of the novel's breakdown of language where we get Beloved the daughter and not daughter's story. Something else that comes to mind from that section is Beloved's looking for "the join." Thinking about the join, that space where something gets articulated about the communal and the conditions for Black life in excess of the violence is important to me.
The third thing is when Denver is standing on the porch ready to step off it [and leave the yard], but also is not ready to step off it. She hears Baby Suggs say, "You don't remember nothing about how come I walk the way I do and about your mother's feet, not to speak of her back? I never told you all that? Is that why you can't walk down the steps?" It's this moment that is retrospective but also present and prospective; it's something that I think about a lot.
As hard as it is, we shouldn't fool ourselves about the ways in which we are positioned in this white supremacist world and that white supremacy organizes the entire world. I wanted to make that present in both In the Wake and in Ordinary Notes — that we should know it and still step off that porch and go on out the yard. Go on. That has been something that continues to inform my work and motivate me.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
