Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe

Some passages from Ordinary Notes by Christina Sharpe:


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I want to tell how sorrow makes a shape that is familiar. And how that familiar thing can be difficult both to name and to narrate.


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There is a certain mode of reading connected to a tradition of colonial practices in which every book by any Black writer appears as sociology. Then all of that book’s explorations, its meanings, and its ambitions lodge in a place called identity. This often-white reading either does this directly, as in, in this book about identity… or indirectly, by way of excepting a particular Black writer from this dreaded trap by writing that they “bravely” eschew identity. The reviewer might then draw a comparison between that Black writer and Sebald and imagine this a compliment of the highest order. Or the reviewer might make clear that the Black writer in question is not-one-of-those-Black-writers who center their work in the abundance of Black life.

These readers and reviewers are stuck on something they call identity and not something called life or genre or craft or intertextuality or invention or literary tradition.

These readers continually misread the note. They decant all complexity, all invention into that thing they name identity that they imagine is both not complex and not relevant to them.


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Abolition is one manifestation and key call of this time of Black liberation; it extends our understanding of the ways that the states we live in have consolidated the carceral and it imagines and enacts other ways of living.

Abolition is one manifestation and a key call of this epoch of Black liberation. It refuses the logics of property. It refuses the ways that the states we live in and the mechanisms of those states in this moment have consolidated the carceral. It joins and elaborates and imagines other ways of being together and in relation, other ways of enacting care for human and nonhuman life.

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.

Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.


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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.


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