Christina Sharpe

Ordinary Notes

Marion

The architecture of the memorial stages encounter.

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.

You do not have to save the things that kill you.

He would never consider nor see the beautiful, elegant life as deeply Black. But elegance is not the province of leisure or the domain of wealth; it is not fashion; it is the persistence of style.

He could never imagine nor see the sapeurs of Brazzaville and Kinshasa.

Spectacle is the right to capture, to capture what is deemed abjection, and the right to publish it. Spectacle is a relation of power, It has a long life and a big sound. The photographer doesn't just see the thing but also amplifies it, doubles and trebles it. And with each appearance of blackness their spectacles are summoned.

Life is a loving practice, the practice of loving. Life is the bridge between past wisdoms and imagined futures. Life, like love, is a rhi-zome-or perhaps an entanglement of try. Life is relation and revelation. Life lays itself on / creates / treads the line between here and there.

Perseverant acts of imagining, desiring, improvising, observing and communing. Continuously creating. Black life: Building in boundless-ness; Keep on keeping on outside and anew of what wastistwill be (given and granted).

Black life is both infinite possiblities and being in betweena rock and ahard space; it's knowing how to soar while always being asked tosce. and fetch it. It's walking forward while constantly looking backwards Black life is navigating orward ivadictions while taking guarded

Black life is rebellion. It is the ultimate contradiction to the isms destroying humanity: colonialism, racism, capitalism. It is the affirmation of possibility through collective, ancestral, radical joy.

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. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility.

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.

There is a deep and long tradition of Black arts ranging across continents and archipelagos attendant on the modern and its legacies of transatlantic slavery, colonialism, and racial capitalism. Black artists across form and those whose only form is their lives are engaged in the knowledges produced by these legacies and contemporaneous trage-dies. They have always performed, thought, lived, enacted a desire for freedom they have always fought for and made spaces, imagined ways when there was no way. Every movement for Black liberation, every era of Black struggle, has been accompanied by its singers, its dancers, its poets, its storytellers, its musicians, its artists its theorists of the possible world, its theorists of the imagined world. These are the tracks we work in —if we are lucky.

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