Ideas - The ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life: Christina Sharpe

Episode Date: July 10, 2024

Christina Sharpe's award-winning book, Ordinary Notes, explores the complexity of Black life — blending memoir, history, cultural and political critique. She argues that the experience of Black people is misunderstood — but can be contested, and healed, by Black creativity, and community.

Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighbourhood, or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto, wherever you get your podcasts. This is a CBC Podcast. Welcome to Ideas. I'm Nala Ayyad.

Knowing that every day that I left the house, many of the people whom I encountered did not think me precious and showed me so, my mother gave me space to be precious, as invulnerable, as cherished. Christina Sharp, reading Note 51 from Ordinary Notes, a book she describes as a love letter to her mother, from Ordinary Notes, a book she describes as a love letter to her mother, the person who equipped her to live as fully as possible in a place that did not love Black people. It is through her that I first learned that beauty is a practice, that beauty is a method. Beauty as resistance against the ugliness and brutality of racism.

I've been thinking about what beauty as a method might mean or do. What it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty's knowledge with us and make new worlds. Christina Sharp grew up in the Philadelphia area and was profoundly shaped by her mother and her commitment to beauty and joy. And that has everything to do with the fact that I'm a professor now and that I can call myself a writer now. She is the Canada Research Chair in Black Studies in the Humanities at York University in Toronto. Her widely acclaimed book, Ordinary Notes, was nominated for the National Book Award in the U.S.

and won the 2023 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for Nonfiction in Canada. The book is not at all ordinary, but it is written in the form of notes, some only one sentence, some several pages long. Their impressions, anecdotes, reflections, critiques, some tender and joyful, some angry and sorrowful, memories, some fond, some painful, woven through and conversing with the work of Black writers and thinkers like Sadia Hartman and Dionne Brand and Toni Morrison's masterpiece, Beloved, a novel centered around the story of a former slave who is haunted by the daughter she killed to keep her from being enslaved. And I liked the form of the note, both because I wanted to play with all of the meanings of note,

but also I liked the compression and the accumulation and the juxtaposition that could happen, how you could move from one idea to the next, and it wouldn't be a leap, but a kind of bridge from one thing to the other. And so I thought that the form would allow for a kind of accumulation of meaning, the way that I wanted to build meaning and connection So I thought that the form would allow for a kind of accumulation of meaning,

the way that I wanted to build meaning and connection and feeling as you work through the book. Threads spin together through the book, connecting slavery, lynching, segregation, mass incarceration, and the killing of Black people, often with apparent impunity, but also the affirmation and refuge to be found in creativity, beauty, caring, and the richness of Black life. And always, history and the present are braided together and felt in personal encounters with racism. Ordinary Notes is addressed to a specific audience, but it presents other readers with complicated, uncomfortable truths, challenging them to confront their relationship with a past of racist violence that has never really passed. I think for my work, the intended addressee or

the first addressee are Black people, wherever we are located in North America, the Caribbean, are Black people, wherever we are located in North America, the Caribbean, the continent, anywhere in the diaspora. But as with any book, you might have an intended addressee, and then you have people who are overhearers, overreaders. That's a word I made up, overreader. So on the one hand, it's, of course, for anybody to read, but I do have a particular you or a particular we that I'm speaking into always. What is ordinary about these notes? You call them ordinary notes. I think what's ordinary about them is I really wanted to think about the kind of ordinary, extraordinary matter of Black life. So they're ordinary in the sense that,

you know, we move through the world, we have a series of encounters, and we have theories, philosophies, feelings, thoughts, reactions, condemnations, embracings of the sets of encounters that we have with people, with work, etc. And so I wanted to think of the sort of quotidian, as opposed to always the spectacular things that happen in our lives. They're both sometimes extraordinary, but also they're just the kind of daily matter of Black living, my living, and the ways that that meets the kind of living of other Black people. And then some of them are sort of passing, but also perhaps repeated thoughts, right?

So, you know, I think about a note like, there are things that I remember, but they no longer live on the surface of my days. And that's about, in a sense, sudden realization that things that I thought I would never not obsess about appeared to me, and I realized that I had stopped obsessing about them, that I could remember them, but they were no longer the kind of texture of everyday. That's quite a thing. That is the work of a non-traumatic experience anyway, diminishing over time, because you can have the kind of linear distance of time and still feel quite close temporally to a terrible event. distance of time and still feel quite close temporally to a terrible event.

Yeah. In the first two notes in the book, you draw on the writing of Toni Morrison, of course, and the Canadian writer Dionne Brand to talk about how one can be, quote, held by a note. What does that mean to be held by a note? Well, I have to go back to my second book, which is In the Wake on Blackness and Being, in which I'd been trying to think about both the hold, as in the hold of the slave ship, but then how else the hold might appear as in one's encounter with another, a kind of ethical obligation to the other where you see them, they see you and so the various meanings of what it might be to be held both as enclosure and as affirming or at least acknowledging encounter and then note two which is about what it might mean to have a note that holds you that allows you to well in that novel to to make an escape right and so what it means to kind of build a kind of sense of community or trust or camaraderie or what I call regard, which is a kind of mutual seeing. Hazel Carby once said I was a forensic etymologist, not entomologist, forensic etymologist. And I embraced that. I wanted to see, you know, what happens if you keep all of these meanings operative? What does it allow to happen? Near the beginning of the book, you write, quote, 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. Why were they the starting point?

That is also a kind of nod to another work by Dionne Brand, which is At the Full and Change of the Moon, and those acts of Marie Arsoule and her compatriots that hover over the centuries, right? Them claiming their freedom by committing mass suicide and thereby freeing themselves from the plantation, and then her decision to let her daughter go into freedom, to let her daughter survive. So the book in many ways began with the photograph of my mother and grandmother, which I'd been obsessed with since my mother showed it to me when I was like 19 or 20. So thinking about my mother's life and my grandmother's life, I never met my grandmother,

she died before I was born. But what my mother would say about the things that her mother would not tell her. And, you know, I'm going to tie that to Gail Jones's Corregidora, which is this novel about generations of women, one of whom was enslaved and what happens afterwards. And the great-grandmother who had been enslaved will not tell what she did, but that she doesn't tell it does not stop that act from determining something about the lives of her daughter, granddaughter, great-granddaughter. And so thinking about how acts named and unnamed, known and unknown, produce effects, it was a way to connect the personal and the historical, to think about the kinds of effects that set a whole set of things moving. It's quite a large question, but I wonder if you don't mind running through some of those effects. My tendency is to answer it through literature. So I'm going to answer it through literature.

Absolutely. So, beloved, Denver doesn't know what her mother, Sethe, has done because Sethe doesn't want to speak it. But she wants to protect Denver from white supremacy, anti-Blackness, you know, it's taking place in Reconstruction, the forces of lynching, etc. You know, all of the things that seemed like a kind of promise of emancipation being violently wrenched back. But just to be clear, what she has done, meaning killing? Killing, yes, right. What she has done, meaning killing the unnamed daughter who returns in the form of beloved. But Denver's inability to enter the world is because she doesn't know what happened. And so she is afraid of everything at a certain point.

You know, the question that stops her is, you know, so your mother was in jail or, you know, what your mother did. And Denver then becomes deaf and then becomes mute for a while and is utterly incapacitated by not knowing and being afraid and therefore also wanting to enact certain kinds of protection. And then has a sort of deep hunger. You know, similarly, if one doesn't know the kind of violent history of slavery in Canada or slavery in the U.S., doesn't mean that one doesn't encounter its after effects everywhere in terms of segregation, in terms of carding, in terms of stop and frisk, in terms of all of the ways that the laws of slavery become transformed into the laws of mass incarceration, into the laws of who is

interdicted, who gets to live where, who moves where. So the kind of ignorance of certain kinds of logics and structures doesn't lessen their impact on you. So I hope that answers. It's a beautiful answer. Some of those things you talked about, those forms of racism that pervade society, you were aware of as a very young girl. Unfortunately. If I understood correctly, some of that manifested itself into a physical illness. If I understood correctly, some of that manifested itself into a physical illness. Can you talk about your awareness of the connection between that illness and your knowledge and experience of racism and those around you as well?

Yes. I mean, I said unfortunately, but I also think in a sense it is unfortunate that anyone experiences that. It is unfortunate that that is our pervading logic. experiences that, right? It is unfortunate that that is, you know, our pervading logic. At the same time, it was fortunate to know that it wasn't, you know, me in particular ways, even as one experiences it as, you know, what's wrong with me as a child, right? Of course. Yeah, so the kind of forces of racism manifested themselves in me as a kind of ulcer when I was like 10, 11 years old, because of the kind of repression and ingestion and an attempt to really hold oneself together in the face of deep, unrelenting unpleasantness. But my mother was really also very clear about, you know, making clear that I was precious. And so there's a way that that doesn't, for someone like me anyway, counteract the force of the external. Because, you know,

you're in school, you spend eight, nine hours a day, five days a week outside of your house. But yeah, I was aware of the connection between the external and the internal, in terms of, you know, how one might have a kind of ingestion of racism and a kind of attempt to hold oneself together in the face of it might manifest in certain kinds of bodily dysfunction. Yeah. You're very generous in telling us and giving us a very intimate glimpse into how your mother made sure you were aware of the perils of the world you live in. How did she do that? I mean, one example is, you know, it was something she felt she had to tell me, which is that, you know, at a certain point, you're getting to the age when your peers are dating. You're not going to be included in certain ways. And if you are included, you're not going to

like the way that you are included. I mean, I was the youngest of six children. It's not like my mother hadn't also seen this with my siblings. She had some practice, yeah. Yeah, though, you know, some of my siblings were much more, you know, popular than I was. But she really wanted me to know that I had some choices that I could make. And it was really quite hard, but I think it profoundly changed the course of my life.

I mean, it's, you know, I'll give another example. I used to get Seventeen magazine, and I don't think anybody read Seventeen when they were 17. You read it when you were like 12 or 13, right? So I would get the Seventeen magazine, and I would love it every month. And then I would get depressed. And so one day my mother said,

you know, there's a connection between you buying that magazine and feeling bad about yourself. It's like, I'm not going to tell you not to buy the magazine, but you might think about the relation between the two. Right. It was like, oh. So perceptive. Yeah, that's true.

I still bought the magazine and I still felt bad about myself probably. But I deeply appreciated having a parent who could say things to me that made me think about actually what I was experiencing. And it gave me a language to understand what I was experiencing, even if I wasn't necessarily able to shift it because even if I didn't get 17, those ideas were everywhere. I mean, there weren't as much of a critique as I have of sort of representational politics. It was one thing not to see oneself anywhere represented. I mean, there were no like Black models on the cover of 17 until I was probably in university, right? Yeah. Part of the work of white supremacy and anti-blackness is to mire us in the same conversations, at the same junctures, in reference to our lives. The very lives which those forces seek to control, occupy, own, use, and ultimately destroy.

This is the regime we live in, and its effects are made to be felt through all kinds of systems, You're right about something, what you call the afterlives of slavery. Which is a phrase that comes from Saidiya Hartman. Right. Can you give us an idea of what you're referring to, what she was referring to when you use that term? I'll quote another thing. Saidiya Hartman writes in a book called Lose Your Mother, A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, something like, I too live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I live in the present produced by it. And so the afterlives of slavery is the way that we understand, and this is a partial quote, that the skewed life chances,

disproportionate access to health care, differential life expectancies, etc., etc., are part of the afterlives of slavery, the way that the logics of slavery live on in our present. And that's part of what I try to get at as well, sort of extending and thinking with Hartman and thinking about the way that the wake, as in the wake and the afterlives of those ships, as well as many other definitions of wake, impact the day-to-day lives of black people everywhere we are in the world it really is underlined by another phrase that you use which is that the past fails to remain in the past yes yes which is also in in conversation with michelle rolf toyle and silencing the past power and the production of history all of the ways that the past fails to remain in the past

and isn't it um it's that faulkner quotation the past is not only not past see i'm not going to get it but it's the past isn't not is not past right so it's the way the past is continually reanimated in the present so really in the context that we're in, it means that the tone and the mode of white supremacy and black subjugation might be different today. But the fact of black subjugation to maintain white supremacy remains. manifest themselves, as you say, change. The fact of anti-Blackness remains. The fact of white supremacy remains. And we see it everywhere being completely reanimated, like, re-inhabited. It's very visceral when you talk about seeing historical photographs, for example, that still look familiar to you today. And you write about the expressions of hatred and rage and anger that you see on the faces of white people. Yeah. Well, you know, the one example that I give is of the white supremacist march in

Charlottesville in 2017. But I think we can see it again and again and again, these kinds of expressions of white rage. And they might not all look exactly the same, but the two images that I have in the book are of this young white boy yelling at the black family who's moving into the neighborhood in Folcroft, Pennsylvania, and then the young white man in the march in Charlottesville. white man in the march in Charlottesville. It is the boy's open mouth. It is that belt wrapped around his hand. It is that rage. Seeing it again, I am hit with a force of recognition so strong it produces nausea. The caption reads, quote, youngsters jeer as moving men tote possessions of the Horace Baker family up the steps of their new home in the formerly all-white Del Mar Village development here, 8-30. The Negro

family finally gained entrance to their new home after two days of demonstrations by whites, end quote. The photograph was taken August 30, 1963, in Fulcroft, Pennsylvania. The boy with the belt wrapped around his hand. I faced that white boy almost every day. So much hatred in that photograph, and they are called, quote unquote, youngsters. As if those ecstasies of racial hatred and the stolid confidences of white supremacist violence are simply them practicing their rituals of passage. So thinking about the relationship between those two photographs and thinking about all of the manifestations we see in the present of that kind of white rage, that even if we don't always get that picture of the face, that that kind of rage

that has animated that face is everywhere apparent. So I think we see it across time, and we see those photographs, and we see them in terms of lynching photographs. If you look at the white people in the photographs, you see this kind of rage that is subtended by a kind of pleasure and desire. You're listening to my conversation with Christina Sharp, the author of the award-winning book Ordinary Notes and In the Wake on Blackness and Being. and In the Wake on Blackness and Being.

Ideas is a podcast and a broadcast heard on CBC Radio 1 in Canada, on US Public Radio, across North America, on Sirius XM, in Australia, on ABC Radio National, and around the world at cbc.ca slash ideas. Find us on the CBC Listen app and wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm Nala Ayyad. Hey there, I'm David Common. If you're like me, there are things you love about living in the GTA and things that drive you absolutely crazy. Every day on This Is Toronto, we connect you to what matters most about life in the GTA, the news you gotta know, and the conversations your friends will be talking about. Whether you listen on a run through your neighborhood or while sitting in the parking lot that is the 401, check out This Is Toronto wherever you get your podcasts.

In Ordinary Notes, Christina Sharp writes of how a commitment to community, caring, and the practice of beauty makes it possible to imagine a better world, one where Black people can live fully and joyfully. But the afterlives of slavery must be acknowledged and reckoned with, a history of white supremacy and racist violence that persists in different tones and guises to this day. Much of Ordinary Notes reflects on memorials and museum exhibits that are devoted to slavery, lynchings, and other atrocities committed against Black people, such as one that Sharp visited in Montgomery, Alabama. that Sharp visited in Montgomery, Alabama.

The National Memorial for Peace and Justice is dedicated to the more than 4,400 known victims of lynching in 12 states in the U.S. The names of the victims, or the word unknown, are inscribed on each of the 805 weathering steel monoliths. Other than turning around

and heading back up the path, there is no way to exit the structure once you begin your descent. You are forced through, forced underneath, hundreds of monoliths. Forced past the wall markers with specific names and the specific terrors that those black people and communities faced, forced past the steps that gesture to the stadium seating that was constructed for the white crowds who rushed, sometimes by the thousands, to be witness and participant in spectacle lynchings. I asked Christina Sharp to tell me about her experience there.

I was compelled by the monoliths. I was compelled by the kind of narrative from slavery to mass incarceration. And I do think, despite my critiques of the project, that I think it does important work. And I also think that in activating the logic of never again, we see the ways that never again has always been a failure. again has always been a failure. That genocides have been ongoing while never again is supposed to be the logic that we live with, that we understand that these things should not happen. And so I'm interested in the ways that a memorial gives a beginning and an ending to a particular set of atrocities that we experience as ongoing. So to think about the era of spectacle lynching, you know, say it's from 1877 to 1944, we see spectacle lynching happening all the time right now with the circulation of the murders of Black people, that police video that gets, you know, released, those bystander witness videos that get released. And so there's a way that that is too neat of a timeline, even as it is meant to do a particular work at a particular time to make us understand the enormity of these modes of spectacular violence. And so the question that I ask is how to memorialize the ongoing, because I think that

the project of memorialization is always going to be undone, as I say, in the same way that never again doesn't mean never again for everyone. That it means that one also can't attend to the afterlives, to the ways that these things, these kinds of violences, are reanimated in the present. Is the book an attempt to do that, though, in some ways? Memorialize the afterlives now, I mean, today? No, I think it's an attempt to think with them, to be in conversation about them, to put them in a kind of juxtapositional arrangement, to say as well that we recognize the way that these things continue even as they might appear in different guises. A remembering is different than memorializing. So it is a remembering and

it is an attending to. That memorial that you went to, you came across a white woman who attempted to have a conversation with you. Yes. Would you mind describing that for us? You know, we've come through the memorial, and the way you move through, you move under the monoliths, and then you come out and you move past the Morrison quotation from Beloved, which is Baby Sugs in the Clearing. They do not love your neck, unnoosed and straight. So love your neck, put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up. And all your inside parts, that they'd just as soon slop for hogs,

you got to love them. The dark, dark liver, love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet, more than lungs that have yet to draw free air, And then you move to the part where the 805 monoliths are laid out like a graveyard. So as we were coming through the end of that, and I'd been looking, my father's family was from North Carolina, and there were just marker after marker after marker

of these mass murders of Black people in North Carolina. And so I was sort of holding my breath, thinking, you know, there's so much I don't know about my own family history, I hope I don't come across a name that I recognize. So coming back around and a white woman stops me and says, you know, excuse me. And I don't think she's talking to me because I'm in my own head. And then she says, excuse me again. So I look and she says, I just want to say, and she kind of gestures, I just want to say I'm so sorry about all of this.

I thought for a minute and then I decided not to reply. She was visibly upset, but I felt like, you know, I'm in a graveyard and you've interrupted my meditation, my own sort of deep disturbance here to hand me your grief in the form of an apology, but it's still to hand me your grief. And I thought it's not mine to bear. I have my own, my own grief. And so I didn't respond. But I think that there's a different, you know, there was a British project of thinking about British slave owners and tying the wealth produced in slavery to the wealth that many white Britons enjoy today. I think there could be a similar kind of work that happens in terms of lynching. You know, all those Black people who were driven out of places like Wilmington, North Carolina, Rosewood, Florida, who had to leave with nothing, who owned land,

received nothing for that. There's a way that I think white people should reckon with what they accrued from that violence. And so that's a different kind of work than a kind of gesture of apology to me in the midst of my own mourning and reckoning. Have you ever encountered such an attempt? in the midst of my own mourning and reckoning. Have you ever encountered such an attempt? I think there must be, but, you know, I'm not sure. I'm thinking of one particular incident.

And even again, as I have a critique of it, the documentary by Katrina Brown called Traces of the Trade, A History of Slavery in the Deep North, which looks at her relationship to the DeWitt family, who at one point were the people who made the most money from African chattel slavery in the North. And it is really her family's attempt to come to terms with, they say something like, their conspiracy with silence, and with the fact that many of them became multiillionaires and are still multimillionaires in relation to it. So that's a kind of individual and familial attempt to really reckon

with the differential results and impacts of chattel slavery. And Katrina Brown says something like, this work has moved her from guilt to grief. And those are two different relationships to an event. I think guilt is in some ways similar to a kind of empathy that removes the object of suffering and places oneself there. As grief is, I too have been deeply affected by this and I have some work to do. Entangled is the word. Entangled, yeah. That's a kind of entanglement. Yeah, which is much closer relationship. Yes. So is what you're saying basically that these things shouldn't be remembered as the past so much as acknowledged and recognized as the present?

Absolutely. And I'll never forget, there's a scholar named Kimberly Juanita Brown who, you know, she gave a talk where she talked about those photographs and, you know, made it really clear that many of the stories would say lynching at the hands of persons unknown, but those persons aren't unknown. They appear really clearly in those photographs. And those are people's mothers, aunts, sisters, uncles, brothers, sisters, cousins, et cetera. And if white people really wanted to, they could identify those people in those photographs and do their own kind of reckoning with that and what that means. And so there's a kind of reckoning that I think most white people refuse to do. And in the meantime, until these kinds of efforts are made, is it naive to think that these memorials provide some kind of,

you know, a way to make redress? No, I don't think it's naive. And I think there are many Black people who experience the memorial absolutely differently than I do. So I don't pretend to speak for every Black person. In fact, you know, I know many people who would disagree with me about how the memorial works and how it worked on them. So I think that the kind of recognition and acknowledgement that no we have not made this up does its own kind of important work. That this is documentation of a series of atrocities that occurred and these are the names of the people. It's really the framing of it as a kind of never again that troubles me and a kind of beginning and an end to it. But I think the work of marking and naming the people who suffered and who were so brutally murdered is deeply important work.

to the victims and tragedies of white supremacist violence, you see, quote, the imagination of whiteness at work, undoing the lesson, restructuring and constantly renewing anti-Black racism. I'm wondering in that context, what does the word whiteness mean? Is it a practice or a political project? Is it beyond a description of a physicality? Absolutely. And that is the term that I use. I say it's a kind of political project because whiteness like blackness, as opposed to white people and black people, circulates in different ways, right? So that there were white supremacists who participated in the January 6th almost successful insurrection who were not quote-unquote white people, right? But they were participating in the kind of logics of white supremacy, white nationalism, and spouting that

rhetoric. So it's to divorce whiteness as a kind of political project from white people, because anybody can be participant in that political project. It's about a kind of aspirational horizon for how you imagine the world and your place in it. One of the most horrific crimes committed against Black Americans in recent years was the massacre of nine Black people at Mother African American Church in South Carolina in 2015. And at the time, a lot of people thought that Barack Obama's eulogy for the pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, was a powerful statement on racism. But it struck you somewhat differently. I wonder if you could talk about how you saw that unfolding. Well, I kind of want to answer the question in two ways.

Please. Because I think that that is an instance of spectacular violence. But I think the kind of most horrific violence that happens to Black people in America and everywhere in the world is the kind of quotidian violence of those afterlives of slavery, like the rates of mass incarceration, the rates of people who died from COVID, the rates of people who are being unhoused by the processes of gentrification and financialization, the destruction of environments like the building of Cop City in Atlanta in a Black neighborhood, the other potential building of Cop Cities in Baltimore, Maryland, you know, Cancer Alley in Louisiana. I think those are the most horrific and ongoing assaults against Black people that occur on a daily basis. And they don't necessarily always rise to the

level of attention that the spectacular violence gets. But those are the daily assaults on Black life that we live with, the mining in the Congo to get coal tan that powers, you know, our iPhones. Those are deep assaults on black life that make life unsustainable. So that's my one answer to your question. of Barack Obama that I don't need to go into right now. But I thought, you know, to sing Amazing Grace, which, you know, has its origins in slavery and the saving of John Newton, who still goes on to still be a slave owner. Because we know John Newton's history. We know that he keeps working on the slave ships after his conversion. And it's only later that he writes Amazing Grace. after his conversion, and it's only later that he writes Amazing Grace. To sing Amazing Grace is to mispronounce the song. It is to insist on a romance of salvation in which the grace is for Newton. The grace is not for us. Amazing Grace is about Newton's journey. It has nothing to do with the horrors and terrors of slavery for the enslaved.

I thought it hit the kind of wrong note. So on the one sense, it hit the right note because it was, you know, his sort of empathetic performance. On the other hand, it utterly evacuates the song of its history and what it might mean. Like, I thought he should have gone and been in the audience and not given a eulogy and certainly not said. Another thing that Barack Obama is associated with is Dr. Martin Luther King's often quoted statement that the arc of the moral universe is long, but that it bends towards justice. No wonder whether there isn't some part of you that thinks that that might be wishful thinking. Oh, that's absolutely wishful thinking. I don't see a bend in toward justice. But then again, you know, I don't know that justice at this point, I don't know what that actually means. You know, there's something like liberation. There's other ways of living together, other ways of being together. I don't think that's justice. Because justice isn't always fair. I mean, I watched a lot of Law and Order at a certain point in my life. One of the things that becomes very clear is justice doesn't mean fairness. So I think we have to have different kinds of horizons

for what living together might mean at this very perilous time in world history. perilous time in world history. In the face of the murders of black people, murders that endlessly repeat, how can one presume still that there is an us and a we that are in something together? This register assumes that we are all in the world in the same way. That we experience suffering on the same plane. That we can be repaired in the same way. That the structures, the architectures of violence and of affect reach us in the same ways. Living together kind of brings up a word that's so simple and yet is fraught. The word we. I mean, is there a we? I think there are different we's. You know, I was speaking to the broadest we, a we that doesn't presume a certain kind of inclusion, but that encapsulates people in various positions, in various geographical locations,

with various histories, desires, etc. As I say, often my we is black. But in this we, thinking about what it might take in this moment to try to survive in some way, planetary catastrophe, it has to be the ability for people to move freely. It has to be the end of oligarchy. It has to be the abolition of property. You know, it has to be a radical rethinking of what life might look like. And that has to mean some kind of life together. I think you've partly answered this, but I still want to ask it directly. What are we left with if there is no we? Well, we see what happens. I mean, what happens is genocides. And that is what's happening. If the we is so narrow, as we see it being narrowed in every way, because there can be a we that is a generous we, there can be a we that is like I'm talking to a

particular group but I'm not condemning those who are not me, but there's a we that is deeply just fascist and that wants to see the eradication and the subjection of everyone else? There's a choice to be made. Is it a we that believes in, produces, sustains, and continues to amplify borders, etc., and the violence necessary to maintain them? Or is it a different kind of we? There's a powerful question at the heart of Ordinary Notes, one that echoes a writer that you greatly admire, Sadie Hartman. Can I live? And live is in italics. What does that question mean to you? Surviving, but living, not just dying, but living, living for living, living as living. It's not only for the self, but what are the conditions under which all of us might be able to, and us Black people, and us not us, you know, everyone, actually be able to live in a kind of living divorced from, you know, the accumulation of wealth, property, etc. But what might be the conditions in which it is possible for everyone to have enough? And that doesn't mean that one doesn't ever experience struggle or anything like that. But what would it even be to imagine the absence of struggle? Because everyone actually has enough to live. And what other forms

of living might emerge that we haven't experienced. Part of the book is devoted to or inspired by a project that you've been thinking about for a long time that would be called The Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness. I have to say that for me personally, one of the most evocative notes is about breathing, where you defined it as a collective noun, a multitude of Black persons gathered today at breathing. Yes. A beautiful picture. Help me see it more clearly. Thank you. You know, it's related to the question of, can I live? What would it actually mean to keep breath in the Black body? Those would be a set of circumstances that would mean that everyone could live, because all manner of violences, I think, would have to be eradicated for that to happen. You know, the kind of circumstances, the kind of state that would allow

us to inhale, exhale. You know, it's both bodily, aspirational, a horizon that would allow us to actually live. You know, thinking about all of the numbers of Black people who suffer from asthma, the Black people who have been murdered by being asphyxiated by police, by vigilantes, etc. So breathing is central, I think, to what it is to imagine the fullness, to inhabit the fullness of Black life. Tenderness. Tenderness might just be a gesture. To the words that you have notes about are tender and tenderness. Yes. I wonder if you could talk about that and the role that tenderness plays and care as an antidote to violence and to hate and the dark picture that we spoke about earlier. Mm-hmm. I think tender is a word that I really like. And again, it's like, you know,

the multiple meanings of tender, including that boat, that small boat that would take enslaved people to that larger boat. But I think I started thinking about tenderness for a number of reasons. And one, I think I wrote the note tender first because that moment in that conversation between Claudia Tate and Gail Jones, when Tate asks her, did she have any particular thing in mind in writing these books? And then Jones says, you know, that perhaps brutality enables one to really understand what tenderness is. And then that note, I go through a number of Black people who have been murdered. Not everyone in the note has been murdered. Some of the people are alive, some of the people are witnesses to murders, some of the people have survived the attempts

on their lives. The boy who was carrying Skittles and iced tea. The girl who was by herself and surrounded by hate. The young woman who was asleep in her bed. The young woman who drove the wrong way and the baby girl who survived this. The man who cried for his mother. The girl who took the video of the man who cried for his mother the other girl the cousin of the first girl who also witnessed this the boy who was skipping away you began with the question of held and held and for me this note was a way to hold them in a different way to hold them in a way that referenced the violence so that they would be recognizable to readers, but didn't only leave them located in that violence, so that there was a way that one might

imagine the boy who was skipping down the street and know who I was talking about, but hold him in that moment before he is killed brutally by the police, right? And not hold them and remember them only in terms of that violence. And that goes to the idea of tenderness and what I really wanted to think about as regard. I wanted to think about a look that was more than a look, that had some kind of reciprocity to it. A look that said something like, I see you and you see me, and we might hold each other in that seeing until we get someplace else. And that's why tenderness became for me a really key term to think with.

Your mother, of course, is a huge and sustaining presence, both obviously in your life, but in the book for us. And you're right that she wanted you to, quote, build a life that was nourishing and black. My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions. Can you talk about how she managed to do that and how that shaped you? You know, I didn't read a single book by a Black author in elementary school, junior high school, or high school. I didn't read a single book by a Black author in the context of my formal education, but I read lots of books by Black authors because they were in my home. You know, and I was one of those kids who went to

the library and brought home 20 books. Plus, you know, my mother bought every Black book that she could. And I have some of those books that I inherited from her. You know, we had these Sunday teas where she would bake and we would, you know, memorize bits of writing by Black writers and perform them. We had our own little salon, our own little recitals. So in that way, my mother wanted me to understand that there was a literature in which I did not appear as the butt of the joke or the background, but as central to the life of the work and to the imagining of the work. and taking me to see, you know, plays and musicals and ballet when they came to Philadelphia and she could afford it, were very much about a reflection of Blackness that wasn't pathologized, that was nourishing. Yeah. 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.

are lucky. That bequeathment of love of books and the literary, how does that make it possible for you to move from the windowsill where you used to read to the world? Lovely question. It made it all possible because it's the work of imagination. You know, neither of my parents went to college. You know, my mother had desires to be an artist and was told by the nuns at West Catholic Girls that she couldn't be. Black people weren't artists. But she did. She had her own art. You know, she wrote, she drew, she sewed. And I think that she let me live in my imagination, for better or for worse, sometimes. And that has everything to do with the fact that I'm a professor now and that I can call myself a writer now because I knew nothing about how one became a professor. And it's two black professors when I was an undergraduate who said, you should really

think about being a professor because the kind of professions that were open to me in my imagination were like lawyer, doctor. So I thought I was going to be a lawyer because I didn't like blood. So I wasn't going to be a doctor. So that is to say that, you know, my mother made possible my entry into worlds in which she could not enter, which she had not been able to. And she did everything she could to nurture my imagination. She also was the inspiration for your statement that beauty is a method. Yes, absolutely. Yeah. Talk about beauty as a method. You know, I thought that these were just things that I did and that maybe somehow impractical things like, you know, to always try to have fresh flowers, that I thought that that was just something that she did to try to

bring a little joy into what were oftentimes, you know, difficult times financially and otherwise. And then really, I began to think that it was more than that, that it was really a theory and a practice of how, of can I live? And that my learning from it was at a much deeper level than I had really thought. You know, my mother, who suffered from depression, but you would never know she suffered from depression because of how she presented herself. I think I saw my mother cry two or three times, and it was deeply traumatizing. But I know that she struggled in all of these ways, but that her presentation was one of a deep commitment to joy, and a deep commitment to joy and a deep

commitment to trying to make spaces of joy in our lives. And what is that but a praxis, you know, a kind of insistence because the insistence on the daily does produce something. Going right back to the beginning of our conversation and the idea of being held by a note, how important is it for the complexity and the vibrancy of Black life and resistance to be held in memory? That's a great question. I mean, if we think about Black people in chattel slavery

and the absence of birth records, death records, because that wasn't important to the master class. But those enslaved people had to remember those things themselves, because you could be sold from plantation to plantation to plantation, brought someplace where you would meet your child and perhaps be forced to breed with that child. You had to remember things that the master class had no interest in remembering. And so I think that that works its way into all kinds of memories. Like there's a moment in the Note 51 where I talk about a book that I really remember reading on Ida B. Wells, but I can't find that book anywhere. But that doesn't mean that the book doesn't exist, because part of the reason that my mother bought so many books for us was because of the frequency

with which books about and by Black people would go out of print and you'd never see them again. Sure. But that kind of insistence on memory as a way, on the one hand, to try to thwart certain kinds of violences and to hold on to the kind of love and recognition of family and community and then the other is as another kind of record in the face of you know history with a capital h and the ways that those archives are intentional and intentionally record only certain things about certain people. So how do you work with an archive that's invested in your disappearance?

So that is about memory and about learning how to read both against the grain, trying to open up what you do have to see all of the different ways that a life might be recognized as having been lived. In Note 246, you write, quote, what is required of us now in this long time of our undoing? Immediately following that is the final section called to notice or observe with care. One of the definitions of note is exactly that, to notice or to observe with care. Is that the answer or part of the answer to the question that you pose in that note? I think it might be part of the answer

because an earlier note says that I don't want to give up on care even as care has been weaponized against Black people, weaponized against Indigenous people, weaponized against poor people. weaponized against indigenous people, weaponized against poor people. I want to hold on to care and I want care to be, you know, mass refusals of the dead future. And so, yes, I do think that's a lovely connection. And I do think to notice and observe with care is part of what is required of us to attend to the living, to attend to the dead, to, you know, to quote Renaldo Walcott, to risk something. Because one has to risk something and to make something else come into being, to make, and I can't say this enough, we need, we in the broadest sense, as well as we in particular senses, need other ways to live together, to imagine the possibility, to bring

into. And we see it happening in all different kinds of ways. And we also see the force of the state, many states, to try to quash that, because it is not in the interest of those in power to make those other ways of living together possible. But we must. That is a beautiful place to end. Thank you so much for being here, for sharing with us. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Christina Sharp is the author of In the Wake, On Blackness and Being, and Ordinary Notes, the winner of the 2023 Hilary West Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction.

This episode was produced by Chris Watskow. Technical production, Danielle Duval. Our web producer is Lisa Ayuso. Acting senior producer, Lisa Godfrey. Greg Kelly is the executive producer of Ideas, and I'm Nala Ayyad.