Her new book offers a multiplicity of notes as a rejoinder, assembling memories and observations, artifacts and artworks, tracing the persistence of racism and brutality while also exploring the varieties of Black life ... Merciful interruptions, attentive kindnesses, moments of regard: In Sharpe’s book, intimacy and tenderness provide something that resembles hope, though perhaps a more accurate word would be respite ... Ordinary Notes makes full use of its form, finding in fragmentation a way to propose and to elaborate, eddying back and forth between cruelty and care, sorrow and joy. A narrative would have presumed an arc, and an arc would have presumed a kind of grand progress that is antithetical to Sharpe’s worldview ... Her critique is so radical that it’s only logical for there to be a decidedly apolitical quality to the responses she eventually offers. She finds a measure of solace and recognition in books, in friendship, in poetry, in art.
Radical, profound ... Each section reads as a standalone essay, each one in conversation with the others ... Notes is not a memoir proper. Sharpe does present terrible scenes of subjection from her childhood and professional life, but her self-portrait is oblique, even opaque ... Section by section, Sharpe’s overlapping personal and critical writing becomes more liquid and intense. Her prose simmers, drawing language and narrative into a potent reduction: possibility.
Sharpe engages with multimedia to explore these topics and muses on photography, meaningful books, quotations, and observations from trips to museums and memorials. She integrates heartfelt personal anecdotes; stories about her family members, particularly her mother and grandmother; and lessons that she has learned from her relatives about seeing beauty in its many dimensions.
Operatic ... The sections of Ordinary Notes that occupy domestic, private, and imaginative spaces are warmer, less cruel-to-be-kind, more tropical with their truths, and devastating because with that candor they enter the storm and not its carefully curated aftermaths.
These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence ... It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
The fragmentary dispatches are rich with suggestion and insight, generating meaning through juxtaposition and benefiting from Sharpe’s pointed prose. Moving and profound, this is not to be missed.
