Space to Breathe

Christina Sharpe's In the Wake ushers in a break between the conflicting (but not diametrically opposed) schools of Afropessimism and Black optimism. While the Afropessimist camp, led by theorists like Frank B. Wilderson III, argues for an ontological dehumanization of the Black person after slavery, Fred Moten's Black optimist camp espouses a resilient belief in collective progress and empowerment within the Black community. Sharpe's emphasis on the aftermath of slavery and the notion of "the wake" intertwines grief, memory, and the ongoing impact of historical trauma on contemporary Black experience while nevertheless illuminating the preciousness of Black collectivity and existence. Sharpe's dear friend and interlocutor Saidiya Hartman speaks to this theoretical rupture in the Black studies dichotomy: "Christina's work totally unsettles that binary between Afropessimism and Black optimism. She addresses the structural conditions of anti-Blackness that condemn Black people on a variety of levels and still attends to the richness of Black social living, and it is an essential contribution."1Sharpe's scholarship contributes to an urgent reevaluation of how we comprehend and confront racialized violence, demanding a reorientation of societal structures toward a recognition of Black humanity. If Black studies flourished as an academic discipline in the twentieth century, broader conversations about anti-Blackness have come to a head following 2020's racial-political uprisings and their many aftermaths, one of them a peculiar and vastly marketable focus on the Black person as someone whose survival is contingent on their being extraordinary. After global movements for Black life in 2020, commodities began popping up in big-box merchandisers across America: Black Girl Magic brand rosé, T-shirts emblazoned with silhouetted Afros, books about how Black children are poised to be exceptional, birthday cards celebrating another year around the sun in tandem with a celebration of Blackness. Yet the year 2020, while anomalous for many reasons, does not exist as a stand-alone moment of racial reckoning. Similar rhetoric circulated in 2016, when products, hashtags, and internet metadata called for #BlackExcellence in the aftershocks of the Trump election. Following the period from 2008 to 2012, the Obamas came to represent a postracial phantasm. Black people are allowed to be extraordinary now (high earners, doctors, lawyers, even presidents, even magical), and this has led us to assume that this potential to be extraordinary will save us. But will it? We should put critical pressure on systems that have configured the Black person as one whose worth is directly tied to being magical or super in a society saturated by images and praxes of anti-Black violence—a violence so inextricable from everyday life that it is always already ordinary. The extraordinariness required of Black folks for their survival (largely rooted in Black capitalism and respectability politics) does not save but instead exiles Black people into a more palatably neoliberal but nevertheless violent realm of dishumanity.2 In a society founded on chattel slavery and its afterlives, spectacularity and magic are marketed as the assumed panaceas to the ordinariness of Black death and subjugation. However, within the ordinary space of the Black quotidian is room for new forms, new beauties, and new methods for celebrating Black life. Sharpe attends to both in Ordinary Notes.Ordinary Notes, Sharpe's third book, is an innovative and imaginative successor to Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-slavery Subjects (2010) and her seminal book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016). Sharpe's 360-page text is separated into 248 notes on Black life, all of which are separated into eight sections. On an initial flip through the book, each page varies in both wordiness and form; long, sweeping essays spanning pages are cut through with short reflections, blank spaces, and the occasional image. Diverging from Sharpe's standard, essay-based chapter formats, Ordinary Notes takes on an experimental shape to explore quotidian Black life "in the wake." Speaking of the wake: while Ordinary Notes is the only of Sharpe's texts that considers the everydayness of Black life in its title, and even though it deviates from her other texts in form, Sharpe's first two books similarly examine the enduring impact of the transatlantic slave trade on the Black quotidian, emphasizing the ongoing violence and trauma that persist in the aftermath of slavery. Monstrous Intimacies treats the familiar sexual brutality born of power dynamics deriving from racial subjugation across the Black Atlantic, and In the Wake, through a combination of personal anecdotes in tandem with broader sociological commentary, illuminates the pervasiveness of contemporary racial violence, the regularity of Black death, and the artistic methods that imagine new futures despite it all. In a particularly apt chapter of In the Wake, "The Weather," Sharpe writes on the all-consuming nature of violences borne on the slave ship and how these violences bleed into contemporary society: "Day after day the stories arrive. Fifty people suffocated in the hold of a ship; three people suffocated in prison over the course of a weekend in the United States. . . . It is not the specifics of any one event or set of events that are endlessly repeatable and repeated, but the totality of the environments in which we struggle; the machines in which we live; what I am calling the weather."3 This attention to stories told "day after day" might be Sharpe's most primary—and central—interrogation of the ordinariness or normativeness of Black suffering.Sharpe turns inward toward her own stories with Ordinary Notes, but not without losing the polyvocality of her previous texts. Throughout a series of personal fragments that are as tender as they are critical, Ordinary Notes sketches out memories, materialities, realities, and potential futures for Black life through the prism of Sharpe's lived experiences and observations. While this is a standout and singular text, Sharpe does not write it alone, often conversing with contemporaries from her personal life, the public sphere, her professional formation, and the interstices of these spaces. (References to writers such as Hartman, Claudia Rankine, Roland Barthes, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison are woven together with notes centering on Sharpe's mother, neighborhood kinfolk, and various strangers at sites such as the Legacy Museum of African American History.)In addition, Sharpe converses with herself; her collection of "ordinary notes" often nods to the publication of In the Wake as a critical event in her life. An early note—15—comes from an unnamed former classmate who reconnected with Sharpe after reading In the Wake (22). In a separate note Sharpe explains how a reference to Morrison's Beloved is an intertextual and everlasting "note on how to live in the afterlife of slavery, in the afterlife of lynching, and in the wake" (67).4 Sharpe also rereads herself, sketching out how her past voices solicit new interventions, including a reexamination of In the Wake in note 74. Sharpe writes, "Rereading 'The Wake,' preparing for a talk, I arrive at this sentence: 'In 1994 the Philadelphia police murdered my cousin Robert'" before explicating the preciousness of their relationship and his nickname, "Bobby." Sharpe continues: "The addition of the word cousin was a gesture of intimacy and respect; it was the sound of relation, not estrangement." At the top of the note, Sharpe calls it "a revision, a sound, a correction, an addition" (115). In the wake of In the Wake, conversations surrounding Black life—ranging from the disquieting to the discursive—can unfold with Sharpe's new opus at the center.As previously mentioned, the collection unpacks the ordinariness of racial violence (which robs Black people of their life, their breath) while finding respite in the ordinary pleasures and potentials of lived existence (the breath-giving fragments of the Black quotidian). While both considerations come to the surface in Sharpe's analyses, the text's shape is as much an investigation of Black life as its written content. This is to say that Ordinary Notes is a marvel in form, experimenting with new arrangements for the literary genre of nonfiction. Fragments of varying lengths are interspersed among 360 pages. Shorter notes may take up only one line, such as note 25, "Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure," and note 85, "A memory that is not mine returns to me" (38, 130). Longer-form, multipage pieces in both prose and verse coalesce in notes such as note 51, wherein Sharpe refers to work born of her text "Beauty Is a Method," alongside photographs of her mother's creative varia, poetic reflections on her childhood, and lists of books (largely Black writing) that molded her relationship to literature (79–86).5 This stylistic choice enhances the overall effect of Sharpe's text by creating a dynamic and engaging rhythm, catching the reader in the sharp realities of shorter notes or the swelling, affective waves of her longer observations. Multiple photographs—taken from the archives or by Sharpe herself—add a visual dimension to accompany Ordinary Notes' written word.Beyond Sharpe's variations in length and genre, two other formal choices are particularly striking. One is the use of censor bars throughout the text, and the other is Sharpe's employment of negative space. These aesthetic choices are pointed and polysemous. Whereas blackened omissions draw the eye toward the vulgar, all-encompassing, and interchangeable nature of violence, they also call for a reconsideration of the spectacular nature of racial violence. Moreover, Sharpe's artistic use of gaps and negative space encourages corporeal breath for storyteller and reader alike: a respite in the face of this violence. Through these formal choices, Sharpe's sophomore success becomes more than a praxis for storytelling in the wake—it is a life force.In initial readings, perhaps the most eye-catching of Sharpe's aesthetic decisions is the use of black censor bars to omit specific words in the text. The first of these bars appears in note 5, wherein Sharpe reflects on a photograph from the integration of Little Rock High School. In the photograph, a group of white students are screaming at Elizabeth Eckford. Tethering Eckford's experiences of violence to her own, Sharpe draws out both difference and similarity by stating, "At school, I wasn't surrounded by a mob threatening to lynch me and screaming, 'Send that '▬▬▬▬' back to the jungle,' 'go home, ▬▬▬▬! Go back to Africa!' . . . But I heard ▬▬▬▬ almost every day for six years at St. Katharine of Siena" (7). In their first employment, the censor bars perform their usual task of omitting language deemed too obscene for publication. (Given the situation and syntax, the reader is led to believe that Sharpe is censoring racist epithets.)As the text unfolds, the bars begin to take other semiotic shapes. Notes 15 and 16 detail messages sent to Sharpe by two unnamed interlocutors. The primary, anonymized letter states, "My ▬▬▬▬▬ is in a PhD program at ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ and has been reading In the Wake. ▬▬▬ reached out to me because ▬▬▬▬▬ thought I would really enjoy it, especially because ▬▬▬▬ noticed so many connections to schools" (22). Sharpe then explains how, "three days later, another note arrives" from a supposed childhood friend, who writes: "Dear Christina, . . . I am ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ and we went to school together. I am back living in ▬▬▬▬▬▬ after many years outside of the area and drive by your old house frequently" (23). In this instance, different from that in note 5, the censor bar muddies all identifiers of those who see themselves in Sharpe's writing. And whereas the earliest use of the censor bar maintains the same length (emphasizing the singularity of a racist term that connected Sharpe and Eckford), this set of bars begins to vary in tandem with word length.At first there is room to believe that this censorship is a safety measure, sheltering Sharpe's kinfolk from potential backlash after the text's publication and sparing Black readers the cruelty of racist language. Going farther, however, the bars' disparate lengths and nebulous subjects point to a secondary effect: an amalgam of redacted names begins to create a critical mass, with their effaced, unique identities all coalescing under the shared experience of Black subjugation in the wake. This nameless mass comes to represent the very "totality" of struggle that Sharpe sketches out in both In the Wake and Ordinary Notes. The suffering of Black life in the wake is so pervasive, present, and powerful that neither it nor its victims need to be named to ensure that it exists. The pain is everywhere. The interlocutor could be anyone; such is the ordinariness of subjugation in the wake. To produce the same effect, Sharpe's most striking use of the censor bar takes place in note 17, which she describes as both "unwritten and unsent" (24). After greeting a censored name, Sharpe writes, "So much rehabilitated and reconstructed into that goodness and perpetual innocence that whiteness extends." The next seven lines are completely blacked out before Sharpe signs her full name at the bottom of the correspondence. It is in the absence of words that the presence of brutality weighs heavy on the page. One need not know exactly what Sharpe is saying—it is enough that the potential for horror exists behind the blackened lines of her prose. In this brutality is Sharpe's orthographic brilliance.While the names of her personal interlocutors are blacked out intext, the names of Black lives lost to police brutality and racist violence are not. Sharpe prints the names of Laquan McDonald, Michael Brown, Walter Scott, Marlene Pinnock, John Crawford, Tamir Rice, and Philando Castille (322, 32).6 While illustrating the importance of saying their names—echoing movements such as #SayTheirName and its variations—Sharpe also displays a deliberate aversion to the naming of their murderers. In a subversive turn, notes containing the censor bar are also where Sharpe most clearly criticizes the "rehabilitation" of "goodness and perpetual innocence" that whiteness affords in the quotidian, especially in contemporary media. Sharpe crystallizes the pervasiveness of this rehabilitation via her notes on racially incited mass killings; in her recollections she explains how the white supremacist perpetrator is often glorified, coddled, or popularized at the expense of their nonwhite victims. In note 63, for instance, Sharpe writes on the infantilizing words that a "sheriff said about ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬, a white twenty-one-year-old man who is accused of killing eight people, almost all of whom were Asian and women. ▬▬▬ murdered six Asian women" (102). Immediately following this, note 64 condemns the noncondemnation by Christy Wampole, a Princeton University professor, of "▬▬▬▬▬▬▬'s December 14, 2022, massacre of twenty-six people, twenty of whom were children between the ages of six and seven, in Newtown, Connecticut, in the United States," a direct response to Wampole's New York Times op-ed that states, "These white men were once our heroes, our young and shining fathers, our sweet brothers" (103). Note 105 details the harrowing moment when "the police brought ▬▬▬▬▬ a meal from Burger King after he fired seventy rounds and brutally assassinated nine people in Mother Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina" (159). A later note, 225, details a prosecutor's speech after Laquan McDonald's murder at the hands of police: "What ▬▬▬▬▬▬ saw 'was a Black boy walking down the street . . . having the audacity to ignore the police'" (322).7 If earlier uses of the censor bar emphasize the ubiquity of racial violence and the interchangeability of its victims, later uses draw attention to the commonplace nature of mass shootings. However, Sharpe's omissions directly destroy the recognition—and by proxy, the valorization—of its perpetrators.In a necessary move, Sharpe turns our attention to how the media portrays mass murderers, especially when it comes to racially motivated hate crimes, as ordinary, commonplace, and merely "troubled" young men who came into extraordinary circumstances. This acquittal, at best, diminishes the crime's weight alongside the value of Black life. At worst, it veers racist perpetrators into realms of continual glorification. White male perpetrators are infantilized, and the disproportionate rate of Black death at the hands of police is configured as an anomalous bug as opposed to systemic feature. What's more, sensationalized coverage focuses extensively on the perpetrators as opposed to the victims, providing the perpetrators with an unwarranted platform that can inadvertently serve as a source of inspiration for others with violent tendencies. The constant repetition of the perpetrators' names and detailed accounts of their actions (in)advertently contributes to a cultlike status, turning them into antiheroes and martyrs in the eyes of racist audiences. This not only disregards the suffering of the victims, their families, and the folks who see their own kin in the victims' faces but also perpetuates a cycle where acts of violence are sensationalized for the sake of news coverage and at the expense of Black mental health.8 Sharpe questions the ordinariness of this violence, the regularity of its killers, and the normalness of their actions. Her explicit refusal to name these perpetrators becomes a praxis of care against the simultaneous glorification and normalization of white supremacy.Sharpe herself is acutely aware of this mediatized sensationalization of whiteness, the digital artification of Black death, and how racial trauma is trans- and intermediated in the present day.9 Refreshingly, she contends that there is no need for this in healing. As she pointedly underscores in note 23, wherein she reflects on the virality of Philando Castile's death video: "The architecture of the memorial stages encounter. Spectacle is not repair" (36).What, then, is reparative? What is healing? Sharpe seeks to answer these questions in a few ways, with mentions of love, care, and healing scattered throughout the text. It may be easier to isolate what healing is not, and Sharpe lends us a reading in note 20: "One is asked to assume a certain position; asked to embrace memorial narratives that offer Black suffering as a pathway to knowledge, national, and 'racial' healing, reparation, and reconciliation. . . . 'We' are not approaching healing" (31). It is only when the reader combs through the text, page by page, line by line, that the text's meaning coalesces into an offering for Black life; the antidote to this embrace of Black suffering is, in fact, the ordinary note. What enables breath is attention to the complexity of the Black experience, painted with potential for life even in the normalization of death. Only at the end of the text—after careful consideration of the book's form—does Sharpe's first note become clear: There are all kinds of ordinary notes: there are unreservedly antiblack notes; there are notes that attempt, but fail, to undo antiblack logics; there are notes that refuse altogether to accede to those logics that simultaneously de/re/and unhuman Black people. These Black notes may land in silence or a tone, a sound, a pitch, a record, or an observation made with care; these notes might just reach you across distance, time, and space, and with them you may be "held, and held." (3; my italics)If we take Sharpe's advice in all of its thoughtful sincerity—that the Black note "may land in silence or a tone"—then we can see how, in retrospect, the entirety of Ordinary Notes is a praxis in refusal. The ordinary note, so surrounded by the excess of quotidian suffering in the wake, strikes a liberatory tone in the silence, across distance, through all observations "made with care." It finds a resurgence of Black life in the spaces that are left for breath. Of course, this is merely one interpretation of Sharpe's first note at a largely narrative level. On a formal level, however, this space for breath shows itself in Sharpe's insistence on the pages' blank space. In Ordinary Notes each note begins at the top of a page. This means that shorter notes—such as the aforementioned notes 23 and 58—appear as one singular line followed by an entire page of empty, white expanse (38, 130). This configuration stands in opposition to Sharpe's formatting for In the Wake and Monstrous Intimacies, as well as other enumerated, notelike texts such as Wilderson's Afropessimism.10It is toward the end of this review that we return attention to the book's format. The eight sections that make up Sharpe's 248 fragments are mostly bare titles drawn from disambiguations of the word note. The only section whose title is not a disambiguation is section vi, titled "preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable Blackness" (233). It is in this section that Sharpe's meditation on the note exits its formal grammars and definitions, instead creating a space for novel definitions, neologisms, and experimental ruminations on terms of everyday Black life. One of the most central terms—a word that marks "the beginning," per Kevin Adonis Browne—is breathing, which is tenderly elucidated in note 167 (237). Through Sharpe, Browne writes that "breathing is the beginning. It is, for us, a first and final movement. In it, we find the prototype of all method, without which: nothing. Breathing, thus, is the foregrounding of all concept—its precursor and first condition, its resolution" (233). In a metaliterary depiction of the book in which it exists, the definition continues to unfold: "Before and after language, and of all that comes and goes unuttered, it is that block of text in the negative space of the page, noticed from the corner of the eye. A premium in these times. Dear. Dearer still. It is how, through the movement of space, life is able to consider itself." Breath is where life becomes attainable, a material reality in the matrix of Black language and existence, for "we, by holding it, are able to grasp a finitude that cannot otherwise be grasped, a meaning that cannot be held" (237). Breathing—the most ordinary and seemingly involuntary act of existence—is the fertile ground on which Black life's potential is at its most legible, its most respirable. Of course, calls for Black breath are necessary in the recognition and negation of violence in the wake. In note 169 Sharpe reminds us of "the man who said 'I can't breathe,'" in a poetic eulogy to those lost in the regular swallows of anti-Black precarity (239). For Sharpe, the necessity of breath is vital, literally and literarily. The genius of Sharpe's Ordinary Notes is that it makes us breathe.Let us return here to the important status of blank space in Sharpe's textual layout. In her work on trauma and memory in Holocaust narratives, literary theorist Anne-Berenike Rothstein sees "blank space as a representation of the unspeakable/the traumatic; blank space as a representation of (lost) space; blank space as a representation of the space of memory and remembrance; and blank space as a representation of the narrative space and the space of reflection."11 Rothstein's analysis allows us to read Sharpe's employment of blank space in Ordinary Notes as an act of reparation that calls for reflection, meditation, and breath. Of Rothstein's four theses on blank space, the fourth, "Blank space as a representation of the narrative space and the space of reflection," merits particular attention. Rothstein, like Sharpe, cites Barthes in her description of aesthetics. While Sharpe cites Barthes's account of the punctum, Rothstein cites his theory of the mise-en-page (172).12 Rothstein argues that texts with blank space "create a form of dialogue with readers and spectators. In this context, the audience becomes even more important and achieves the status of a coproducer of the text."13 The dialogue, for readers, is not necessarily logocentric. In fact, quite the opposite is the case—it is silent, taken up with nothing but the body's ordinary inhale and exhale. For Rothstein, moments of isolation, blankness, emptiness, and silence become spaces for the reader to pause and reflect. They become moments of meditation and introspection. In the event that a reader does not want to decipher any headier or novel interpretation of the text, they become moments simply to breathe. In the disciplinary tapestries wherein Sharpe quilts her work—across Black studies, ethnic studies, feminist theory, media theory, and archival work, to name a few—regular exposure to the nature of one's own marginalization becomes suffocating. For so long it was thought that an escape from this realm of subjugation was some ascension to a new height, an extraordinariness, a magic, an excellence—a type of respectability or success marked by slippery metrics of acceptance crafted by a society steeped in Eurocentric standards and white supremacy.Sharpe's timely work asks us to reconsider these beliefs. The book's many notes, surrounded by the peaceful void of an empty page, the obfuscated words, the wide margins, the bare topography of nothing but breath—these are the notes that "end in silence." They are the notes that call for a reconsideration of the systems that have constructed our understandings and underpinnings of Black life in the wake. While it's unclear whether or not Sharpe meant for her first note to be a prescription, a disclaimer, or a preface to the work that readers would encounter over the remaining 360 pages, it lives as an undercurrent through the impressive achievement that is Ordinary Notes. The escape, the potential, the beauty: it may just be pause. It may just be breathing. It may just be ordinary.