By: Staff Writer
April 30, 2024
A noted Caribbean author and Black studies scholar said that Black people are produced “through and by unrelenting violence,” as she reads excerpts from her books at the Bocas Literary Festival.
Christina Sharpe, York University Black Studies chair, said at this year’s Bocas Lit Fest that Black people are “not known only to ourselves and to each other by that violence.”
Sharpe was discussing the impact of her book, “In the Wake: On Blackness and Being,” where she further unpacked how important the work is to readers of all creeds.
She also said: “One of the things that I kept thinking about, as I wrote In the wake, but I don’t really speak to and so I’ll say is…. the failure of each book, which is an opportunity to do something else and that failure is not kind of self-flagellation, but you write the book that you can write at the time, and that then the next book is an opportunity to begin from there.”
In this original and trenchant work, Sharpe interrogates literary, visual, cinematic, and quotidian representations of Black life that comprise what she calls the “orthography of the wake.” Activating multiple registers of “wake”—the path behind a ship, keeping watch with the dead, coming to consciousness—Sharpe illustrates how Black lives are swept up and animated by the afterlives of slavery, and she delineates what survives despite such insistent violence and negation.
She continued: “So one of the things I would talk about all the time when I talked about In the Wake was something I wanted to call regard as a kind of alongside care, but perhaps also slightly different.
“So I wanted to think about Ordinary Notes as an acting of a kind of regard, which is a kind of mutual recognition, an ‘I see you and you see me’ and from there, we might do something in the context of our forces that try to unmake us every day.”
Ordinary Notes is also a work she read at this year’s Bocas Lit Fest. Ordinary Notes was published in April 2023 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book is a collection of 248 notes about black life. It was shortlisted for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Sharpe also said about Ordinary Notes: “I hoped that this book would kind of enact the knowledges that black people have about where and how we live, and how we make something in the face of all that that is in excess of those violences we experienced beauty, we make music, we read we write we dance we are we can extend a look that says like that note which does not change our condition, but lets us know that we are not in that condition alone.”