Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions. She spared me tremendous pain. This Black note changed the course of my life.

The architecture of the memorial stages encounter. Spectacle is not repair.

This is how the docile cultural subject is made, through a violence material, metaphorical, continuing, and ordinary, perhaps couched as interest, care, or tenderness, and displaced onto others.

sometimes you have to hold your flowers like a weapon.

And if shape makes, it can also unmake; it can liberate as well as confine. Black Compositional Thought is black abstraction in pursuit of Black life.