Ordinary Notes

by Christina Sharpe

Ruth Wilson Gilmore and Mariame Kaba remind us that abolition is both tearing things down and remaking: more than anything else, Gilmore says, it is about presence, not absence.[151] Abolition is remaking our vocabularies. Abolition is another word for love.[152]

It is hard, sometimes, to step into the world when you know, really know, the viciousness of white people.

In A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, Dionne Brand writes that “[b]ooks leave gestures in the body; a certain way of moving, of turning, a certain closing of the eyes, a way of leaving, hesitations. Books leave certain sounds, a certain pacing; mostly they leave the elusive, which is all the story. They leave much more than the words.”

“the skeleton architecture of our lives…. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.”[169] We predicate our hopes and dreams.

“Naiveté is often an excuse for those who exercise power. For those upon whom that power is exercised, naiveté is always a mistake.”[181]

One of his oldest friends is dying and my brother is a soft man. “Every day you wake up and there’s something trying to break your heart.”

White people “are not simply ‘protected’

by the police, they are—in their very corporeality—the police.”[196] Whiteness being a name for property and its violent protection.

There is no set of years in which to be born Black and woman would not be met with violence.

Care is complicated, gendered, misused. It is often mobilized to enact violence, not assuage it, yet I cannot surrender it. I want acts and accounts of care as shared and distributed risk, as mass refusals of the unbearable life, as total rejections of the dead future.

The answer to these obscene questions? Return the bones. Return the photographs. Repatriate the statues. Empty the museums.