Christina Sharpe > Quotes

“Living in the wake means living the history and present of terror, from slavery to the present, as the ground of our everyday Black existence; living the historically and geographically dis/continuous but always present and endlessly reinvigorated brutality in, and on, our bodies while even as that terror is visited on our bodies the realities of that terror are erased.”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“Every memorial and museum to atrocity already contains its failure.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“I want us to tell the truth about our history not because I want to punish America, I want to liberate us but we can’t get to liberation if we don’t acknowledge what we’ve done.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“The architectures of violence fracture we; affect does not reach us in the same ways.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“I want In the Wake to declare that we are Black peoples in the wake with no state or nation to protect us, with no citizenship bound to be respected, and to position us in the modalities of Black life lived in, as, under, despite Black death: to think and be and act from there.”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being

“Visuality is not simply looking. It is a regime of seeing and being, and any so-called neutral position is a position of power that refuses to recognize itself as such.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“She said that she wanted, needed, me to know this. She told me that she thought, from the things that I had told her, that I was not unaware of what she said but she wanted me to have the knowledge I needed to make a choice. She wanted me to know that I had choices. This telling set into motion a series of events that fundamentally changed me. My mother wanted me to build a life that was nourishing and Black. My mother wanted me to live in spaces where I would be reflected back to myself without particular distortions.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“Books--poetry, fiction, nonfiction, theory, memoir, biography, mysteries, plays--have always helped me locate myself, tethered me, helped me to make sense of the world and to act in it. I know that books have saved me. By which I mean that books always give me a place to land in difficult times. They show me Black worlds of making and possibility.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“I was watching the news and I heard one of the commentators say, there were the Biden supporters having their celebration and then the Trump supporters having their protest … and they are conflicting, and they have the right to be here.    Not one time when we were marching for George Floyd did those people on the mainstream news say we had the right to be there.93”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“There are many books that produced in me a feeling I needed or wanted to feel. Some of them are books that I love, and others are not. But love is beside the point. What these books share is that they produced in me the feeling that I needed.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“I’ve been revisiting what beauty as a method might mean or do: what it might break open, rupture, make possible and impossible. How we might carry beauty’s knowledge with us and make new worlds.”
― Christina Sharpe

“There was a time when I would answer people's questions largely with quotations from plays, novels, poems, and nonfiction works. What I wanted to say had already been said and said better than I could have hoped to say it myself.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“In the graveyard, there are another eight hundred and five monoliths laid out like coffins, exact duplicates of the ones that are part of the permanent memorial. Each county in which a lynching took place is invited to research lynching in their communities and then enter into a process with the EJI in order to place the corresponding monolith in their community. As far as I know, only one community has claimed a marker.”
― Christina Sharpe, Ordinary Notes

“In Beloved, the weather comes, breaks, changes quickly; it “let[s] loss,” it is remarked upon and forgotten; it is. In my text, the weather is the totality of our environments; the weather is the total climate; and that climate is antiblack. [...] In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; it is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.”
― Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being