The Gift of Imaginative Rupture: Christina Sharpe in Conversation

In this extract from our autumn issue, Wasafiri 123, Christina Sharpe speaks to Guy Gunaratne about the origins behind her most recent work – Ordinary Notes – and the ways in which she draws from historical archives and visual art in her writing.

You can download this full piece for free during the month of October 2025, or read Wasafiri 123 in print, available to order now.

To speak with Christina Sharpe is to converse with a constellation. There are singular motes of brilliance in all her writing, most significantly in her 2016 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, a profound work of critical theory and cultural analysis, and her most recent, Ordinary Notes. What makes Sharpe an essential thinker, however, is the way in which her books, taken as a corpus of precise philosophical thought and poetic force, arrange into a shining unity for the reader. Sharpe’s concept of ‘wake work’, for instance, explores the enduring effects of slavery on Black existence. Her rendering of the multiple meanings behind ‘wake’ – a ship’s churning trail in the water, a vigil for the departed, an awakening – has given capacious form to the persistent traumas in Black life. In recent years, Sharpe’s writings – composed in an almost alchemic register – have introduced conceptual frameworks that have deeply influenced the ways in which contemporary thought might navigate (and write into) the history and afterlives of slavery. In speaking with her during the months of this past winter, what has become apparent is that Sharpe not only offers the expansive gift of imaginative rupture but does so without the need for transcendent figuration. Sharpe writes about the ordinary: she focuses on the absent plots of our present, its blank spaces, and the ephemera that animates the historic archive. What is vital, what is life, can be found in what is materially experienced. Sharpe, in attending to what constitutes the condition of our present, gives us new language to know the world as it is, and might yet become. 

Guy Gunaratne: Before we begin, I’d like to know where it is that I find you. Where are you writing from? What do you see around you? I am currently in Malmö, Sweden, at my desk. I have a miniature porcelain clock on the wall in front of me, Roman numerals with a pendulum, which I picked up from a visit to the Vatican earlier this year. I have your books on my desk. There is a book by Fred Moten’s here also, and a copy of Beloved. 

Christina Sharpe: Right now, I am in Tobago. The sea is in front of me. I am writing several essays and working to finish a short book called: What Could a Vessel Be? I brought only a very few physical books with me. The books I have on my desk are: Aisha Sabatini Sloan’s Dreaming of Ramadi in Detroit: Essays, Renee Gladman’s My Lesbian Novel, Anne de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Steffani Jemison’s a rock a river a street, Tisa Bryant’s Unexplained Presence, and Stan Douglas’ 2011 ≠ 1848.

The books I have open on my computer are Leanne Betasamosake Simpson’s forthcoming Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead, Kate Zambreno’s Book of Mutter and Appendix Project, and Rinaldo Walcott’s On Property. I also have a handmade leather book with thick paper and a set of small paints, brushes, and pencils that was a gift from a friend, and a laminated accordion folding card that lists the birds of Trinidad and Tobago. 

GG: Could you share a little about the origin of Ordinary Notes? How that book came to be? 

CS: Yes. It has several origins.  

Toward answering this question, I typed ‘Notes Toward Something’ into the search bar, and when I opened the folder, I was surprised by the number of potential and partial notes in there that I did not use. 

I tell this story often, I think. In 2018, I interviewed Saidiya Hartman at The Underground Museum in Los Angeles about her book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Over lunch earlier in the day we were talking about our next projects, and I showed her several photographs of my mother as a child, two of which appear in Ordinary Notes. I was working on two projects at the time. She told me to choose the harder one. I did. Ordinary Notes was the harder one. 

In 2019, I wrote a short essay called ‘Beauty is a Method’ for the first Loophole of Retreat Conference at the Guggenheim Museum in conjunction with Simone Leigh’s ‘Hugo Boss Prize’ solo show of the same name. ‘Beauty is a Method’ is recognition and homage, an understanding of the practice of what my mother did in the house and the world — it is one of the centres of this book. 

I wanted to write a book in which the form did something — like those books that I mention earlier by Kennedy, Keene, and Brand. 

GG: Can I ask about the white space in Ordinary Notes? It’s something I picked up when reading it again, how pleasurable the breadth of each page felt. Did the thinking around the form of the book extend to these blank spaces? 

CS: Yes. I thought those spaces would be places to breathe, permission to pause, and spaces for annotation. It was important to me that the notes vary in length. That each note has the space it needed — whether that was a sentence or several pages. 

GG: I want to engage you on your inclusion of the well-known photograph of Elizabeth Eckhart in Ordinary Notes. You write that when you first saw that image, Eckhart’s was ‘a kind of composure I could not imagine summoning’. Fred Moten writes on that same image, suggesting that we might think of Eckhart’s ‘passage’ in this photograph as a kind of withdrawal signified in a number of ways; her open composure, her unshielded, solitary walk, her sunglasses. 

When you approach visual art or historic archive in this way, is your intention to examine what is being documented as well as to re-examine the various interpretations that are carried in popular conscience (how the image has been written about, presented as in the past)? And when it comes to iconic imagery like the Elizabeth Eckhart photograph, do you think this way of looking and re-examining is central to your work? 

CS: When I wrote of her composure, I meant that I marvel that Eckhart is still in control of her bodily functions. I marvel that she is still moving on her own two feet. I marvel that she has not completely collapsed in the face of this assault which she is, now, bearing entirely on her own. What I think I read is that she is stunned on the level of the body — molecularly. 

The atmosphere around her as she is walking is wholly violent — I think that an analogy might be drawn between Eckhart and the circulation of contemporary lynching videos and photographs that purport to produce something like sympathy or empathy and then action. Saidiya Hartman has told us that the circulation of these images and narratives of Black suffering does not do the work that many imagine it does. It inures people to suffering and it fails to account for the enjoyment in suffering and the desire to produce more. I think about this in each of my books (and I am indebted to Hartman). 

Read the full piece here, free to access and download for the month of October 2025 only.