Beauty as a method
Reflecting on Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, Toni Morrison and Audre Lorde
Hey all,
Two weeks into a grotty cold/flu thing and I’m starting to bounce back after more my snot and Louis Theroux documentaries than expected. So, some editing of some writing done earlier in the month to feel jazzy.
Enjoy and happy xmas — another year, already!
Eden x
This week I've been sitting with the notion of beauty as a method. It came out of preparing for a seminar, listening to a podcast interview between academic and writer Christina Sharpe, and David Naimon, host of Between the Covers.
Sharpe's new book, Ordinary Notes, shapes and captures Black life through 248 brief fragments ‘constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence’. It's cutting and tender, beautifully written and as much a love letter to Sharpe's mother, Ida, as it is an incisive commentary constructions of race in the US and around the world.
In the interview, Naimon reflects with Sharpe on 'beauty as a method', saying that what struck him about the book was its commitment to the praxis. That beauty ‘is not something passive, but rather something that one might have to actively, even painstakingly, manifest in life’.
Black life as beautiful is an assertion Sharpe learns from her mother, who wanted [Sharpe] to live in spaces where [she] would be reflected back to [herself] without particular distortions. That meant keeping her house alive with Black thought, stories and history. In Note 69, for example, Sharpe shares the story of her and her mother’s elaborate language of book giving as a means of keeping their imagination alive.
Parts of Ordinary Notes see Sharpe reflecting on parts of her mother's life that are unknown to her. In them she makes the active choice to ‘enter [these memories] with grace and imagine with tenderness or I have left them alone’. Sharpe assumes the best, rather than the worst, writing out of love for this woman who gave her the tools to show her much of herself. I find this profoundly caring.
That beauty is an active and political choice came up in my reading of Saidiya Hartman this week, too, also quoted in Sharpe. In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, another exploration of Black beauty, Hartman writes:
‘Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical act of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much.’
Hartman's project is the reconstruction and reimagining of the lives of young Black women in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, telling their stories past the constraints of the archive and its agendas. To give these girls back their youth and pleasure in the slap-dash risk of the city. Her prose is rich, and the language follows that youthful energy of the city: ‘the air was thick with laughter, boasts of conquest, lies bigger than the men who told them.’
Both writers got me thinking of Toni Morrison, the author quoted at the beginning of Ordinary Notes, and revisited throughout the book, just as Saidiya Hartman is frequently referenced by Sharpe too. Morrison’s literature imbues beauty in its reconstruction and reimagining of Black life and history.
Take the opening sentence of Sula, full of so much, reading like a distorted fairytale:
‘In that place, where they tore the nightshade and blackberry patches from their roots to make room for the Medallion City Golf Course, there was once a neighbourhood… It is called the suburbs now’
Or the start of Tar Baby:
‘THE END of the world, as it turned out, was nothing more than a collection of magnificent winter houses on Isle des Chevaliers. When laborers imported from Haiti came to clear the land, clouds and fish were convinced that the world was over, that the sea-green green of the sea and the sky-blue sky of the sky were no longer permanent. Wild parrots that had escaped the stones of hungry children in Queen of France agreed and raised havoc as they flew away to look for yet another refuge. Only the champion daisy trees were serene. After all, they were part of a rain forest already two thousand years old and scheduled for eternity, so they ignored the men and continued to rock the diamondbacks that slept in their arms. It took the river to persuade them that indeed the world was altered. That never again would the rain be equal, and by the time they realized it and had run their roots deeper, clutching the earth like lost boys found, it was too late. The men had already folded the earth where there had been no fold and hollowed her where there had been no hollow, which explains what happened to the river. It crested, then lost its course, and finally its head.’
Morrison is the writer of the vivid sentence, the heart that moves you, the feeling deep within it. Reflecting on Beloved where she considers the slave narrative, Morrison writes that ‘it seemed to me that describing what it looked like would distract the reader from what I wanted him or her to experience, which was what it felt like. The kind of information you can find between the lines of history. It sort of falls off the page, or it’s a glance and a reference. It’s right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes people with names.’
Morrison's essays and non-fiction holds much within them too. Somewhere from the vaults of her wisdom while an undergraduate I latched onto her advice that 'I didn't know in the beginning that I could go back and make it better; so I minded very much writing badly. But now I don't mind at all because there's that wonderful time in the future when I will make it better, when I can see better.'
I wrote the words down on a neon pink post it note and referred back to them most days. Stuck on the wall of my bedroom they stood out to me as a reminder to move forward, to trust the words would reveal themselves in time. Just last week I came across the note tucked into the front of my literary theory anthology, and I was taken by how much the quote still spoke to me.
Back to beauty and my mind jumped to 'Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet' Audre Lorde, whom my friend loves. I’m still yet to read Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, but Lorde’s essay 'Uses of the Erotic' and The Cancer Journals have really got me thinking about how we love. ‘Uses of the Erotic’ speaks of the beauty of embodied feeling, and how feeling 'offers a well of replenishing and provocative force to the woman who does not fear its revelation, nor succumb to the belief that sensation is enough.' Easy enough to know, harder to embody.
The Cancer Journals contends with the role of the state and corporate interests in the cause and distribution of cancer in communities. Sat alongside the rage that treatment is probed more closely than clean drinking water or foods riddled with pesticides, is Lorde’s love of the women who get her through treatment.
‘I do know that there was a tremendous amount of love and support flowing into me from the women around me, and it felt like being bathed in a continuous tide of positive energies, even sometimes I wanted a bit of negative silence to complement the pain inside of me. But support will always have a special and vividly erotic set of image/meanings for me now, one of which is floating upon a sea within a ring of women like warm bubbles keeping me afloat upon the surface of that sea.’
Lorde’s power of feeling beckons in radical conceptions of community, care and interrelatedness in the face of alienation. Beauty becomes emotional connection with oneself and the world. As reader, the task we are invited to consider is how to think on beauty without idealising it as separate, a rarefied commodity, dehumanising those who actively commit to it everyday.
The common thread through these four writers is a beauty conceived out of radical ways of loving. In their own way, Sharpe, Hartman, Morrison and Lorde affirm a sacred humanity within their Blackness, a commitment to love in the presence of white brutality, to love for themselves. That is beauty, that is its political agenda. It is an agenda that grows in the seeds of the many abused by power: that seeking joy becomes a declaration of one’s right to it, the richness already within one self and one’s community.
In Ordinary Notes Christina Sharpe talks of ‘hav[ing] a sense’ that white writers ‘whose work I have taught and found useful and interesting and moving, have not read the work of Black writers’, and, later, how if they had, ‘how different that work would have been’. Gaps in reading are not just gaps in knowledge — as if knowing information is understanding, as if the problem is always we do not know enough not we do not choose to see. Gaps in reading, then, can too become gaps in feeling. It depends on who you are, your own life experiences. But a reader will always be the richer and more well-rounded, more human, for reading widely, in understanding that your vision is not — or should not be — at the centre of this world.
Returning to beauty. The ideas these books examine reinforce that beauty is an active, compounding, practice. Go and read them for yourselves, delve in and you’ll see how the writers commit to beauty in their ways of storytelling.
For me, as a place to start: beauty is using at least the same amount of paper to craft a space for tending to what you love, what brings deep pleasure, as the envelope you have historically held for despair.
In that envelope there are trees rooted more deeply than you, sunsets that appear every day because why would they not, a walk on a bright day, the voice of the people you love, the soft fur of a trusting animal, the laughter of a good joke, the loose abandon of dance, the relief of a deep breath, the sweet intoxication of food, the comfort of rich words, connection of physical touch, and the small small pleasures of this thing called life, which really hold everything that gets transformed into the ‘big’.
Now, I am about to embark on writing an essay on Sharpe and I have many more thoughts about why she engages with beauty in the way she does alongside a harsher reality — but I don’t want to plagiarise myself so I am keeping hushed in this newsletter.
Over the festive period, I hope you get some moments for beauty within your own life. Not beauty for the sake of possession, or a clenching, a striving to have the beautiful, but beauty for beauty’s sake, beauty because something is beautiful, because you took a breath, looked about, and saw what was already there.
Eden x