Author | Percival Everett |
---|---|
Language | English |
Publisher | Graywolf Press |
Publication date | 2009 |
Publication place | United States |
Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
Pages | 234 |
Preceded by | The Water Cure |
Followed by | Assumption |
I Am Not Sidney Poitier (2009) is a novel by American writer Percival Everett. Originally published by Graywolf Press, in 2020 it was published by Influx Press in the UK. [1] It explores the tumultuous life of a character named Not Sidney Poitier as the social hierarchy scrambles to balance his skin color with his wealth.
Each adventure reflects a prominent film starring Sidney Poitier, such as The Defiant Ones or Guess Who's Coming to Dinner , and incorporates a significant twist. The novel reflects a Post-black writing style by parodying the traditions of Black literature.
The novel begins with the conception of Not Sidney Poitier, a boy whose mother, Portia, invests on the ground floor in Turner Broadcasting. She gains quite a lot of money when it becomes successful. Ted Turner comes to visit her and meets Not Sidney. Portia dies soon after the meeting, and Turner becomes Not Sidney's guardian.
Turner gives Not Sidney free rein over his money and life, to avoid the white savior stereotype. Not Sidney is educated by a socialist college student named Betty. Not Sidney is extensively bullied, and in response attempts to learn martial arts. When that fails, he learns how to "fesmerize" people, a skill akin to hypnosis. He uses that ability to mess with Turner, Betty, and Turner's wife, Jane Fonda. Upon reaching high school age, Not Sidney decides to attend public school. He develops a crush on his teacher, which she notices. She invites him to her home, where she sexually assaults him on two separate occasions. She threatens to fail him if he doesn't allow it, though after the second time, she fails him anyway. Not Sidney reports her actions, but is ridiculed by the administration both at his individual school and at the Board of Education. As a result, he drops out and decides to travel to California.
Not Sidney attempts to drive cross-country, but he is stopped and arrested by a racist cop. He is put into prison unlawfully. While being transported to another facility, he and his fellow prisoner escape when their bus crashes. He and Patrice head back to Atlanta on foot. After some time, they get into a fight and are interrupted by a young boy named Bobo. Bobo takes them to the house where he lives with his blind older sister. The four plan to jump atop the train headed back to Atlanta the next morning.
While they sleep, Not Sidney has the "Band of Angels" dream, in which he is a slave named Raz-ru. In the dream, he watches a high-yellow (mixed-race) woman be taken from her high-society life and be bought as a slave by his master, who Not Sidney eventually kills. The next day, Sis and Patrice begin a romantic relationship, and start drinking that night to celebrate. When the sun rises, Not Sidney opts to leave the couple sleeping and ride the train alone to Atlanta. (This chapter was inspired by Poitier's movies The Defiant Ones , A Patch of Blue , and Band of Angels ).
Upon returning from his failed cross-country trip, Not Sidney decides to go to college, and sets up a meeting with Gladys Feet. He bribes her with a donation for a place in the upcoming class at Morehouse College, a historically black college. He's assigned to a room with Morris Chesney, a fraternity brother who attempts to bully and haze young men rushing the fraternity. To end their ongoing conflict, Not Sidney (NS) fesmerizes him into reorienting the fraternity around recycling and leaving him alone. While at Morehouse, NS attends classes taught by professor and writer Percival Everett. NS goes to his office hours, and develops a mentor/mentee relationship with him after Everett reveals that he is a fraud. While attending Everett's classes, NS meets Maggie, a Spelman College student, and they begin a relationship.
Not Sidney goes home with Maggie for Thanksgiving. He learns that her family are Black conservatives, biased against Black people with darker skin. Not Sidney suffers a series of microaggressions from them and is hit on by Agnes, Maggie's sister. Agnes performs oral sex on him to upset Maggie. During their sexual encounter, Not Sidney has the "No Way Out" dream. He is a doctor who loses a white patient and is blamed for the man's death. Near the end of the visit, Maggie's parents find out that Not Sidney is immensely wealthy, and begin to treat him with a near-reverent respect. After recognizing this, he calls them out about their colorism and causes a scene at Thanksgiving dinner. He leaves the house and ends his relationship with Maggie. (This chapter was inspired by the movies Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and No Way Out .)[ citation needed ]
Not Sidney drops out of Morehouse and again tries to drive to California. His car begins to break down in the small Alabama town of Smuteye. He pulls into the driveway of a small house, seeking tools to fix the car. The nuns living there offer their tools, but ask him to fix their leaking roof in exchange. The sisters believe that he has been sent by God to help them build their church. They tell him he will be building a fence the following day.
He goes to sleep, and has the "Buck and the Preacher" dream. He is Buck, leader of a wagon train of freedmen in the West who are running from a posse of army men wanting them to work their land. He steals a horse from a preacher in order to escape. The preacher punches him in the face.
After he wakes, the sisters tell him again that he will build their church, but he is not convinced. He fixes his car and leaves. He stops at the Smuteye Diner to get some food. Hearing the waitress and patrons ridicule the sisters, he decides to use his wealth to help the nuns build the church. After a struggle to get a check cashed in Montgomery, Alabama, he witnesses a Klan rally. He watches a cross burn down before leaving. (This chapter was inspired by the movies Lilies of the Field and Buck and the Preacher .)[ citation needed ]
He returns to the nuns with the money, but finds they have hired a suspicious architect who clearly plans to abscond with the money. Because of his suspicions, Not Sidney only gives them a portion of the money, then goes to the diner only to be arrested for a murder he did not commit. He calls Ted Turner and Percival Everett for help, and they come down to rescue him. After being freed from prison, he finds that the person who was murdered looked exactly like him, and wonders if that was the real Sidney Poitier. A massive tornado starts to form as he returns to the nuns' house, and he sees Mr. Scrunchy and Sister Iranaeus shoveling his money into a bag. They drive away in a truck, and the police chief moves to apprehend them with Not Sidney, Ted Turner, and Percival Everett in the car, but when the group finds Mr. Scrunchy and Sister Iranaeus, they are both dead after their truck hits a pole. Not Sidney gets his money back, and decides to resume his trip to California by plane. This chapter was inspired by the movies They Call Me Mr. Tibbs! and In the Heat of the Night
Not Sidney flies to Los Angeles, where he is met with press and a limousine, and is whisked away to an award show. He has truly become Sidney Poitier, and wins an award for a performance of his. In his acceptance speech, he references the fact that they are strangers to him, and dedicates the award to his mom, whose grave he has left unmarked. The words that end the book, his speech, and will stand on his mother's grave are: I Am Not Myself Today.
The following main characters are listed in order of appearance:
I Am Not Sidney Poitier explores the identity crisis associated with racial performances. In the novel, Not Sidney can never find his true self because Everett designed him to be a caricature of Sidney Poitier. He was constantly forced into a mold that eluded him. As Christian Schmidt states in his essay The Parody of Postblackness..., Not Sidney is "a mere negation of self," because, "without Sidney, Not Sidney would not exist."
Michael Buening, an editor from PopMatters, attaches this idea to the confusion that many Black men feel during situations in which they can't escape expectations associated with their skin and ethnicity. Buening concludes that Everett's parodied trope characterizes the experience of life for Black men as a journey of immense searching.
In the novel, Everett engages with several aspects of traditional Black literature through parody: "Playfully engaging the fiction of Ralph Ellison, Richard Wright, and intertextually invoking his own literary oeuvre, Everett's I Am Not Sidney Poitier signifies upon the history of African American literature and can fruitfully be read as a parody of it. Following Hutcheon, I use parody not in the narrow sense of 'ridiculing imitation' (A Theory 5) but as a term to describe complex forms of 'trans-contextualization' and inversion."[ clarification needed ]
This approach is characteristic of many "Post-black" authors. These authors create worlds in which race may or may not be relevant, but does not totally control or define the story. By doing so, these authors change the view of "Black literature", and try to establish that Black authors are capable of creating stories that are not entirely about the concept of race.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier received a warm reception but was limited in its reviews. It won two awards: the Believer Book Award and the Hurston/Wright Legacy Award. Everett's supporters lauded his absurdist comedic approach in creating a character that "negates" everything he is intended to represent.
Assistant professor Christian Schmidt from the University of Bayreuth defines the novel as a "meta parody that thematizes the very difference between original and copy even if the sign that marks this difference is as crude and banal as the simple 'not' of its protagonist's name." This attribute of the novel, along with its experimental and fractured lens of Not Sidney, create the "coded discourse" necessary for parody to thrive. Critics, including Schmidt, recognized Everett's emphasis on parody and noted instances such as his 2009 Fuck were discredited by many "intratextual critiques".
I Am Not Sidney Poitier has been classified as a part of "Post-black literature", by which Black novels parody/respond to the genre of Black literature. These authors write worlds that are entirely dependent on the text itself, and as such do not address the racism outside of it. [2]
NPR called the story a "delicious comedy of miscommunications" and "one of the funniest, most original stories to be published in years." [3]
Publishers Weekly 's review lauded Everett as "a novelist at the height of his narrative and satirical powers" and the novel as "smart and without a trace of pretentiousness". [4]
Kirkus Reviews said: "The author had some fun; the reader will too." [5]
The Merchant of Venice is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written between 1596 and 1598. A merchant in Venice named Antonio defaults on a large loan taken out on behalf of his dear friend, Bassanio, and provided by a Jewish moneylender, Shylock, with seemingly inevitable fatal consequences.
Sidney Poitier was a Bahamian-American actor, film director, activist, and diplomat. In 1964, he was the first Black actor and first Bahamian to win the Academy Award for Best Actor. He received two competitive Golden Globe Awards, a BAFTA Award, and a Grammy Award as well as nominations for two Emmy Awards and a Tony Award. In 1999, he was ranked among the "American Film Institute's 100 Stars". Poitier was one of the last surviving stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema.
The Defiant Ones is a 1958 American drama film which tells the story of two escaped prisoners, one white and one black, who are shackled together and who must co-operate in order to survive. It stars Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier.
Lilies of the Field is a 1963 American comedy-drama film adapted by James Poe from the 1962 novel of the same name by William Edmund Barrett, and stars Sidney Poitier, Lilia Skala, Stanley Adams, and Dan Frazer. It was produced and directed by Ralph Nelson. The title comes from the Sermon on the Mount in the Bible. It features an early film score by prolific composer Jerry Goldsmith. The film was turned into a Broadway musical in 1970, retitled Look to the Lilies, with Shirley Booth in the role of Mother Maria Marthe.
No Way Out is a 1950 American crime drama film noir directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and starring Sidney Poitier in his film debut, alongside Richard Widmark, Linda Darnell and Stephen McNally. The film centers on an African American doctor who confronts the racism of a poor slum after he treats a racist white criminal.
"Rosebud" is the fourth episode of the fifth season of the American animated television series The Simpsons. It first aired on the Fox network in the United States on October 21, 1993. In the episode, Mr. Burns misses his childhood teddy bear Bobo on the eve of his birthday. After flashbacks reveal Bobo's journey through history, the bear ends up in the hands of Maggie Simpson. Burns does everything in his power to get Bobo back.
In the Heat of the Night is a 1967 American mystery drama film directed by Norman Jewison, produced by Walter Mirisch, and starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. It tells the story of Virgil Tibbs (Poitier), a Black police detective from Philadelphia, who becomes embroiled in a murder investigation in a small town in Mississippi. The film was adapted by Stirling Silliphant from John Ball's 1965 novel of the same name.
Mudhoney is a 1965 Southern Gothic film directed by Russ Meyer. It is based on the novel Streets Paved With Gold by Raymond Friday Locke. The film is a period drama set during the Great Depression. "I got in a little bit over my head," Meyer said about the film. "That's when I thought I was Erskine Caldwell, John Steinbeck and George Stevens all in one."
Percival Leonard Everett II is an American writer and Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Southern California. He has described himself as "pathologically ironic" and has played around with numerous genres such as western fiction, mysteries, thrillers, satire and philosophical fiction. His books are often satirical, aimed at exploring race and identity issues in the United States.
Let's Do It Again is a 1975 American action crime comedy film, starring Sidney Poitier and co-starring Bill Cosby and Jimmie Walker among an all-star black cast. The film, directed by Poitier, is about blue-collar workers who decide to rig a boxing match to raise money for their fraternal lodge. The song of the same name by The Staple Singers was featured as the opening and ending theme of the film, and as a result, the two have become commonly associated with each other. The production companies include Verdon Productions and The First Artists Production Company, Ltd., and distributed by Warner Bros. The movie was filmed in two cities, Atlanta, Georgia and New Orleans, Louisiana, where most of the plot takes place. This was the second film pairing of Poitier and Cosby following Uptown Saturday Night, and followed by A Piece of the Action (1977). Of the three, Let's Do It Again has been the most successful both critically and commercially. Calvin Lockhart and Lee Chamberlin also appeared in Uptown Saturday Night. According to the American Film Institute, Let's Do It Again is not a sequel to Uptown Saturday Night.
Cry, the Beloved Country is a 1951 British drama film directed by Zoltán Korda and starring Sidney Poitier, Charles Carson and Canada Lee, in his last film role. The film is based on the novel of the same name written by Alan Paton.
Smuteye or Smut Eye is an unincorporated community in Bullock County, Alabama, United States, located northeast of Perote.
Buck and the Preacher is a 1972 American Western film released by Columbia Pictures, written by Ernest Kinoy and directed by Sidney Poitier. Poitier also stars in the film alongside Harry Belafonte and Ruby Dee.
Pressure Point is a 1962 American psychological drama film directed and co-written by Hubert Cornfield. It stars Sidney Poitier and Bobby Darin, about a prison psychiatrist treating an American Nazi sympathizer during World War II.
The Lost Man is a 1969 American crime film, written and directed by Robert Alan Aurthur, loosely based on British author F.L. Green's 1945 novel Odd Man Out, which was previously made into a 1947 film directed by Carol Reed and starring James Mason.
The Lilies of the Field is a 1962 novel by William Edmund Barrett, who based his depiction of the sisters partly upon the Benedictine nuns of the Abbey of St. Walburga, originally located in Boulder Colorado.
Harlem Writers Guild (HWG) is the oldest organization of African-American writers, originally established as the Harlem Writers Club in 1950 by John Oliver Killens, Rosa Guy, John Henrik Clarke, Willard Moore and Walter Christmas. The Harlem Writers Guild seeks to give African-American writers a platform to present their art in its entirety without censoring their experience of being Black in the United States of America. In addition to publishing works, the Harlem Writers Guild also acts as an organization to promote social change and an entity that hosts events to celebrate and promote their members.
Erasure is a 2001 novel by American writer Percival Everett. It was originally published by the University Press of New England. The novel reacts against the dominant strains of discussion related to the publication and criticism of African-American literature, and was later adapted by Cord Jefferson into a film titled American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright.
A Kitty Bobo Show is an American animated pilot created by Kevin Kaliher and Meaghan Dunn, and produced by Cartoon Network Studios for Cartoon Network. The pilot revolves around the eponymous character, Kitty Bobo, as he tries to prove his coolness to his friends.
The Trees is a 2021 novel by American author Percival Everett, published by Graywolf Press.