I Am Not Sidney Poitier (review)

Percival Everett adds another unique and entertaining new novel to his collection of fiction with I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Readers can expect the tongue-in-cheek writing style and off-the-wall energy characteristic of Everett, who provides a pre-narrative "disclaimer":

All characters depicted in this novel are completely fictitious, regardless of similarities to any extant parties and regardless of shared names. In fact, one might go as far as to say that any shared name is ample evidence that any fictitious character in this novel is NOT in any way a depiction of anyone living, dead, or imagined by anyone other than the author. This qualification applies, equally, to the character whose name is the same as the author's.

This "disclaimer" exhibits Everett's distinctive wit, but note his warning: do not confuse the novel's protagonist, Not Sidney Poitier, with the Academy Award winning actor Sidney Poitier. I Am Not Sidney Poitier follows the life of Not Sidney Poitier, not Sidney Poitier—well, not initially. Other "fictitious" characters include: Ted Turner, Percival Everett, Bill Cosby, Harry Belafonte, Elizabeth Taylor, and a host of actors or actor look-alikes who starred in movies alongside Sidney Poitier. But again, be not mistaken: this novel is not about Sidney Poitier; it is about Not Sidney Poitier.

While amusing, Everett's "disclaimer" and play on words also suggest the novel's engagement with multiple meanings, identification, and semiotics. As Susan Salter Reynolds writes, "[Everett is] interested . . . in how we edit our dreams and our everyday experience to make sense of the world, in 'how we make meaning.' This is not plot, exactly, but something Everett calls 'the inner thread of the story.'" Examining "how we make meaning," Everett draws on many elements of hyperreality theory—juxtaposing media with our interpretation and understanding of reality. In his fiction, Everett often includes references to philosophical linguists who examine semiotics, probably best exhibited in Glyph (1999) and Erasure (2001). Though I Am Not Sidney Poitier does not achieve the brilliancy (and complexity) of some of Everett's other works, the novel humorously investigates the fuzzy boundaries between reality and media without cluttering the narrative with complicated ideology.

Everett uses Not Sidney Poitier as a vessel through which to explore the iconic image of actor Sidney Poitier. In a recent interview with Time Out New York, Everett tells Drew Toal, "I was interested in the icon of the palatable black man in the '60s or '70s." As Toal reports, "[Everett] was drawn to Poitier because he is such a complicated figure—politically outspoken in public, and eminently 'safe' onscreen." Everett "recreates" many of Sidney Poitier's films, some as part of the plotline and others as Not Sidney's dream sequences. The novel's Poitier-film allusions include: No Way Out (1950), Band of Angels (1957), The Defiant Ones (1958), Lilies of the Field (1963), Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967), In the Heat of the Night (1967), and Buck and the Preacher (1972). The multiple Poitier-film references result in a distortion of reality, blurring the separate identities of Not Sidney and Sidney Poitier. Toward the novel's end, Not Sidney—who has recently withdrawn $50,000 in cash to build a church in rural Alabama (see Lilies of the Field)—comes face-to-face with his exact lookalike, who has been murdered when mistaken for Not Sidney. Seeing himself—or his identical lookalike—Not Sidney questions his reality and self-perception:

There were people out there looking for me, wanting my fifty thousand dollars. I knew they would kill me for it and I wondered if in fact they already had. As we stepped out of the makeshift morgue I thought that if that body in the chest was Not Sidney Poitier, then I was not Not Sidney Poitier and that by all I knew of logic and double negatives, I was therefore Sidney Poitier. I was Sidney Poitier.

(212)

The novel concludes with Not Sidney Poitier being taken for Sidney Poitier—"'Are you...