Editors Reads Verdict
I Am Not Sidney Poitier is Everett's most gleefully absurdist novel — a picaresque that systematically remakes Sidney Poitier's filmography while dissecting how America sees and fails to see Black men. The comedy is broad, the satire is pointed, and the title character's navigations of identity are as poignant as they are funny.
What We Loved
- The conceit of mirroring Sidney Poitier's films is both structurally elegant and thematically exact
- The comedy operates on multiple registers simultaneously — slapstick, absurdism, and social satire coexist
- The author's cameo as a character named 'Percival Everett' is one of contemporary fiction's best metafictional jokes
Minor Drawbacks
- The episodic picaresque structure means some sections are stronger than others
- Readers unfamiliar with Sidney Poitier's filmography will miss some of the satire's specific targets
Key Takeaways
- → The insistence on being seen as who you are — not who others project onto you — is both a personal and political act
- → America's racial imagination remains so fixed that it cannot see Black men as individuals
- → Comedy is among the most precise instruments for examining what cannot otherwise be said
| Author | Percival Everett |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Graywolf Press |
| Pages | 234 |
| Published | August 1, 2009 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Literary Fiction, Satire, Picaresque |
I Am Not Sidney Poitier Review
Not Sidney Poitier — that is his full legal name, given at birth by his mother in what the novel treats as a fact requiring no further explanation — enters the world with a name that announces his central problem: he will spend his life being seen as someone he is not. His mother’s early death leaves him in the hands of Ted Turner (the actual Ted Turner, who appears as a recurring character), and his inheritance of a fortune in Turner Broadcasting stock makes him one of the wealthiest young Black men in America. This does not simplify his situation.
I Am Not Sidney Poitier, published in 2009, is Percival Everett’s most deliriously comic novel. Its structure mirrors the film career of the actual Sidney Poitier — The Defiant Ones, Lilies of the Field, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner — subjecting its narrator to scenarios that echo the films with the logic of a particularly dark farce. Not Sidney is shackled to a white man in a chain-gang escape. He encounters a community of nuns in need of help building something. He is repeatedly mistaken for the famous actor, a confusion that the novel uses to examine the peculiar blindness of white America when confronted with a Black man.
The comedy is broad and, at times, burlesque — but Everett’s comic control is precise. The absurdism is never merely for its own sake; each mirroring of a Poitier film says something specific about the films and about the society that made them. Sidney Poitier’s career was built on a particular kind of Black dignity that white audiences could receive without threat. Not Sidney Poitier shares nothing but a name with that persona, and the gap between them is the novel’s subject.
Everett himself appears as a professor character named “Percival Everett,” who delivers lectures of cheerful opacity and offers Not Sidney the novel’s closest thing to wisdom. It is a metafictional joke that earns its self-indulgence: the author’s presence in the text makes explicit what is always implicit in this kind of writing — that the novel is an examination of how stories get told about people who did not write them.
Our rating: 4.2/5
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" about?
Not Sidney Poitier — named at birth for the actor by his eccentric mother — grows up in the care of Ted Turner after inheriting a fortune, and survives a series of misadventures that mirror famous Sidney Poitier films, encountering racism, absurdity, and a world that insists on seeing him as someone else.
What are the key takeaways from "I Am Not Sidney Poitier"?
The insistence on being seen as who you are — not who others project onto you — is both a personal and political act America's racial imagination remains so fixed that it cannot see Black men as individuals Comedy is among the most precise instruments for examining what cannot otherwise be said
Is "I Am Not Sidney Poitier" worth reading?
I Am Not Sidney Poitier is Everett's most gleefully absurdist novel — a picaresque that systematically remakes Sidney Poitier's filmography while dissecting how America sees and fails to see Black men. The comedy is broad, the satire is pointed, and the title character's navigations of identity are as poignant as they are funny.
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