‘As real as the unreal’: Identity and Iconography in the Fiction of Percival Everett

Résumé 0

In his memoir Dreams from My Father (2004), U.S. President Barack Obama chronicles his search for identity after the death of his father, ‘a figure he [knew] more as a myth than as a man’. This paper will explore how author Percival Everett confronts and wrestles with raced and gendered cultural icons, particularly representations of African American manhood, from the mid- to late-20th century. In his 2001 novel Erasure, Everett uses the philosophical/artistic practice of sous rature to challenge inflexible notions of black identity dating back to the Richard Wright classic Native Son and recurring in contemporary fiction classified as ‘street’ or ‘urban’ literature. Negation becomes Everett’s tool of choice in his 2009 novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, in which the title character, through the simple act of introducing himself, repeatedly denies any relation to his somewhat namesake and doppelganger, African American cinema icon Sidney Poitier. I argue that Everett’s fictional project does not reject race identification so much as it expands (via the partial obscuring and subsequent layering of narratives in Erasure) and explodes (via the absurd vignettes of I Am Not Sidney Poitier) previously restrictive understandings of blackness in general and black masculinity in particular. In work that heralds Kenneth W. Warren’s critical meditation What Was African American Literature?, Everett blurs the lines between real and imagined, waking and dream, in order to offer a retrospective critique of African American culture that also suggests innovative, provocative ways for rethinking questions of race and identity.