Written and revised by:
Marc Choi, Brianna Linn, Lael Truth, Brian Vargas, and Christina Yi
“What’s wrong with your eye?… Looks like the boy’s gonna pop” (Everett 19)
We imagine this image, a portion of the “Staredad” meme, to be an accurate representation of the famous fesmerizing stare used constantly by the protagonist Not Sidney Poitier in Percival Everett’s novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier. The image above depicts a man with an apparently crazy and dazed stare, who possesses an extremely powerful gaze. While it may introduce a feeling of uncomfortability, it also gives rise to the question: “Can a look so stern give someone the power to control others?”.
Percival Everett parodies the concepts of mesmerization through fesmerization and the existence of the character Not Sidney Poitier and Sidney Poitier the actor. These parodies are used to distinguish the slight differences between the two agents and illustrate how miscommunication can occur from this.
In the novel I Am Not Sidney Poitier, written by Percival Everett, fesmerization is used both motivically and functionally as both a tool to emphasize how strong public misinterpretations can be and as a tool for negation and parody, just as Not Sidney appears as both a negation of the actor Sidney Poitier and as a parody of Poitier’s film characters—this range of characters includes Noah Cullen, an escaped convict from the film The Defiant Ones. The motivic use can be observed in the parodying of several terms and individuals that exist outside the book, like mesmerization and Sidney Poitier.
Not Sidney Poitier is a character who is constantly confronted by the similarities between himself and the characters the actor Sidney Poitier portrays in his films, as well as the similarities in his appearance to the actor. Because those characters that Sidney Poitier plays are not an accurate representation of himself, it is reasonable to argue that Not Sidney, in the way he lives his life through several characters from Poitier films, is a personification of the term “not”; he is not Sidney Poitier. Similarly, this confusion can be observed with the character, Anton Franz Fesmer, who is constantly mistaken for Franz Anton Mesmer—Everett explicitly states in the book I Am Not Sidney Poitier that they are often confused for each other (Everett 16).
Fesmerism is a method of persuasion created by the character Anton Franz Fesmer from the book I Am Not Sidney Poitier— in contrast, the term mesmerism comes from a real doctor named Franz Anton Mesmer. Their first and middle names are mixed up while their last name is altered from an “F” to an “M”. However, fesmerism and mesmerism are not very different from each other. Mesmerism is centred around controlling the health of the body using hypnotism, while fesmerism in the words of Not Sidney is “a method of gaining control of a subject without the subject’s awareness” (Everett 16). Similar to the restrictions of mesmerization, not all people can be fesmerized, which places the character Not Sidney in several awkward situations created through his failure to fesmerize an individual; Not Sidney has been subject to this flaw several times and has learned the consequences to this flaw—he even stated, “if it doesn’t work, one comes across like an insane and possibly dangerous person” (Everett 18). Mesmerism was discovered through animal magnetism “wherein the invisible fluid in the body acts according to the laws of magnetism” and it can “be activated by any magnetized object and manipulated by any trained person.” While these methods are involved in different processes they have a commonality in that both are not guaranteed to work.
A portion of Not Sidney’s life is used as a parody of the film entitled The Defiant Ones. Not Sidney gets unfairly prosecuted and incarcerated like the character played by Sidney Poitier in The Defiant Ones. In the novel, Not Sidney’s escape from a prison bus “shackled to a slight white man”, a.k.a. Patrice, who Not “knew he (Patrice) liked neither me (Not) nor the fact that I was black” (Everett 49) to the capture by the little farm boy is almost parallel to The Defiant Ones (Everett 52, 59). The subtle, yet profound difference is that Not Sidney escapes and leaves behind his racist prisoner and as a result achieves freedom (Everett 79). Not Sidney just left them in the dust when he could have easily helped them. This is something that is completely off script from the film, in which Sidney attempts to save his fellow prisoner to the end and ultimately failing to escape because of this. This is one of the few differences in the plot, but this one action reveals that Not Sidney is apathetic and selfish, which is completely different from the character Sidney played who is caring and compassionate.
The importance of this conversation, which discusses the use of negation through the word “Not”, highlights the introduction of miscommunication and how it frequently happens throughout the novel. This is like the misunderstanding encountered with the situation with the hole in the ozone. Headlines strongly claimed that there was a hole in the earth’s ozone layer, but there was no significant evidence to support these “facts”. A layer in the ozone did disappear, but the claims were over-exaggerated. However, these declarations influenced the people’s imaginations, resulting in them assuming that the problem was much greater than it was. The “hole” was a small dot compared to the rest of the world which is shown in the image above. There is a huge difference between a giant hole and a small area on the earth that is affected. The media was manipulated into thinking that electromagnetic radiation was no longer being filtered and was passing into a majority of earth’s surface. This miscommunication resulted in a two-year delay for CFCs, which is a harmful chemical that damages the ozone layer, to be banned and caused a massive debate on whether or not the “hole” was real.
On a surface level, all the individuals and situations discussed above appear almost identical to each other. However, through further examination, it can be observed that there are subtle differences that are of extreme importance. Not Sidney Poitier’s life revolves around the fictional characters that Sidney Poitier plays, so he is what his name states. There are physical differences between fesmerism and mesmerism, hence the first letter of both words, and application differences. With the environmental issue concerning the ozone layer, it is important to understand the difference between ozone depletion and an initiation in ozone depletion. Those who were aware of the differences acknowledged the underlying distinction and were able to uncover the truth. Percival Everett is aware of the power miscommunication can have upon society and the individual. He utilized this concept in the novel, “I Am Not Sidney Poitier”, by creating parodies about the situations regarding miscommunication to emphasize that things are not always how they seem. In life, we tend to assume many things, because most of the time, we do not always understand the facts given to us.
Bibliography
Everett, Percival. I Am Not Sidney Poitier. Graywolf, 2009.
Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Franz Anton Mesmer.” Encyclopædia Britannica, Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc., 19 May 2018, www.britannica.com/biography/Franz-Anton-Mesmer.
“Should We Still Be Concerned about the Ozone Layer?” DebateWise, debatewise.org/debates/2303-should-we-still-be-concerned-about-the-ozone-layer.
Pereira, Sydney. “NASA Study Found That the Hole in Earth’s Ozone Layer Is Closing up Due to a Decline in the Chemicals Causing It.” Newsweek, 5 Jan. 2018, www.newsweek.com/nasa-hole-earths-ozone-layer-finally-closing-humans-did-something-771922.