Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

I'm officially in love with Percival Everett, I think.

It started when I learned that he'd written a book called A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond as Told To Percival Everett and James Kincaid. My sense of humor is too cocked for me to not be drawn to such a long and ridiculous title. Benjamin Rosenbaum's similarly titled "Biographical Notes to 'A Discourse on the Nature of Causality, with Air-Planes', by Benjamin Rosenbaum" is among my favorite short stories, after all.

While I waited for that to arrive on Amazon, I picked another of his books up at the library.

35) I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.

The title, in addition to being a strikingly on-the-nose sentiment, is possibly a spoof on Tom Wolfe's I Am Charlotte Simmons, as the novel is also concerned in some sense with the evolving cultural mores of today's youth culture. The novel's title character is named Not Sidney Poitier, a curious moniker his mentally ill mother assigned to him for no clear reason we're ever given. It turns out that as he grows up, he begins to closely resemble his non-namesake, and Everett has Not Sidney endure a series of adventures that more or less directly parody famous Poitier movies.

The novel begins Shandyan, with a very funny and very peculiar narration of the narrator's birth. It ends Borgesian, with the lines between Not Sidney and Sidney blurring in almost ecstatic ways. And on almost any other book I was writing up for this community I would hesitate to make those comparisons, because I'm growing wary of making naive comparisons to white authors on this community, wary of slotting them into a paradigm where they're considered second class citizens. But among the questions Everett seems to be asking, particularly in a central passage where Not Sidney experiences Not Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, is what makes a particular narrative "white" or "black". What separates Dick from Delany, what separates Baldwin from Hemingway, what separates Sidney Poitier from Not Sidney Poitier, and what separates Not Sidney Poitier from billionaire Ted Turner, who has a hysterical turn here as Not Sidney's eccentric adoptive father figure. So it's vitally important that Everett run his novel up against Tristram Shandy and David Copperfield and The Metamorphosis, in addition to the narratives of Frederick Douglass and Sidney Poitier and the rest of his "black narratives". The result of this mishmash is a literature of suffering and hope, joyously combined.

36)Erasure by Percival Everett

All three novels of Everett's that I've read feature some form of self-insertion. In I Am Not Sidney Poitier, Percival Everett is a Morehouse professor who teaches a course on the Philosophy of Nonsense and offers Not Sidney all manner of entirely unhelpful and nonsensical advice. In A History of the African American People, Everett is a Berkeley professor contracted by Strom Thurmond to help set his thoughts down on paper. In Erasure, Thelonious Ellison (a name which in a way is the same as Not Sidney) is a middle class novelist and teacher who has just published a novel that parodies the post-modern literary establishment and is recognizably similar to Everett's Glyph in form and content.

Ellison takes a leave of absence from his teaching job at Berkeley after his sister is shot and he is left to care for his Alzheimer's-afflicted mother. In the interim, he sits down and writes a parody of one of the "ghetto novels" that has become so popular lately as epitomized by Push. Everett sets down 60 pages of the novel within the novel, an ebonics-laden tale of violence and drugs titled My Pafology.

The novel poses fascinating questions about authenticity as "My Pafology", retitled "Fuck", becomes a best-seller and wins the National Book Award. Everett is brutal and funny as he mocks Oprah, the literary establishment, liberal guilt, and our desire to find a fiction that somehow communicates the truth of human suffering.

37) A History of the African American People (Proposed) by Strom Thurmond as Told To Percival Everett and James Kincaid by Percival Everett (and James Kincaid? I'm honestly not sure what Kincaid's contributions were, which is part of the point)

An epistolary narrative tracing the development of the titular historical memoir, from its conception in the blurry mind of a Thurmond aide through its development by a desperate Simon and Schuster editor and the bewildered ghostwriting undertaken by the team of Everett and Kincaid, writers in the Berkeley English department, one white and one black.

Unlike a lot of such parody novels, Everett doesn't supply you with any sort of anchoring character. Everyone you meet is just as poorly adjusted to society. They let their perversions, their foibles, their weaknesses drive them. Thurmond's aide misrepresents his relationship with his boss. The editor abuses his position of authority to make sexual advances on his assistant. Kincaid is obnoxiously overcareful to avoid offending his black colleague, while Everett abuses this deference for amusement and personal benefit.

And somehow, amid a cast of misshapen lunatics, serious thoughts begin to emerge about the nature of history and narrative, about the way we read the world around us. Somehow, misguided as he is, Strom Thurmond's insistence that he is more responsible for the history of the African-American people than anyone begins to teach us how to ask the right questions about who writes history and how they interpret it. The book shows when and how to question the historical canon, when and how to embrace minority opinions, asks whether it's ever necessary to decide on a definitive answer. And I have no idea how Everett does this. It's magic, how he finds form in his chaos.

I'm on a bit of a post-modernism kick. These books are both very, very funny and very, very different.

33. The Last Days of Louisana Red by Ishmael Reed is an abstruse and yet very nasty piece of fiction. At its surface level, it's about a black family in Berkeley navigating the turmoil of the '60s. The four children of a divorced businessman find different paths to adulthood: ultimately, the story ends in over the top tragedy for three of them. Beneath this surface layer, there are metanarratives about white-black relations, male-female relations, what it means to be authentically black in America, the function and evolution of drama, and an assortment of other topics. The titular Louisana Red becomes, in Reed's hands, a powerful metaphor for black rage.

Reed throws around a lot of offensive language. There are a number of misogynistic rants that I found stomach-churning, and as a Jew I was thrown out of the book for a moment by one of his anti-semitic screeds, where the narrator labels the Jews "Pyramid Rock Toters" and accuses them of oppressing the blacks. I paused, closed the book, and debated whether I was willing to endure potentially more of the same, and eventually decided to continue. I'm still not sure this was the right decision. Reed's undeniably a gifted writer who has something to say. I'm just not sure I'm equipped to hear it.


34. Don Dimaio of La Plata by Robert Arellano (sometimes Roberto Arellano)

A mashup of Don Quixote and the story of corrupt former Providence mayor Buddy Cianci, and it's even stranger than that sounds. Important characters in the novel include a cocaine-addicted gibbon on the lam and a talking toupee that navigates the astral plane.

The novel is full of sex, drugs, vulgarity, violence, abuse, and it's saved from all of that by a powerful sense of whimsy. Each section of the novel's narrative about Don "Pally" Dimaio, mayor of La Plata, is preceded by a punning reinterpretation of a passage from the Quixote. Sancho Panza becomes Pancho Sanchez, Dimaio's policeman chauffeur and bodyguard. The windmill turns into a a billboard that a cocaine-addled Dimaio insists is full of " 'ginas ". Dulcinella becomes a porn star named Dolly Dellabutta that Dimaio fantasizes about. It turns the whole affair deeply silly, and had me giggling hysterically through the whole thing.

Frankly, though, the book is worth it for the beautiful cover alone.

a: reed ishmael, a: arellano robert,

12) All About H. Hatterr by G. V. Desani

I cannot rave about this book enough. It's absolutely wonderful. It's in the Everyman novel tradition, but there is something unique about Hatterr even within this tradition.

H. Hatterr is half-European, half-Malay and 100% patsy. He grows up in India amidst a mishmash of conflicting ideologies- British colonial influences, Indian traditional influences, garbled influxes of modern philosophies- owning none of them but attempting to grab onto all of them. He always fails miserably and hilariously and pathetically... and gloriously.

Hatterr does not deserve better than he gets. Hatterr is every bit as crass and commercial as those who screw him out of money. Hatterr is every bit as undisciplined as those who best him in the sexual arena. Hatterr is every bit as hypocritical as those who keep him out of the spiritual world. He is one of those fools who need to be protected from themselves. That is the part of ourselves that we see in him, for he is in fact an Everyman.

Modernity is not a comfortable place. All he truly wants is comfort, and that is the one thing he cannot buy no matter how much Tradition he grabs. Hatterr occupies an inherently uncomfortable role, outsider on the edges of European civilization, inheritor of a different cultural strain, trying to figure out how to be true to his heritage without giving up the benefits of Western life.

Hatterr's appeals to the great Occidental wise men Marx and Freud and Locke are hysterical and at the same time tragic. The India we see in Desani's story is an India that will destroy itself and emerge no different from the West it fears and worships.

And Desani's prose!!!!!!! Crazy isn't enough of a word for it. Malapropisms refashioned into something more than malapropisms, the entire English language taken on a tour of the darker corners of its own history. Desani's Hatterr chews up Shakespeare and regurgitates his language into new patterns that retain the Bard's grace and add new levels of meaning and depth.

You ever read a book with language so energetic, so creative, so wildly and powerfully different from anything you've seen before that you just about dance in your seat from excitement as you read? This is that kind of book.

It is filled with powerful formal structures that explode in your hands as you try to read, sabotaging themselves, parodying themselves, refusing to be pinned down or understood in a consistent way. It's a book that is itself alive, and perhaps even human.