I Am Not Sidney Poitier

by Percival Everett

Her screams filled the streets like screams.

“You’re distressed,” he said. “I don’t know if I’d say distressed.” “You don’t have to. I can see that you’re in a deep distression.”

1) Imagine a radical and formidable contextualism that derives from a hypostatization of language and that it anticipates a liquefied language, a language that exists only in its mode of streaming. How is a speaker to avoid the pull into the whirl of this nonoriented stream of language? 2) Is the I one’s body? Is fantasy the specular image? And what does this have to do with the Borromean knot? In other words, why is there no symptom too big for its britches? 3) How might it feel to burn with missionary zeal? Don’t be shy in your answer.

“My mother testifies before Congress and goes on television all the time talking about conservative issues. She’s trying to get rid of the welfare system because it keeps black people down and to stop gay rights because it endangers the family structure and keeps black people down and to abolish affirmative action because it teaches special preference and that keeps black people down. That sort of stuff.”