be ye a lantern…

I love that idea of illuminating your own path, but thank GOODNESS for people like Claudia who seems to know all the best blogs and consistently points me to them.  Over at The Bottom of Heaven, Claudia has written up her experience watching The Princess and the Frog with her daughter; I haven’t seen the film yet, but I read Nnedi Okorafor’s review recently and wonder if maybe I should check it out.  Claudia then pointed me to an interview with Toni Morrison where she responds to the question: are black girls better off today than at the time you wrote The Bluest Eye?  Morrison’s answer might surprise you…makes me wonder how much time she actually spends with teenage black girls…

While watching that video, I noticed a link to a film that shook me when I first saw it several years ago: Speakers for the Dead: A Hidden History of Blacks In Canada.  I saw this in 2005, I think, while I was living in Toronto for a few months…my black & white ancestors are from this part of Ontario, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they, too, were run off their land by a white mob…who then grew potatoes in the black cemetery and used tombstones for building fences, or serving as home base on a baseball field…yeah, Oh, Canada…you can watch the ENTIRE film here (it’s under an hour).

Today I finished reading I Am Not Sidney Poitier by Percival Everett.  As with Erasure, this novel is hilarious—I mean laugh-out-loud-on-the-subway funny.  Once again, Everett constructs a brilliant satire of the characters played by Sidney Poitier, a man still admired for his dignified representations of black masculinity in film.  The novel’s main character is a curious look-alike named Not Sidney Poitier by his mother; when she dies, 11 year old Not Sidney is taken in by his mother’s executor—who just happens to be Ted Turner!  Jane Fonda makes an appearance, as does Bill Cosby, and even Percival Everett himself as a sardonic professor at Morehouse.  The novel recreates scenes from Poitier’s film career (In the Heat of the Night, A Patch of Blue, Lilies of the Field, The Defiant Ones) but even if you haven’t seen those films, the depiction of race relations is still hysterical.  Everett (the author) gives Not Sidney the sexuality his namesake often lacked in those films—or rather, he allows women to act out the fantasies they perhaps could only project onto the saintly Sidney…there’s a lot of fellatio in this book, but there’s also a critique of elitism and colorism among blacks.  My favorite bit might be the speech Cosby gives to the Morehouse men in which he punctuates every other sentence with “Pudding Pops!”  I bought it for my soon to be 24-year old brother for his birthday; highly recommended…