Paromita’s Reviews > I Am Not Sidney Poitier > Status Update

..My mother is buried not far from this auditorium, and there are no words on her headstone. As I glance out now, as I feel the weight of this trophy in my hands, as I stand like a specimen before these strangely unstrange faces, I know finally what should be written on that stone. It should say what mine will say:

I AM NOT MYSELF TODAY."

“I came back to this place to find something, to connect with something lost, to reunite if not with my whole self, then with a piece of it. What I’ve discovered is that this thing is not here. In fact, it is nowhere. I have learned that my name is not my name. It seems you all know me and nothing could be further from the truth and yet you know me better than I know myself, perhaps better than I can know myself..

“You want to know why people are so fucked up? Son, that’s about the only question I can answer with even a small measure of authority. It’s because they’re people. People, my friend, are worse than anybody.”

Listen, just remember that nothing puts you at an advantage like knowing what someone is thinking when they don’t know you know what they’re thinking.

"I stayed away, reading and thinking. The latter activity, I was certain, would finally be my downfall. Downfall sounds a bit melodramatic or even vain, certainly romantic, as if I believed I occupied or expected to achieve some station, but the fact was I believed thinking or overthinking finally would not serve me well, if at all."

"I’m beginning to think the only difference between being black and being white is that if you’re white you just don’t know about your blood, you’re dumb to your blood, ignorant about that one drop. White people fear that one drop like we fear the rope."

"By so daringly stepping away from my role as victim, I was to be feared, or at least made to feel like a shit for abandoning the rules.
I hated everything about everything."

"A steady diet of humiliation leads to a kind of immunity or desensitization to abasement and discomfiture and so I found myself caring less and less, and the less I cared the less anyone seemed interested in beating me up. Lack of interest or not, the beatings continued, perhaps because they had become a habit or ritual for a few..."

"The one matter that was not confusing to me, but seemed to escape all others, was the fact that the only thing that was certain to become obsolete, would necessarily become wearied and worn, was the truth. I knew this in spite of the truth that I had had little truck with the truth in my life."

I could hear my mother’s voice. “Read. Always read. No one can take that from you. The evil picture box [her name for the television] won’t make you smarter, but books will. Read. Read. Read.”