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Sidney Poitier

Lovemore Ranga Mataire
ONE of the things that have remained a sore on the African’s conscience is the inability by black intellectuals and luminaries to document their own stories according to their own experiences. It is depressingly shocking that only a sizeable number of books recounting the African experience from an African perspective are in existence.

Whether by default or diffident we have allowed other people to interpret our existence and in turn accepted their accounts without probing our own consciousness on what really matters to us as Africans.

It is this deficiency of the internal probing of consciousness that could have motivated Sidney Poitier, one of the most revered actors in the history of Hollywood, to put pen to paper and document his own life as he lived it.

Born in 1927 in the Bahamas, Sidney Poitier penned “Life Beyond Measure”, a uniquely crafted collection of letters to his great-granddaughte, Ayele, born in 2005.

This is not just a simple historical record but a really inspirational book documenting how Poitier, a simple boy from Cat Island in the Bahamas, had to overcome enormous odds so that ultimately his bravery, convictions and grace made him a role model for many people.

He draws his perspectives on life from his experience against racism after immigrating to the United, and offers his thoughts on love, faith, courage and philosophical nuggets in between.

One of his underlying themes is triumph against adversity.
Despite being poor and scantily educated, he managed to break the race barrier in theatre and film during the Civil Rights era, attaining stardom and success in Hollywood including being appointed a diplomat.

Thus in his prologue, he challenges readers to tackle even the thorniest questions and try to make a difference and not to resign one’s self to fate.

“To lose interest in life – to retreat from being totally alive and totally engaged in the world within and outside of ourselves – is a tragic plight in my eyes, yet one easily remedied whenever we must muster the willingness to bear up to our thorniest questions.”

Poitier is grateful that God’s grace has enabled him to live long (he is now 87) and like our own President Mugabe, does not offer any prescriptive instructions for such an enduring life.

Rather, Poitier dwells on the need to draw one’s own conclusions, especially at important vulnerable turning points where one is filled with “fear, doubt, uncertainty, desperation, and loss of confidence”.

While the book is addressed to his great-granddaughter, the real target audience is assuredly universal given the issues of religion, racism, poverty and wars that he tackles.

From the outset, Poitier seeks to debunk the myth that lack of a formal education as we understand it today hindered his ancestors from attaining full human status.

He gives the example of his father Reggie Poitier who had no formal education and made his living as a tomato farmer, but nevertheless was a man of stature among his peers, was well respected and valued for his sound judgment and advice in the community.

In recounting his life story to his great-granddaughter, Poitier feels duty-bound to capture what moulded him otherwise future generations will simply have hazy or no recollections at all of their past.

“So it falls to me to preserve what I can for you by returning to the fundamental questions and touching on answers in ways that my father and his peers of village elders would do today – assuming that they would be as conversant with the outside world in which I now live as I was with the village life they once lived,” writes Poitier.

Chronicling the Poitier family tree, he touches on religion and recounts how his mother was a spiritual being who believed in the cause and effect of nature.

Religion played and still plays a role in mankind’s monumental struggle against forces of nature on which the condition of survival rests, Poiter acknowledges.

He recounts his mother’s consultation with a soothsayer who foretold Poitier’s life as it later came out to be in his adult life.
While his mother could have been unaware of the fact that the world was round and the existence of so many oceans and continents, she had a connection to something in which she rested her faith.

His mother’s ancestors were able to retain remnants of who they once were in defiance of the institution of slavery, which set out to obliterate their original cultural and religious identity.

Sidney Poitier’s “Life Beyond Measure” is an inspirational piece of art, whose thrust is hinged on hope as an eternal tool in the survival kit of mankind.