Trevor Noah's Born a Crime intrigued me ever since I heard his interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air. I was never a fan of his until that interview, but there, I learned a lot about South African life before and after Apartheid, and Noah showcased some intriguing ideas about language and race that I had never really thought about before. The interview inspired me to read the memoir, which, from its descriptions, seemed like it would be both a humorous and culturally important read, and possibly even something to teach.We are always looking for interesting and accessible international texts.I finished the Audible version of the book today, which is read by Trevor Noah himself. And, I was not disappointed at all: this is a funny and often wise examination of South Africa, race and Apartheid, as well as a tribute to the Noah's gutsy mother who raised him.
The memoir is fully titled Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood, and that title speaks both to Noah's birth -- he was born to his black mother and his white father when it was a crime for black and white people to mix in South Africa -- and to the disjointed nature of the memoir, which really is a series of vignettes that follow a somewhat chronological route from Noah's elementary schooling (he went to an elite private school after his mother secures a scholarship) to his burgeoning career as a comic (described here only briefly).
Noah spends much of his childhood alone, as doesn't fit in with black people or white people, and his existence could lead to the arrest of his mother -- indeed, this happened several times. Trevor's family lives in fierce poverty; one of the details that most stuck with me, probably because I worked in a butcher shop and swept this stuff up, is that the family often lived on "bone dust," the remnants of cutting meat on machines and intended for dogs. Later, Noah and his family spend a whole month literally eating worms and spinach. He writes about all of these with a matter-of-fact tone, absent of self-pity.
Noah's light-skinned presence is such an oddity in his neighborhood that his house becomes a landmark when giving directions: "The house on Makhalima Street. At the corner you'll see a light-skinned boy. Take a right there." It's also an oddity in his house, where his extended family of grandparents treat him differently because of his light-skinned status; Noah makes the point that his family replicated the U.S. justice system by giving him much more lenient punishments for the same infractions for which his darker cousins received beatings. At a really compelling point occurs here: Noah's grandmother complains to his mother that she can't beat Trevor because it leaves marks that she can't see on her dark-skinned grandchildren.
Despite his struggles, Noah's mother is a boulder of force in his life. She set out to make a baby with a white man, despite its implications, and then raised Trevor in a way that opened up the world for him:
"My mother refused to be bound by the ridiculous ideas of what black people couldn't or shouldn't do. She raised me as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do. When I look back, I realized she raised me like a white kid -- not white culturally, but in the sense of believing that the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered.
"We tell people to follow their dreams, but you can only dream of what you can imagine, and, depending on where you come from, your imagination can be quite limited. The highest rung of what's possible is far beyond the world you can see. My mother showed me what was possible. The thing that always amazed me about her life is that no one showed her. No one chose her. She did it on her own. She found her way through sheer force of will.
"Perhaps even more amazing is the fact the my mother started her little project, me, at a time when she could not have known that apartheid would end. I was nearly 6 when Mandela was released, 10 before democracy finally came, yet she was preparing me to live a life of freedom long before we knew freedom would exist."
The above passage gives a good example of the kind of book that Noah has written here. Interspersed between his stories are bits of philosophy and wisdom that are often thought-provoking. Noah makes a common point about language -- at one point, he writes, "Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people" -- but supports it with humorous examples, like the time he was almost mugged for being white until he turns around and starts talking to his would-be attackers in their native language. Like a chameleon, Noah did his best to camouflage his racial differences with language, a trait he learned from his mother.
There are a few uneven bits. An anecdote about a dancer whose given English name was "Hitler" strains credibility (it's hard to understand how Noah, having made the point about how much his mom has opened up the world for him and now in late high school, wouldn't have known why Jewish faculty and students wouldn't be offended by a dance party that turns into a "Go Hitler! Go Hitler!" rally) and doesn't seem to have a resolution. A late tangent about a hospital bill just felt like a space filler, and I would have enjoyed some more connective tissue between Noah's regional success as a deejay at parties into how he started his stand-up career. (I've seen a little of Noah's standup material, and know he talks about being mixed-race... I wonder how that went over in South Africa.)
However, this memoir is often moving (the ending, about the final conflict between Trevor's mom and her husband, Abel, left me gasping), thoughtful (I especially loved an adulthood meeting between Trevor's father and Trevor, and the truths it exposed), and funny (there's a bit about sneakily shitting in the house in front of his blind great-grandmother that had me laughing out loud... Beyonce is mentioned). Noah's ideas about language and race are compelling, and his first-hand account of growing up under Apartheid and its aftermath is both approachable and thought-provoking.
And, yes, this could be the next great 9th grade text.
On his father:
“Relationships are built in the silences. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them—and that is what apartheid stole from us: time.”
On his mother:
“People thought my mom was crazy. Ice rinks and drive-ins and suburbs, these things were izinto zabelungu -- the things of white people. So many people had internalized the logic of apartheid and made it their own. Why teach a black child white things? Neighbors and relatives used to pester my mom: 'Why do this? Why show him the world when he's never going to leave the ghetto?'
'Because,' she would say, 'even if he never leaves the ghetto, he will know that the ghetto is not the world. If that is all I accomplish, I've done enough.”
from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2ivmxTM Book Review: 'Born a Crime' by Trevor Noah - Entrepreneur Generations
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