Author : Trevor Noah
Genre : Non-fiction; Memoir
Publisher : One World
Pages : 304
Rating : 3.5/5
I borrowed Born A Crime by Trevor Noah from the library because I do watch Trevor Noah’s show on Comedy Central, I have seen his stand-up comedy and heard about his background. While his show is entertaining, I do find him a little juvenile as compared to Jon Stewart, the previous host of The Daily Show, but that might be because he is trying to target the younger demographic. His live stand-up comedy show (which I saw a couple of years back) was a lot more “mature” and far more perspicacious than I’d thought it would be.
The tone of this book is trademark Noah – informal, colloquial, casual. And interesting.
Noah was born in South Africa during apartheid, to an African Xhosa woman and a Swiss Caucasian man, when an inter-racial relationship was a crime punishable by a 5 year prison term. So in the initial years at least, relatively light colored Trevor had to be “hidden away” and couldn’t be seen with his mother – as in she could not identify herself as his mother, lest she be convicted of the crime an inter-racial relationship. Later, as apartheid lifted, Trevor had more freedom and he narrates his life as his little family unit – him and his mother and later his younger brother move back-and-forth between black neighborhoods and black townships like Soweto.
His independent-minded, strong-willed mother Patricia strove to give him everything within her power, because she wanted him to have a better life than she had had. His childhood was mired in poverty and he describes quite a few hair-raising episodes – like the one time he and his mother jump out of a moving bus – and some hard ones, like the time in his life when he ate caterpillars, day after day; he describes the taste and texture and feeling of eating caterpillars – extremely unpleasant – and tells us that it is the food of the poorest of the poor.
Noah describes himself as an imp, a prankster and a practical joker, a hustler who managed to earn a few bucks here and there using his street-smarts. He also describes situations where he was caught between two worlds – he was light colored enough to not be considered black enough, and he didn’t actually fit in with the colored folks – and had to pick a side.
He endured hard times, but Noah is completely frank and honest about all his experiences, and tells them with grace and good humor, qualities that he appears to carry with him in real life. Despite all the hard times, the injustices, the unfairness of it all, he comes across not as an embittered young man but someone who appreciates life, a person imbued with a splendidness of spirit.
