January 2021: Born A Crime (Noah)

Post date: Feb 15, 2021 2:20:23 AM

Our first book club meeting of 2021 was held via Zoom on Tuesday, January 12th.  We started the new year off well, with eighteen members joining in the discussion.  Our selection for the month was Trevor Noah’s memoir Born A Crime:  Stories from a South African Childhood. 

The book’s title reflects the fact that Noah’s existence was proof of his parents’ guilt in apartheid South Africa.   When he was born in 1984, it was illegal for people considered to be white by the government to have sexual relations with people the government deemed non-white.  Noah’s mother is a black South African of the Xhosa tribe and his father is a white immigrant to South Africa from Switzerland, so Noah’s birth was proof of a crime that could have landed them both in prison for up to five years. 

As a result, the first few years of Noah’s life involved a good deal of secrecy and subterfuge.  He could see his father only for short periods and only indoors.  Outside, his father had to walk on the opposite side of the street from Trevor and his mother, acting like he did not know them.   His mother also had to pretend not to be his mother when they were in public, and she employed various ruses to make it seem she was just the caregiver to her light skinned son.  When she and Noah visited her family in the townships, Noah was kept hidden inside the family compound. Fearing that neighbors would report the family, Noah was not allowed to play in the neighborhood with his cousins and the other black children. 

When Noah was six, Nelson Mandela was released from prison and the legal system of apartheid came to an end.   Noah and his mother could openly participate in a South African society that was changing dramatically, but which still posed serious challenges to Noah, as a mixed-raced child, and to Noah’s mother, as a black woman trying to raise a son on her own.  Most of Noah’s memoir focuses on these post-apartheid years and on his mother’s struggles to support them and on his attempts to find where he belonged in a society that was still dominated by racial and cultural categories into which he did not neatly fit.  The stories are often harrowing, though almost always also humorous, and Noah’s skills as a comedian are on fine display.  We all seemed to enjoy the book, and we marveled at the resilience of Noah and his mother and at the intelligence and creativity they employed in navigating life’s obstacles by overcoming them or by reinterpreting them to move beyond them.   

In many ways, Noah describes issues that most teenagers face: dealing with moves to new neighborhoods and schools, getting through the awkward middle school years, negotiating the social dynamics in high school, figuring out how to talk to romantic interests, and learning how to support himself as a young adult.  However, his account also explains how these childhood experiences were shaped by the unique history and character of South Africa.  We appreciated how much we were able to learn about the country through his stories.

For example, Noah details the history of language education in South Africa.  During the reign of apartheid, the government was careful to teach and preserve native languages and to educate children in the language of their tribe or cultural community.   This might at first seem like an admirable attempt at cultural preservation.  However, Noah points out that it was an essential part of the apartheid regime’s divide and conquer strategy.  If the black and colored South Africans could not understand one another, they were more likely to distrust and dislike each other and, therefore, less likely to unite against a common oppressor.   Noah’s mother recognized this, learned several languages herself, and encouraged Noah to learn even more.  Noah frequently used this ability to his advantage.  He did not look like most of the people he interacted with, but if he could talk like them, he would often be accepted.  (Noah includes dialogue in several of these languages in the text, one of the many reasons why it is worth listening to the audiobook, which he narrates.)

This ability with languages is just one of the many gifts that Noah’s mother gave her son, and, although Noah is interesting and highly entertaining, many of us found his mother, Patricia Noah, to be the most fascinating person in the book.   A woman of intense faith and conviction, her strength and sense of purpose was inspiring.  However, some of her choices left us a little puzzled.  A few of us were frustrated that she stuck with her abusive second husband, even when she and her sons (Noah has two half-brothers) were clearly in danger.  However, Noah clearly sets out the factors in South African society that made it almost impossible for his mother to get away.   More difficult to understand, therefore, is his mother’s decision to have Noah in the first place.   Noah believes his parents loved each other, but his mother was clear to his father that she wanted to sleep with him in order to have a baby, and that his role in the child’s life was purely optional.   She knew the risks and the difficulties that her child would face, and yet she intentionally conceived Noah, so that she could have someone to love that would be entirely her own.  Was Noah’s mixed-race status, therefore, a tool to ensure that his father would have only a minimal role in her son’s life?  Was it a way to keep him from being ignored by her family, in the way she had been largely ignored, while keeping him from being embraced by them fully?  Was this a selfish choice?  

I suspect the answer is that was in part selfish, but that Patricia Noah’s decision to live her life focused on her own needs and desires was an admirable way of resisting the constraints of the apartheid regime and of her traditional culture.   Her world constantly dictated what she should be and do, and she quite consciously ignored these proscriptions, avoiding the legal and social consequences when she could and stoically accepting them when she could not.  In the process, she helped to change the attitudes and expectations of the world in which she lived, and she raised a son who will help to change them even more.