Born a Crime (Trevor Noah)

Born a Crime
Trevor Noah
Spiegel and Grau
Nonfiction, Humor/Memoir
***** (Great)

DESCRIPTION: In America, comedian Trevor Noah may be best known as the hand-picked replacement for The Daily Show's Jon Stewart. Long before that, he was a native of South Africa where he was, quite literally, born a crime: apartheid laws forbade relations between races, laws which his black mother and white father willfully flouted. Noah relates stories of his childhood and young adulthood, stories featuring his force-of-nature mother, his secretive father, numerous brushes with the law, and the stepfather who would one day put a bullet through his mother's head.

REVIEW: At my job in the library shipping center, seeing books pass from branch to branch as patron requests demand, I see many celebrity autobiographies come and go. Most only see a flurry of activity, then sink into obscurity. Some, however, see sustained circulation, such as this one. So I figured it was probably worth a read, myself, even though I don't watch much of Trevor Noah or The Daily Show. (Scheduling conflicts, mostly - plus an overall sense of despair at how little in the nation actually changes, or rather how much progress has actively backslid, since Stewart's days tilting against the Bush regime. But, I digress...)
Reading this, it's clear why Noah was selected to succeed Jon Stewart. He writes with clarity and humor and emotion, making for an entertaining and enlightening journey through his formative years, with personal experiences punctuated by notes on the greater backdrop of 1980's and 1990's South Africa. The system of apartheid was founded on studies of worldwide racism, a cold and calculated effort to pit the majority nonwhites of the nation against each other to protect the superiority of the minority white population. As an American (and a white American at that), I've known that racism exists and apartheid was a terrible thing, but Noah's pre-chapter asides, and numerous instances in his life, spell out just what the practice really meant (and what the legacy still means) to those living it, the arbitrary illogic of racism granted the full force of law and sustained only by deliberately-fomented fear of the Other along largely artificial dividing lines. It is chilling, to say the least... all the moreso as one sees similar ideas once more gaining favor in nations that should really know better by now (or, at least, one would hope they know better, but lust for power over the masses is unfortunately as timeless and universal a human trait as rejection of facts.) Noah does not oversimplify or glorify his youth; he was a hell-raiser at times, and bent more than a few laws in his day. Tales involve the role of various churches in his life, first attempts (and failures) at romance, how language can bridge barriers created by skin color, efforts to connect with his white father, and his sometimes-tempestuous relationship with his fiercely independent and devout mother, a relationship complicated when she meets up with a traditional and abusive man. It's an interesting look at an interesting life, one with high points and low points, lessons learned and lessons relearned, relationships forged and broken and sometimes reforged, but ultimately suffused with a refusal to give up or back down or accept boundaries.

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