Born A Crime
Author: Trevor Noah
Publisher: One World
Publication Date: November 2016
It can be easy to forget that celebrities had childhoods. Beneath a public persona is, first and foremost, just another person with an accumulation of experiences that, if the icon is honest and we are attentive, we can know and understand. Noah’s stories curated from his South African childhood don’t just solidify him as more than pixels on a screen. They bring his firsthand experiences with issues such as post-apartheid racism, an unresolved feeling of estrangement, and the challenge of making your way in life from a single parent home to readers in a way that makes these elements of Noah’s origins both understandable and, in some cases, even relatable.
It may seem ironic that the writer engages in his own form of segregation, explicitly separating social and historical context from personal content rather than integrating both into a cohesive narrative. It is a gamble, but one that largely works. Noah is able to present each story simply as an account of experiences because he separately prefaces each story with a brief explanation of relevant socioeconomic circumstances. This gives him the freedom to speak relatively lightly about complex material, entertaining his readers with his presentation while providing them with the opportunity to think about the underlying content - if they choose to read and heed it.
There are limitations to this approach.
Noah both invites readers extremely close to his personal memories with each story and creates a distancing, instructional effect at the same time. Each approach interrupts the other. A storyteller ultimately is not supposed to give you the ingredients of a story. They’re supposed to give you a mixture of words and perspective, of engagement and entertainment, and even education that together make a gestalt - something more than the sum of its parts. History is part of Noah’s story. Context is part of Noah’s story. One can easily understand why a TV personality whose life focus is entertainment chose to take this a la carte approach, but the cost is a separation of context and history from the personal narrative they shape and inform. For example, you can read the two meaty paragraphs about education in post-World War II Germany and post-apartheid South Africa, or you can skip straight to the - recognizably funny Trevor Noah - chapter title “GO HITLER!” In other words, you can just order dessert and skip the vegetables. Hard to be against that, but also hard to call it a full meal.
As a writer, Noah may be better suited to scripts than memoirs, but Born A Crime is still a thoughtful glimpse through a comedic yet informed narrative into South Africa’s complicated, disappointing, but still hopeful post-apartheid reality.
- D. K. Nuray
