Trevor Noah's Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood
The first book I truly enjoyed from start to finish was Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. I felt a special connection to his story, which is why it had such a deep impact on my life.
What stuck with me is the lesson that it doesn’t matter what I’ve been through, only how I choose to remember it and how I let those events shape my life. Trevor takes his own history and uses it to fuel this incredibly creative, comedic side. It’s not that he's unaware of the trauma, but he just chose not to let those situations hinder him from anything. He’s so adaptable to so many different rooms and spaces, kind of like water. He reminds me of myself in that aspect…I also have a gallant time learning and absorbing information, figuring out how I can fit into a space, or even outside of it, without causing chaos. Trevor was in so many different spaces and places that he just absorbed all this information, and he's so good at it: the accents, the languages, the whole thing.
In his book, he spoke about apartheid, a system of institutionalized racial segregation and discrimination enforced in South Africa from 1948 until the early 1990s. The Apartheid officially ended in 1994 with the country's first multiracial democratic elections. As a “Colored” person in South Africa, a term used to describe people of mixed-race ancestry, Trevor was born to a Swiss-German father and a Xhosa mother. Being mixed-race was a crime, and his parents' relationship had to be kept a secret. I was and still am fascinated by the Xhosa language, a click language spoken by Noah's mother and her people. Trevor never really uses heavy words like trauma to describe his past and the events that shaped him. Instead, he focuses more on humor to dilute the harsh reality or to make the reader understand exactly how he viewed the situation.
I remember telling someone that there were times I had to go to sleep as a child, with nothing to eat. As a kid at that time, you're just using your imagination, imagining sugar water was fruit juice and butter dumplings were an actual five-course meal. That was the reality. When I share a piece of my childhood with people, it’s like a sob story, but I don't want sympathy. I want people to understand and see it as I saw it. Trevor did a great job with this book because it helps the reader not focus too much on the actual event, but instead, brings the reader into his humorous, resilient mind. And that to me is ART.
His relationship with his father wasn't easy due to apartheid, and his dad had to see him in secret. Oppressive regimes and systemic oppression have been something I keep coming back to. While understanding that my own core wound is abandonment, I wondered why. I thought to myself, "I have both parents; why is this feeling so heavy?" During slavery, Black families were ripped apart. Children were separated and sold away from their parents. Because of this, Black families learned early on that to love something is to risk hurting, so they developed a deep fear of getting close. Imagine falling deeply in love, knowing that the person you love can be taken away from you at any moment, like they were nothing. Imagine being put on Earth to form human connections and fearing the very thing our bodies crave. That fear is heavy. Now imagine having a child and, all your life, you've lived in fear. You teach that child to live in fear, passing that trauma down, and so on
The truth is, it wasn’t my pain I was carrying; it was something handed down through generations. It made me think back to this book, and I remember reading about his mom being a single mom and how Trevor was that very rebellious, explorative child, which caused his mom lots of headaches. But she was such a noble and wise woman, and very strong. She was even shot in the head by Trevor’s abusive stepfather, and even that didn’t stop her drive and willingness to overcome. Patricia, his mom, mentions something called "The Black Tax," which was about oppressive regimes and systemic oppression, and how Black people had to work twice as hard just to be at zero. ZERO!. She taught him the importance of being like water, as we talked about earlier. She taught him multiple languages so he could be free and also have power in the world. She taught him the importance of dreaming.
Once I looked back at my parents, I saw that it was their trauma, not mine. I didn’t want to question "why" anymore because I had my answer, and the truth is, the answer didn't matter. Because the action still stays the same: move on and find yourself.
Though I didn’t have a “Patricia” in my life, I had my own versions. Growing up, I learned to cater to their needs and do what I believed they needed from me, so I could not have chaos. But that’s my skill, and I could look at it as something bad, or I could look at it as a creative tool.
A lot of things end with me. “Abandonment is absence without communication.” It perfectly describes the lasting impact of generational trauma and the silent wounds we carry. Trevor Noah’s book has taught me the importance of dreaming and believing, and not dwelling on the past, and understanding that it happened, now let’s move on.
