Born a crime, Trevor Noah

I was recommended this book a few years ago by Javier Ruescas, a booktuber (among others) who really made me want to read it because of its story. And indeed, written by Trevor Noah, a famous comedian, this book relates not only his personal life, but also everything that happened in South Africa during and after apartheid.

Spanish version

Full of historic information about apartheid, the so-called "bloodless revolution" and the war between the tribes Xhosa and Zulu, through the explanation of what he felt at some moments, Noah makes us get closer to what it must have been for South Africans.

As he explains it in the third chapter, Trevor Noah was a mixed child, the son of a black mother and a white father. By then one of the worst crimes you could commit was to have a relationship with a person of another race. He explains the categorization of people into different groups during apartheid, depending on their skin color -not only black or white, but many more. You could get up to five years prison if you broke the racial law, above all if you were dark-skinned. This is one of the reasons why he was raised in a house (and hence a world) run by women. People were also relocated depending on their "race". 

Also sentimental at some points, it gives you for example goosebumps when on page 9, Trevor explains the reason why he hates second hand cars, which is related to his mother's "attempt of murder" by his stepfather, or when he talks about "his affairs of the heart", where he mixes emotion and sarcasm, as well as jokes about himself. Full of funny details and sarcasm, the author talks about the realities in such a humorous way that one cannot help smiling despite the sometimes difficult facts described.

I am going to separate the fragments in different parts with some excerpts that called my attention (many more did it but I don't want to spoil everything):

Trevor Noah's mother, family and "the hood"

The author introduces his mom as a rebel and he explains how she found a way to live in a neighborhood prohibited to black people, how difficult it also was to know who to trust and who could report you to the police. Throughout the book, he doesn't stop making fun of his mother's belief in God and Jesus, and how he always tried to make her see how irrational she sometimes was.

Incredibly touching, he tells the story of his dog Fufi, when he says "you don't own the thing that you love" and at a point when he writes "being chosen is the greatest gift you can give to another human being"

"Relationships are built in the silence. You spend time with people, you observe them and interact with them, and you come to know them".

Another of the moments when he makes you have your heart in your mouth is when he describes how thin the line between being civilian and criminal is, as, according to his words, "crime doesn't discriminate in "the hood"".

Trevor went to jail, and he explains the way most black people, his mother included,  educate their children, sometimes telling the police to lock them up, to teach them a lesson before the system does. At that point, he was more worried to get in trouble with his mother than with the law and called a cousin to try not to make his mother realize what had happened to him. 

His mother wanted to talk to anyone as equals, even men. She got married to Abel who wanted to stop her being free and wanted a subservient. On the basis of lack of respect, he began to hit her.

She went to the police station to lay a charge against Abel but police officers didn't receive it and kept on the man's side. When he was 11, his mother had sold the house to put all the money in the "family business": a garage run by Abel where Trevor also had to work and where all the family lived. Trevor slept in cars and, because of all the circumstances, he began to fall down at school for not doing his homework. Anyway, even if all the family was working in the business, they kept on losing money to the point that they had to eat worms.

As Noah describes him, Abel was a nice guy with a drinking problem: apart from drinking the money, when he was drunk, he hit his mother and Trevor. 

They lived in a world of abuse "where you can love a person you hate and hate a person you love". Abel bought a gun, police continued coming after the fights but no charges were filed.

Fed up with the situation and not understanding his mother, Trevor decided to move to a flat after his mother got pregnant again. He even stopped visiting and calling her.

Later on, Trevor began as a comedian and touring countries when his mother decided to leave Abel. One day, his brother called to tell him (after asking him how he was and if he was busy) that his mother had been shot in the leg and then in the head. Once in the hospital, Andrew, his youngest brother, said how his father was going to kill everyone, even his sons, and told him all what had happened in detail.

Doctor said it was a miracle that she could survive and the bullet hadn't touched any vital organ nor major vein.

Looking back, the author expresses how difficult life had been for his mother and how giving she was, even as a child herself, how she taught him to think: she always said "learn from your past and be better because of your past, but don't cry about your past. Life is full of pain. Let the pain sharpen you, but don't hold on to it. Don't be bitter"

About the languages

Trevor was bullied because of his skin color and education. Therefore he had to be a chameleon, to navigate between groups and he managed to do it thanks to languages. "Life will force you to pick a side", he says, but he didn't want to.

There are some quotes I've fallen in love with:

"South Africa has many different languages: 11 official but dozens more, what makes people getting lost".

"Language brings with it an identity and a culture [...]. A shared language says "we're the same". A language barrier says "we're different""

"Language, even more than color, defines who you are to people"

There's also a quote by Nelson Mandela that appears in the book: "if you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart"

About racism, skin colors and ignorance

A statement that has particularly called my attention about Trevor (and most kids)'s innocence concerning skin color is definitely this one: "[...]in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate".

Trevor explains how, at a time, colored people were could "get promoted" to white: people submitted application to the government, but people could also be demoted to "lower" categories or races.

It is also really funny when he relates how cameras at school couldn't feature his color and picked the white color for him. For that reason people, who had constructed their concept of race, didn't recognize him. He says it was like when he was creating his character, he traded all his intelligence points for beauty points

At a point, he talks about people in South Africa calling their dogs and kids after Hitler and other European names and the analogy with other dictators and murderers. With some of his friends, one of them called Hitler, they had some issues with Jews and other white people who felt offended, without black and colored people knowing  the reason.

About regrets

"I don't regret anything I've ever done in life, any choice that I've made. But I'm consumed with regret for the things I didn't do, the choices I didn't make, the things I didn't say. We spend so much time being afraid of failure, afraid of rejection. But regret is the thing we should fear most. Failure is an answer. Rejection is an answer. Regret is an eternal question you will never have the answer to."

A few sarcastic quotes

"[...] how christianity works: if you are a Native American and you pray to the wolves, you are a savage. If you are African and you pray to your ancestors, you are a primitive. But when white people pray to a guy who turns water into wine, that's just common sense".

"I was the champion of the Maryvale sports day every single year, and my mother won the mom's trophy every single year. Why? Because she was always chasing me to kick my ass, and I was always running not to get my ass kicked."

I'm sorry if you've found this review a bit long but this is really an amazing book that I recommend to everyone. It's easy to read and filled with funny moments that will surely make your day while you'll learn and discover more about South Africa, from the point of view of someone who's lived the facts in his own flesh.

https://www.trevornoah.com
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