Born A Crime

This Book by Trevor Noah was nice, It was good. What!!!! There is no way I am using these low-in-power adjectives to describe this awesome, incredible, humourous, insightful, and eruditely written book. This is not an exaggeration of any sort, I mean all the words I just poured out on this book. No capping!

This memoir by Noah has a way of not boring you but keeping you flipping through pages unsatiated, you just want to know what happened next.

Born A Crime as the title implies, is a recount of his sad life during the period of the apartheid and how he sadly survived with the help of his super mom. A lot of segregation and racial disparity were the most activity between whites and blacks and even among different tribes.  

I had only witnessed the ill-treatment that the citizens of South Africa went through before independence in the movie "Sarafina" It was very vivid and traumatising, Noah on the other hand brought the whole thing to life in a very captivating manner. He was born a crime, Whites should have nothing to do with Blacks especially when it comes to relationships and procreation, but the mother, so daring, so witty, and very aware of the consequences went in to have a white child with a white man, exposing this poor child to those harsh treatments. But will you blame her?

One would hereby say that Trevor's mother knew exactly what she was doing, she wanted to mock the system, she wanted to let them know that in between this chaos, she could do whatever she wanted to do and it will succeed. There were times that she was scared of what the system will do if they found out, especially the whites, that she was with a white child, she'd be questioned and even separated from his beloved, so to shield this, she will pretend to be a nanny to her own child.

Imagine being lectured about the apartheid era but in a humorous way, that is exactly how he presented this amazing piece of art. Of course, it was not all comedy throughout, but he had a way of lessening the intensity of the trauma he went through as a child born between two worlds that he did not fit in.

He wrote the book in 18 different chapters with each chapter showing how badly he was affected by being born black and White, he did not only show the bad effect, he knew he had learned a lot from this and that it had made him who he is today. He recounts his childhood, teenage years, and adult life in 18 captivating ways, and in all these chapters, he believed, through his mother that, the system was just a senseless rotten thing that will decay with time. He did not understand why some of the locals even fought among themselves.

He chronicles his time in cells and how he later realised that all those there were good-hearted young men arrested for petty crimes. His period with gangsters and how life was in the hood.

All in all, Noah's relationship with his mother was well admired and acknowledged, the mother was strong and smart and as a result, Noah survived and was able to outwit some bullies. He acknowledged the fact that his mother's only friend was him and he knew how his mother loved him, this assurance from a mother alone can melt mountains, their bond was so strong that the system could not even break them or separate them.

Even though Noah always questioned his mother's faith in Jesus, that faith kept the mother going, like in the last chapter of the book "My Mother's Life"  his mother, after healing from the gun wounds told Noah that she prayed to Jesus and that was why the gun misfired a number of times. Noah testified by himself that he still did not understand how Abel misfired the gunshots, the gun worked perfectly, but what exactly happened? That was a whole mystery.

Some of my favourite quotes from the book include the following:

It’s a powerful experience, shitting. There’s something magical about it, profound even. I think God made humans shit in the way we do because it brings us back down to earth and gives us humility. I don’t care who you are, we all shit the same. Beyoncé shits. The pope shits. The Queen of England shits. When we shit we forget our airs and our graces, we forget how famous or how rich we are. All that goes away.

My mother used to say the way to a man's heart is through his stomach. Lovely woman. Useless surgeon.

“Hey! Why are you hanging out with the blacks?”“Because I am black.”“No, you’re not. You’re colored.”“Ah, yes. I know it looks that way, friend, but let me explain. It’sa funny story, actually. My father is white and my mother is blackand race is a social construct, so...”That wasn’t going to work. Not here.

"In any society built on institutionalized racism, race mixing doesn't merely challenge the system as unjust, it reveals the system as unsustainable and incoherent. Race mixing proves that races can mix – and in a lot of cases, want to mix. Because a mixed person embodies that rebuke to the logic of the system, race mixing becomes a crime worse than treason."