Confronting Apartheid’s Revenants: Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime and/as Traumedy

Abstract

This article explores the relationship between trauma and comedy as represented in Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood. Drawing on Nira Yuval-Davis’s conceptualization of belonging and Jacques Derrida’s notions of hauntology and the revenant, I consider the attention Born a Crime gives to history, experience, and the memory of pre- and post-1994 South Africa. Specifically, I examine the ways in which Noah’s memoir comments on and contributes to a narrative of pain, identity, belonging, and racialized politics. I also argue that as Noah uses his personal and subjective experiences to critique the ideology of apartheid, he opens the dialogue for South Africans to interrogate their past in order for them to know how to deal with their psychosocial present.

Keywords:

• Trevor Noah
• traumedy
• belonging
• revenant
• racialized politics
• apartheid

Disclosure Statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Notes

1 The nature of Trevor Noah’s identity remains unclear in the narrative context of Born a Crime and, indeed, in contemporary South African politics. As Mohamed Adhikari has perceptively pointed out about fragile identities in South Africa, Noah was “not white enough, not black enough,” meaning he had a mixed identity since he was born of a black South African mother and a White Swiss/German father. This ambivalence is clearly at the centre of Born a Crime where Noah is perceived by others (including apartheid’s arbitrary categories) as “coloured” (a troubling, if not disconcerting and discomfiting identity) even though he could not easily “cross the colour(ed) line,” as Heidi Grunebaum and Steven Robins would put it. In Born a Crime, Noah quite explicitly identifies himself as “mixed” (22) and “mixed but not colored” (120).

2 Salsabel Almanssori, “Teaching Middle School Students About Structural Racism with Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime,” 64.

3 David Morris, The Culture of Pain, 85.

4 James Blignaut, “Fixing the Pain of Apartheid and Healing South Africa Is Everyone’s Business.”

5 Annie Gagiano, “Complicating Apartheid Resistance Histories by Means of South African Autobiographies,” 668.

6 Phillipe Lejeune, On Autobiography, 4.

7 Hala Kamal, “Trends in Autobiography Theory and Writing,” 186.

8 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, 198.

9 Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson, Reading Autobiography, 198.

10 Annie Gagiano, “Complicating Apartheid Resistance” 668.

11 Annie Gagiano, “Complicating Apartheid Resistance” 668.

12 Richard Menary, “Embodied Narratives,” 63.

13 Stanton Wortham, Narratives in Action, xi.

14 Richard Menary, “Embodied Narratives,” 78.

15 Mitchel Foucault, Abnormal, 57.

16 I return to this concept in the analysis section of this essay.

17 This is possible because, as readers, we can temporarily disengage ourselves from the traumatic realities that the author bears witness to, as we only encounter them in written form. There is, therefore, what Henri Bergson calls “a momentary anaesthesia of the heart” (3) on the part of the reader, who is consequently freed to laugh at the comedic rendition of pain.

18 Mairi Emma Neeves, “Apartheid Haunts,” 112

19 Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 11.

20 Michelle Balaev, “Trauma Studies,” 360.

21 Caruth, Unclaimed Experience, 62.

22 Balaev, “Trauma Studies,” 363.

23 Névine El Nossery and Amy L. Hubbell. “Introduction,” 1.

24 Mimi Hayes, “Traumedy.”

25 Of course, part of the memoir takes place post-apartheid, so what we get in Born a Crime is the author’s reflection of his life both as a child born during the apartheid era and as a teenage boy growing up in post-1994 South Africa when the ideology of apartheid was still alive and deeply affected the social lives of Black and Coloured identities.

26 Nichole Force, Humor’s Hidden Power, 3.

27 Force, Humor’s Hidden Power, 1.

28 Force, Humor’s Hidden Power, 1.

29 Force, Humor’s Hidden Power, 4.

30 It is very easy to essentialize racial and ethnic identities in South Africa, as if the only ones that exist are Blacks and Whites. This Black-White reductionism misrepresents the demography of South Africa, which comprises Blacks, Coloureds, Whites, and South Africans of Asian extraction.

31 See, for example, Mohamed Adhikari, Not White Enough, Not Black Enough: Racial Identity in the South African Community (Athens/Cape Town: Ohio University Press, 2005) and Salsabel Almanssori, “Teaching Middle School Students About Structural Racism with Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime,” 64.

32 Trevor Noah, Born a Crime, 34.

33 Noah, Born a Crime, 26.

34 Noah, Born a Crime, 32.

35 Olivia Toywa, “Narrating the Self in Apartheid Through Humour in Noah’s Born a Crime,” 22.

36 Toywa, “Narrating the Self in Apartheid Through Humour in Noah’s Born a Crime,” 22.

37 Noah, Born a Crime, 32.

38 Noah, Born a Crime, 36.

39 Noah, Born a Crime,163.

40 Noah, Born a Crime, 137.

41 Noah, Born a Crime, 141.

42 Noah, Born a Crime, 65.

43 Noah, Born a Crime, 66.

44 Noah, Born a Crime, 67.

45 Dan Berger, “We Are the Revolutionaries,” 13.

46 Berger, “We Are the Revolutionaries,” xiv.

47 Berger, “We Are the Revolutionaries,” 10.

48 Dina Ligaga, Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media, 143.

49 Ligaga, Women, Visibility and Morality in Kenyan Popular Media, 12.

50 Zygmunt Bauman, Postmodernity and Its Discontents, 25.

51 Nira Yuval-Davis, “Borders, Boundaries and the Politics of Belonging,” 216.

52 Noah, Born a Crime, 163.

53 Noah, Born a Crime, 162.

54 Noah, Born a Crime, 163–64.

55 Noah, Born a Crime, 160.

56 Noah, Born a Crime, 160–61.

57 Noah, Born a Crime, 160.

58 Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” 199.

59 Yuval-Davis, “Belonging and the Politics of Belonging,” 199.

60 Noah, Born a Crime, 141.

61 Noah, Born a Crime, 138.

62 Noah, Born a Crime, 139.

63 Temitayo, “Transgressive Space and Body,” 68.

64 Noah, Born a Crime, 137–38.

65 Noah, Born a Crime, 142.

66 Zimitri Erasmus, “Introduction,” 13; original emphases.

67 Noah, Born a Crime, 62–63.

68 Some of these memoirs include John Fredericks’ Skollie, Malebo Sephodi’s Miss Behave, Lesley Smailes’ Cult Sister, Lindiwe Hani and Melinda Ferguson’s Being Chris Hani’s Daughter, Grizelda Grootboom’s Exit, Clinton Chauke’s Born in Chains, Malaika wa Azania’s Memoirs of a Born Free, Bonang Matheba’s From A to B, Vanessa Govender’s Beaten but not Broken, Helena Kriel’s The Year of Facing Fire, and Ilana Gerschlowitz’s Saving My Sons.

69 Noah, Born a Crime, 63.

70 Zeus Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy,” 138.

71 Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy,” 137.

72 Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy,” 138.

73 Noah, Born a Crime, 64.

74 Leonardo, “The Color of Supremacy,” 137.

75 Adeyelure Temitayo, “Transgressive Space and Body in Chimamanda Adichie’s Americanah and Trevor Noah’s Born a Crime,” 68.

76 Derek Hook, (Post)apartheid Conditions, 5.

77 Hook, (Post)apartheid Conditions, 6.

78 Noah, Born a Crime, 33.

79 Noah, Born a Crime, 122.

80 Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx, 97.

81 Noah, Born a Crime, 69.

82 Alice Hackney, “Roscoe Burnems’ Traumedy Brings Uplifting Humour to Difficult Subjects.”

83 Noah, Born a Crime, 161.

84 Temitayo, “Transgressive Space and Body,” 68.

85 Clifford Robson, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, 63.

86 Noah, Born a Crime, 130.

87 Noah, Born a Crime, 36.

88 Noah, Born a Crime, 37. This is, obviously, not funny since Noah is talking about real loneliness. It does, however, advance the trauma of isolation that apartheid’s arbitrary policies created in Black and mixed-race/colored identities.

89 Temitayo, “Transgressive Space and Body,” 67.

90 Temitayo, “Transgressive Space and Body,” 68.

91 Noah, Born a Crime, 36–7.

92 Kim M. Reynolds, “Laughing Pains.”

93 Quoted in “How Race Jokes Are Helping the Healing Process in Post-Apartheid South Africa.”

94 Caruth, “Trauma and Experience,” 5.

95 Neeves, “Apartheid Haunts,” 125.