It is my professional duty to make myself vulnerable to the lives of others. It is also my duty to discern fact from fiction, writes Gabriel Crouse.
Imagine if you haven’t seen Trevor Noah’s most impressive interview to date, the scene. Noah sits opposite his chosen nemesis, the 24-year-old alt-right provocateur, Tomi Lahren. She is direct and energetic. He is cool, slick and funny.
But he weirdly struggles to make eye contact. As they debate the Black Lives Matter movement Lahren brings up the murder of five police officers in her home town of Dallas, Texas, by a self-avowed hater of white people. How would you respond?
Jon Stewart, the man who made The Daily Show one of the most important liberal media institutions in the US, would, this critic submits, have taken pause.
He would have acknowledged that those police officers did not deserve to die, nor did the nine wounded officers deserve to get hurt. After recognising their sacrifice he would probably object to the claim that the murderer should be considered representative of a movement that challenges real and visible terror that African Americans have suffered and continue to suffer.
But not so for Noah. His eye is not on real lives (and deaths) and true stories but somewhere up to the left on a political scoreboard.
This is the point I was trying to make in my review of Noah’s Born a Crime. Keeping both eyes fixed on the political scoreboard leaves no room for real human connection.
When Shannon Ebrahim slammed my review of his book for being “shallow” and producing a sense of “repulsion” she was playing the same game as Noah.
Full credit must go to Ebrahim for extensively reporting the often overlooked religious element of Noah’s story. Not only is Noah’s mother fervently religious, she experienced a “miracle”.
She was shot by Noah’s stepfather and the bullet that went through her head slipped by every vital part. She thanks her son, in the name of God, for saving her life and footing the hospital bill. The rest of Ebrahim’s rejoinder is a litany of ag shame stories that detail how tough Noah’s childhood was all to support the conclusion that his mother’s hard work, his talent, and God’s grace place him beyond reproach.
But my unfashionable review drew attention to the half-truths and omissions that Noah relies upon to contrast his current success with previous repression. Apartheid was terrible; on this we agree.
The distressing revelation of Born a Crime is that apartheid just was not quite terrible enough to suit Noah’s purposes so he gilds the lily or, rather, tars the toilet.
Hot tar sticks and Noah has been blaming apartheid for the separation of his parents in stand-up skits for years, and he does so again in this book, portraying his childhood as a nightmare not very different from that of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who had to stay hidden from Nazis and produced a haunting (now famous) diary.
Really? By the time Noah was born (1982) the mad scientists of apartheid had largely stopped enforcing the relevant laws against miscegenation, and those laws were scrapped when Noah was two. Beyond that point, especially in Hillbrow and Yeoville, nobody except racist crackpots worried about mixed couples.
Noah’s failure to acknowledge this simultaneously panders to ignorant Americans and obscures a deeper hurt. It is immensely difficult for anyone to accept that their parents’ love was not enough to keep the family together.
To see this in Noah’s book is not to be “exceedingly critical”, as Ebrahim claims, it is to be empathetic to a real man with real parents and real pain
I read Born a Crime several times and whenever I reached the point where Noah scapegoats apartheid for the absence of his father I felt the hurt called pathos. Noah yearns to keep his parents on a pedestal: that is moving. It is my professional duty to make myself vulnerable to the lives of others. It is also my duty to discern fact from fiction, a skill Noah lacks in his self-assessment and his world view.
Regarding the latter consider a contemporary example. When Noah is arrested in democratic South Africa while stealing his step-father’s car he claims to be a victim of racial profiling.
This is exactly the sort of detail Americans take at face value because they imagine that our cops are white and picking yet again on an innocent black man. Really?
I think of the metro police as a South African force, created by the ANC in the freedom era to keep us all below the speed limit and off the curb. When our traffic cops deviate from the law it is stereotypically to chase the (race-blind) profit motive afforded by bribes.
Our problems and America’s problems are not always the same. Having lived in Canada and South Africa, Ebrahim would have understood exactly whose buttons Noah was pushing, and why.
Ebrahim might also be positioned to wonder about Noah’s extraordinary portrayal of himself as the only comedian in South Africa. Last time I checked we had one of the world’s extraordinary comedic traditions, but I covered that ground in my review.
Then again, maybe it is worth clarifying the position, especially since South African readers might start to wonder what all the fuss is about. Here, to conclude my contribution to this debate, is a detailed account of Noah’s sense of humour failure.
One week into his move to New York Noah was interviewed by Jimmy Fallon, and the first real question was the ultimate set-up: “South Africa. I really wanna get to know you, I wanna ask you a lot of questions about this. Was there a big stand-up scene in South Africa?” Sweet naive Jimmy, so keen to pay his respects to a culture he does not know, so eager for Noah to give a shout-out to his home boys.
But Noah answers thus, “No. Because there wasn’t a big freedom scene. (laughs)... It sort of limits you. There was no stand-up scene to be honest."
That is a steaming pile of crud, and sweet Jimmy cannot tell the difference between what goes in and what comes out so he laughs with glee.
Around the same time Jerry Seinfeld, whose extensive interviews with comedians almost always include historical summaries of the stand-up genre, is not so easily fooled: “So in South Africa comedy was illegal 21 years ago...what are you talking about? It was illegal to stand up on a stage and tell a joke?” Seinfeld’s incredulity sets Noah off in his favourite mode, the black South African who is going to patiently explain to a silly white man how things really are.
Noah: “Free speech was against the law, so let’s start there. So if you were to get up and say anything that could be construed as saying something about what’s happening around you, and this was open to interpretation by the government or the police, you could then be locked up for inciting the people.
“They believed that what you were doing was conspiring to overthrow the government.”
This critic’s reminders of South Africa’s great struggle tradition in comedy might not impress the few South Africans (like Noah) who don’t know what names like Athol Fugard, Winston Ntshona, John Kani and Evita Bezuidenhout mean.
Nelson Mandela was released in 1990, before Noah hit Grade 1, and in his first speech he said two things no one should forget: “Today the majority of South Africans, black and white, recognise that apartheid has no future”. And for anyone who thinks Madiba was pandering to white interests the most famous line: “The factors which necessitated the armed struggle still exist today.”
Right there, in front of the world Madiba called for the overthrow of the government and sanctioned violent means to do so. And that was him walking out of jail, not into it, four years before Noah said South Africans could possibly tell a joke in public.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.