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Trevor NoahA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Trevor Noah is the central character and author. His memoir is not strictly chronological and often jumps between early childhood and adult memories, with the regular intervention of Noah’s contemporary authorial voice and analysis. However, the stories follow a rough chronology, beginning when Noah is five, progressing through his late childhood and teens, and ending in his early 20s.
As a child, Noah is “naughty” and a “terror” (145). He enjoys questioning authority on the basis of what he sees as sound, logical thinking. His curiosity often gets him in trouble. For instance, at age three, he burrows under the fence of his grandmother’s yard in Soweto and runs through the neighborhood. Though Noah doesn’t know it, this is extremely dangerous: If the police or an informant had seen him, they would have immediately taken him to an orphanage. In another anecdote, he shows a childhood friend how to light a fire with a sunbeam and a magnifying class, then forgets his fire-making materials in the sun, inadvertently starting a fire that burns down a white family’s home.
Noah maintains these characteristics into his teenage years, running a black-market CD-burning business that grows into a reselling business in his late teens and 20s. It means very little to Noah that his business is technically illegal. The nature of Crime in Apartheid and Post-Apartheid South Africa is such that it is simply a way of life in poor neighborhoods like his.
Noah struggles with the tension between External and Internal Perceptions of Identity. His mother, Patricia, is Xhosa and categorized as Black under apartheid, while his father, Robert, is Swiss German and categorized as white. The racial categories of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa are so complex and nonsensical that people’s perceptions of Noah’s race and identity conflict with his own. He says, “I know that I’m black and I identify as black, but I’m not a black person on the face of it” (232). He also occasionally identifies as “mixed,” which is not a recognized race in apartheid South Africa, though he meets other “mixed” people in adulthood (32).
As an author, Noah is both a humorous storyteller and a deft cultural analyst and commentator. His discussions of living as a poor person in apartheid South Africa show how economic status is embedded in every facet of the white supremacist apartheid system. Poverty is weaponized against Black people as a method of subjugation, and at the same time Black poverty is treated as evidence of a moral failing. He explains how the racist logic of his home country during the time of his upbringing and after traps people in cycles of poverty and violence that are built with the very intention of trapping them.
Patricia is the most influential person both in Noah’s life and in his memoir. The book’s dedication reads: “For my mother. My first fan. Thank you for making me a man.” Patricia helped to shape key aspects of Noah’s character. One of the most important things she does is to raise him “as if there were no limitations on where I could go or what I could do” (75). She teaches him that “the world was my oyster, that I should speak up for myself, that my ideas and thoughts and decisions mattered” (75). When Noah is an adult, he meets other “mixed” kids whose parents removed them from South Africa after they were born, thinking it impossible to raise a “mixed” child there. Patricia raises Noah without regard for those laws. Instead of giving these laws power over their lives, she finds clever “cracks in the system” (28). Noah often reiterates that it was both luck and his mother’s ingenuity that saved them.
This desire to flaunt rules that are unjust and nonsensical, which she passes down to Noah, started before he was born. Patricia left her family home in Soweto at 22 and illegally rented a flat in Johannesburg. She was “caught and arrested many times” (25) but paid the fines and continued to live as she had been. After Noah is born, she develops ingenious ways to live as a mother and son with two different skin tones.
When Noah is growing up, she sometimes goes “for the belt or switch” to discipline him (87). Noah calls this “Old Testament discipline” (255). However, she does not use corporal punishment for Noah’s two younger brothers, Andrew and Isaac. While Patricia doesn’t say so aloud, Noah believes she “had a genuine change of heart on the matter” (255). As Noah grew up, and then as she entered a relationship that turned out to be violent, Patricia came to realize that violence, even in the form of discipline, is “the cycle that just repeats itself, the damage that’s inflicted on people that they in turn inflict on others” (256). Noah, who is never violent, teaches Patricia this lesson. Though raised in a world characterized by violence, Noah learns that “relationships are not sustained by violence, but by love” (256). He takes this “progress” and the things he has learned about the cycle of violence back to Patricia “and create[s] a new world and understanding for her” (256). While Patricia shapes Noah into the man he is, he also shapes her as he grows up and becomes that man.
While stubborn and independent, Patricia is extremely giving. She gives Abel the money to buy the garage he worked for, sells her house in Eden Park to keep the garage afloat, and quits her office job to try to manage the garage’s finances. She is willing to go all in with a person to help them succeed. After a year of Abel drinking away all the money she puts in to help him, she realizes that the part of her that was independent and self-sufficient has been lost “at the mercy of someone else’s failed dream” (255). She leaves Abel and moves to Highlands North. Even after being shot in the head by Abel, she is out of the hospital in four days and back to work in seven, which is characteristic of her persevering and stubborn nature.
Robert, Noah’s father, plays a minor role in Part 1 of the memoir. When he meets Patricia, she is 24 and he is 46. They live on the same floor in an apartment building in Hillbrow, Johannesburg, where Patricia is illegally renting a flat. It is extremely dangerous for a Black person to rent in Johannesburg. Even in the integrated clubs and restaurants she goes to, there is danger of the police showing up or someone selling her out. Robert is one of the people with whom Patricia “felt safe” (26). He is a tall, Swiss German man with brown hair and brown eyes.
Robert is not allowed into the hospital when Noah is born; if Patricia were to even list him on Noah’s birth certificate, Noah would be taken away. Regardless, Robert wants to be in Noah’s life. Noah lives with Patricia, and they both “sneak around and visit my dad when we could” (28). Robert is quiet and calm. Most of his time with Noah is spent watching formula one racing in peaceful silence.
After Patricia marries Abel, Noah is unable to visit Robert due to Abel’s toxic control of him and Patricia. Robert moves to Cape Town and loses touch with Noah for 10 years. During this time, Patricia only speaks kindly of Robert, reminding Noah that Robert chose to be in his life, saying nice things about Robert’s character, and telling Noah that he has Robert’s smile.
When Noah is in his early 20s, Patricia urges him to reconnect with Robert. When he finally finds his father again, Robert reveals to him that he has been following all the career news he can find about Noah, compiling it into a scrapbook. This scrapbook symbolizes Robert’s pride in his son’s success and love for him. After seeing the scrapbook, Noah no longer doubts his father’s love for him.
Abel becomes Patricia’s boyfriend after her romantic relationship with Robert, Noah’s father, has ended. He is a minor side character until Chapter 17, when he and Patricia get married, and he becomes the main antagonist in both her and Noah’s lives.
When Abel is Patricia’s boyfriend, he and Noah do not have a familial relationship. At this time, Noah feels neutral to positive about him. Noah initially appreciates how he “wasn’t trying to be my father or even a stepfather” (125). After Abel and Patricia marry, Abel begins drinking heavily. This makes him angry and unpredictable. Noah describes how Abel would unexpectedly lash out:
I always thought of Abel as a cobra: calm, perfectly still, then explosive. There was no ranting and raving, no clenched fists. He’d be very quiet, and then out of nowhere violence would come. The eyes were my clue to stay away. His eyes were everything. They were the eyes of the devil (246).
Patricia tries multiple times to file charges against Abel for domestic abuse. The police repeatedly refuse to arrest Abel, blaming Patricia for Abel’s abuse of her. Abel is friends with the police and manipulates the patriarchal social structure to continue abusing his family. Abel is from the patriarchal Tsonga society, where women are expected to bow to men. His abuse and toxic masculinity cannot be entirely blamed on his culture. Though certain values of Tsonga society might have contributed to Abel’s belief that everyone around him owes him “respect,” the violence he carries out because of this belief is his personal responsibility.
Many people in Abel’s family disapprove of such behavior. When Abel shoots Patricia in the head and then, believing he has killed her, plans to die by suicide, his family are the ones who compel Abel to turn himself into the police. Even though Abel does turn himself in, he is only given three years’ probation because he technically had no prior convictions: Because the police never filed Patricia’s many cases against Abel for his domestic abuse, even his attempt on her life is not taken seriously by the court.
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