Identity, Belonging, and Community Theme Analysis

Noah’s existence is not only outlawed by the apartheid system; the system also fails to neatly categorize him as black or white, and so his existence as a biracial man reveals the underlying flaws in the system’s conception of race. Nevertheless, he still has to cope with apartheid dividing the world—and people continuing after apartheid to divide themselves—based on race. He is frequently forced to choose a racial group even though that he knows that inequality and oppression thrive precisely by sustaining such animosity. And yet he also recognizes his unique potential to define his own identity by bridging different groups, as well as to show those groups their common interests. Throughout the course of his memoir, Noah manages to find a sense of belonging in the world without clinging to any particular group or identity label.

Under apartheid, identity is defined according to race. But this makes little sense for Noah, who knows that his existence as a mixed-race South African proves the system’s illogical foundations. Noah argues that interracial relationships challenge the very foundation of apartheid’s racism because, quite simply, they show that people want to be together despite racial difference, not only ever because of racial similarity. This, in turn, is why interracial sex is illegal. Judging by skin color alone, Noah is classified as “colored,” a group that falls between black and white in terms of rights and social status. Yet, practically speaking, this makes no sense: colored people are a specific, closed community, largely in Western South Africa, descended from centuries-old mixed marriages and most closely connected to white Afrikaner culture. Even though Noah is not part of this colored community, the apartheid system would have him live, work, and make a family exclusively with other colored people just because of his skin color, which shows how divorced apartheid’s racist thinking is from the reality of how people define their identities. Luckily, Noah and his mother, Patricia, manage to escape detection, but he still repeatedly has to be hidden as a child: he cannot meet his father, Robert, or walk with his mother in public (she often pretends to be his nanny or maid). He cannot play on the streets with his cousins in Soweto, lest he be kidnapped by the government and moved to a colored settlement.

Because race is (for the most part) the dominant basis for identity in South Africa, Noah often feels forced to “pick a side” and choose part of his identity at the expense of the rest. Although he first attends an integrated Catholic school called Maryvale College, after the sixth grade his schools are always divided on the basis of race, and he is consistently unsure how to position himself—he is not particularly white, black, or colored, and he is certainly not Indian. At his first school, he grows close to the other black students and decides to leave his advanced classes to be with them. Similarly, he feels most at home in black neighborhoods (Soweto and Alexandra) and hates the white suburbs, where everyone else lives behind a huge wall. And he particularly feels ostracized by colored kids, who bully him constantly in Eden Park and show him why “it is easier to be an insider as an outsider than to be an outsider as an insider.” However, when he briefly ends up in jail and goes to the cell under the courthouse for his bail trial, again Noah has to pick a group of inmates to hang out with based on race, and the choice is not obvious: he has been playing the part of the colored gangster but wants neither to reveal the part he is playing to the actual colored gangsters nor invoke their wrath by hanging out with the black men. So he goes and talks with the white men.

Noah’s ability to pick various sides in various situations paves the way to the solution to his sense of alienation: he learns to bridge different communities and show that belonging can depend on identities people choose and build themselves, rather than ones imposed on them by the circumstances of birth or color. The first chapter focuses on the three churches that Noah’s mother takes him to every Sunday: an integrated church, a black church, and a white church. This represents the family’s ability to create community on their own terms (rather than only on the basis of race), but also Patricia’s fearlessness in the face of racism during the last years of apartheid. Noah uses business to remain at once an insider and outsider to everyone. By reselling food from the busy cafeteria line in high school, he manages to get along with everyone without needing to truly join one racial group at the expense of the rest. And during his year selling goods on the street in Alexandra, he again uses the social distance of business transactions to build connections with a wide variety of people in the neighborhood. But, throughout his childhood, Noah’s main technique for bridging different identities is learning various South African languages, which allows him to communicate with most of the people he meets and signal that he is part of (or at least respects and understands) their group. This gets him out of potentially violent situations numerous times and makes him a marvel (and arguably the most popular kid) on the first day of sixth grade during recess.

Ultimately, because he recognizes that violent systems like apartheid thrive by making oppressed people focus on their differences rather than common interests, Noah simply refuses to define himself negatively by confining himself to one group and instead defines himself positively, by opening himself to various people, languages, and experiences. This is not only a tool for him to survive in a divided world where he does not neatly fit in any box, but also a means to heal the world by coaxing people out of their boxed-in communities and into a broader mindset of shared humanity.