October 22, 2024
Last Saturday night I watched SMPA alum (and GW Recent Alumni Achievement Award winner) Zinhle Essamuah interview Trevor Noah in the Smith Center. Noah is funny and thoughtful, and of course Zinhle is great. Three themes from the conversation stood out for me that seem worth sharing.
Curiosity was a thread that ran through Noah’s answers, and that runs through his work. The importance of examining the perspective in coming to conclusions and making decisions. Asking questions of yourself and others. Wanting to know why and how things are. A few weeks ago Noah told National Public Radio’s Ayesha Rascoe, “you owe it to yourself to be curious, and you owe it to yourself to try and at least understand where other people are coming from. You don't have to agree with them, but if you understand, it makes it a little less crazy.”
The second theme is imagination. Noah has a new book called Into the Uncut Grass about a little boy who runs away into the uncut grass in the backyard because he doesn’t want to make his bed. The book “is dedicated to the imagination that lives in all of us.” Beyond the power of imagination in a child, Noah talked to Zinhle about the necessity of imagination to create a better world. Someone had to imagine democracy, civil rights, and an end to apartheid in Noah’s native South Africa. Nothing new can happen without someone imagining it first. He even shouted out Elon Musk for thinking it made sense to catch a rocket with oversized chopsticks.
The final theme was hope. We have to ask why and how things are, we have to imagine new ways of being together and new solutions to problems, and we must have the belief that we can make things better. A recent update from his foundation was titled, “Celebrating the Strength of Women and Welcoming Tomorrow with Hope” and the subtitle of his first book, Born a Crime, is “a memoir of love, hope and resistance.” Noah isn’t naive - as the son of a Black mother and white father his birth was a crime in his home country - but hope remains central to who he is. In the face of everything he has seen and lived through, he made it clear that without hope, we’ve got nothing.
Stay curious, use your imagination, and never lose hope - seems like good advice.