Sedaris 'Chameleon And' Me Talk Pretty One Day

“We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in” (Sedaris, ch.1). The chapters Chameleon and Go Carolina from Born a Crime by Trevor Noah and Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris, respectively, demonstrate the internal battle between society and one’s sense of self. Although both Trevor Noah and David Sedaris' stories differ in social and cultural context, there are similarities in the way both authors accept themselves and discover their own identity which is expressed through an introspective tone. Although both authors’ stories have a similar theme, the social and cultural context of the stories makes them different. In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah grows up during apartheid in South Africa. He has a white father and a black mother. Because he

In Born a Crime, Trevor Noah discusses his path to self acceptance; he starts the story with depictions of how his family and town sees him as white. When he goes to school and witnesses segregation, he starts to ponder his identity. The introspective nature of his tone reveals that he is aware of the multitudes of his identity: “The world saw me as colored, but I didn't spend my life looking at myself. I spent my life looking at other people. I saw myself as the people around me, and the people around me were black” (Noah, ch.4). He finds a sense of belonging with black people that he doesn't with white people: grappling with the two sides of himself, finding that he identifies with being black more so than white. He felt he belonged when he was with black people: “With the black kids I wasn't constantly trying to be. With the black kids I just was” (Noah, ch.4). At school he didn't feel the need to prove or perform his identity when around black kids, he felt like he could just be

These two things lead Sedaris down his path of self-acceptance. Throughout the story, he finds ways to not bring out his lisp, such as using synonyms to avoid saying words with an s sound. He accepted his speech instead of trying to fix it, displaying a tone of introspection as he realizes and reaffirms who he is and wants to be: “...because none of my speech classes ever made a difference, I still prefer to use the word chump” (Sedaris, ch.1). Accepting this part of himself symbolizes not only the acceptance of his speech, but also the acceptance of his identity. The different parts of himself—being gay and struggling with a lisp—are two sides of the same coin for Sedaris as he never got his speech fixed, and by proxy didn’t let society rule the things he likes or the way he is. He never gave up his interests although they were unconventional for a southern boy: “In order to enjoy ourselves we learned to be duplicitous” (Sedaris, ch.1). Sedaris, along with the other boys, found ways to be themselves while still performing the act of a traditional southern