Cockroach

"Rawi Hage’s Cockroach , a novel about today’s times. It’s about an immigrant from an unnamed Middle Eastern country who comes to Montreal and lives the life of a cockroach – which means he’s a little thief, endlessly hungry, and he’s searching for food other people are throwing out. He’s capable of getting into other people’s houses and stealing some objects just so that he can get a little bit of an entry into normal life, and he’s also lonely, loveless and an absolute outcast, almost like a non-human being. So it’s a very typical portrayal of the new types of immigrants who live absolutely on the edge of society. It’s gripping because it has a parallel story of the trauma that happened to the main character in his homeland. The main character seems to be on the verge of falling into some psychosis. Sometimes you’re not sure how seriously he perceives himself as a cockroach, so you have a little bit of a Kafka story in it. At the start of the novel we learn that he tried to commit suicide and failed, and the Canadian government imposed psychoanalytic treatment on him. In this therapy he is also forced to tell the story of his life which to a point he does, but also he tries to manipulate the analyst in a way by, as a cockroach, coming into her house and stealing some objects from it – he wants to be in charge. I found it incredibly painful to read because it opened the questions of what happens to people who have been living in incredibly traumatic environments, where from generation to generation violence, losses, humiliations have been a mode of life, especially if we look at Middle Eastern cultures. This must radically change you. The book also opens up our enormous, unaddressed problem in the west with people from the third world. It’s a lack of understanding for the traumas, and a real problem of integration. I felt it especially after that sad statement of Angela Merkel’s that multiculturalism doesn’t work, which was in the papers in Slovenia on the same day as a story about a Bosnian immigrant – so, a ‘cockroach’ – building a bridge for the dominant population for half a million euros of his own money. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter Multiculturalism is definitely a reality, and we do have to find a way of living together. My fear is that once you start uttering things like Merkel’s you open the doors to violence and aggression. Aggression always needs theory. We cannot easily be racialists or nationalists unless we have theory – we need to justify aggression to ourselves, not only to others. It’s a depressing book, but well written. I think all these books really depict the reality of post-industrial society beyond the glorified happiness, and that’s why I chose them. Yes, absolutely. The positive thing is that you stop being obsessed with an ideal of happiness and just find an enjoyment in ‘ordinary misery’ as Freud would say. All these books take away this ideology of happiness, choice, endless possibilities, power of the individuals. They perceive that yes, people have power to a point, they have the possibility to make choices, but they don’t have super powers to create an ideal life. We live in very speedy times, and we are pushing ourselves to speed our lives up even more. All these books in some way give us time to reflect, and perceive us to be a little more humble than we are."