The internalized vermin of exile in Montréal: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

Abstract

This article argues that the protagonist in Hage’s Cockroach (2008) introjects the vermin as a representation of internalized antagonism. As the unnamed narrator struggles in an inhospitable city, he internalizes this unflinching feeling of estrangement through introjection. This process reveals how the loss of home entails the state of a vagabond who resists normalization and seeks the unruly life of the underground. The way the city of Montréal is portrayed as notorious for its indifference towards newcomers aggravates the condition of the divided self in exile, which necessitates the intrusion of the monstrous. In effect, not only does introjecting the cockroach signify a menacing presence but also suggests a decolonizing act of insubordination against a city whose hegemonic order, like its freezing weather, looms large.

Whimsically imagining himself to be a cockroach, the unnamed narrator in Rawi Hage’s novel fancies himself as ruling the underground, a place envisioned as a safe haven for the underprivileged from the ruthless urban surface where the taxpayers live. Drawing on the conceptual frame of internalization, which examines “how external events shape our inner experience and how […] the ‘outer’ world is perceived and integrated” (Wallis and Poulton, 2001: 1), this paper examines internalized feelings of exile toward the city of Montréal as experienced by a delusional Arab immigrant. The alienating effect of living in an inhospitable city stigmatizes the unnamed narrator’s sense of identity and causes him to introject the cockroach as a defining aspect that enacts antagonism. This article, therefore, explores the protagonist’s obsession with the vermin, which seems to represent internalized anxieties experienced by an immigrant who is reduced to the role of a survivor in an assumingly less-than-kind city. As the unsettling cafés, insecure immigrants, taxpaying yet detached city-dwellers, and grey streets at the mercy of ruthless weather become hostile and disturbing, the narrator’s only solace is to internalize these estranging feelings by introjecting the attributes of a cockroach that can flee the urban grounds into the world of dissent. The vermin as a product of introjection serves as a dramatization of the narrator’s subaltern agency. His lack of mobility, represented through a life of entrapment between an inhospitable city and the native, war-torn Lebanon of his childhood and early youth, generates the life of the underground world and renders the existence in the form of a cockroach preferable to that of the impoverished life of an immigrant in frosty Montréal.

Rawi Hage is a Lebanese–Canadian novelist, short story writer, and visual artist. Born in Beirut, he later moved to New York and then to Montréal; he worked as a cab driver, then a photographer, before becoming an award-winning writer. His IMPAC Dublin Literary Award-winning debut novel, De Niro’s Game (2006), won world acclaim and was a finalist for both the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction and the Scotiabank Giller Prize. His second novel, Cockroach (2008), also won several awards; and his third novel Carnival (2012) was equally well received.

In his review of the novel, Amir Taheri points out that Hage’s Cockroach may remind some readers of Kafka’s Metamorphosis. However, Taheri remarks that there are certain differences at play: “Kafka’s anti-hero is metamorphosed into a cockroach without knowing and/or wanting it […] Hage’s anti-hero, on the other hand, builds the cockroach aspect of his persona willingly and as the key element of a mechanism of self-defence in a hostile world”. Moreover, Taheri argues, “despite appearances, Kafka’s pessimism, dressed as black comedy, has nothing to do with Hage’s profound and life-affirming optimism, triggered by the simplest gifts of daily existence” (2009: n.p.). Likewise, in an interview with Jian Ghomeshi, Hage expresses frustration about having his novel constantly compared to Kafka’s novella: “my intention was never to emulate Kafka … Kafka does not have a monopoly on these fantastic [creatures]” (2009: n.p.). The cockroach serves to project a mental state that converses with the politics of exile.

Hage’s Cockroach is a substantial addition to the postcolonial literature of exile and immigration. The author points out that this novel is not about immigration per se but about the socioeconomic conditions that immigration incurs: “I’m exploring poverty issues, class, religion, fundamentalism, displacement — there are other things to explore through immigration” (“Hage’s Cockroach Crawls”, 2010). In this sense, the novel does not romanticize immigration. Neither does it portray another story of “the stereotypically eager and grateful immigrant”; in stark contrast, the narrator curses his luck and this northern terrain (Hout, 2012: 160). The novel narrates the anxieties of a young man who has emigrated to Canada as a refugee from the Middle East and has been living in Montréal for several years. The novel is a tour de force in Canadian literature in the sense that it portrays the unsettling lives of immigrants in such a multilingual, multicultural vortex. In the context of the Canadian experience, Anthony Purdy (1990) observes that exile has a particular resonance among Québeçois literary voices: “As presumably is the case with any culture built on the twin foundations of colonization and immigration, the theme of exile plays a central and complex role in the literature of Québec” (1990: 23). Populated by immigrants and asylum seekers, Hage’s novel subscribes to the literature of exile and immigration written by Arab Canadians in Québec.

F. Elizabeth Dahab speaks of literature written by Arab Canadian writers as a neglected area: “Québeçois/Canadian Literature produced by writers of Arabic origin suffered from an ailment not uncommon to exilic literatures, namely, that it was weakly institutionalized and largely unknown to mainstream scholarship” (2009: vii). Moreover, in “The Language of Difference: Minority Writers in Québec”, Sherry Simon draws attention to the writing of immigrants “who have in common neither a programme nor a style but a problem of affiliation which is expressed explicitly through a conflict of cultural and literary codes” (1987: 121). These literary codes, which technically define the sense of exile that permeates Cockroach, find expression through certain associations, signs, impressions, and mental states that are projected through the disjointed life of a semi-homeless Arab: “Exile suggests longing for a lost center and a vagabond state. Reflected in the disjointedness of signification, it implies a deconstructive poetics with an absent center […] Disjointedness within self implies a divided self, multiple personalities, masks, and doppelgangers” (Zeng, 2012: 2). The vagabond state and the divided self are apparent literary codes that define the Arab narrator who internalizes the drifting and aimless peculiarity of a vagabond’s life. To him, living like a vagabond defines his diasporic condition of having neither home/homeland nor any sense of belonging. He speaks contemptuously of other immigrants (like the professor), who fancy themselves different and pretend not to be impoverished or welfare recipients:

At least I am not a hypocrite about it. Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug; I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist. I look society in the face and say: I am here, I exist. There is existence and there is the void; you are either one or a zero. (Hage, 2008: 122) ¹

Being without a fixed home and yet with a self-proclaimed identity, the narrator is a diasporic embodiment of the vagabond state; hence the need for the vermin to enact the antagonistic life of a vagabond, defining himself against the ordered world that seeks to enforce normalization and (at least in his mind) expel nomadic abnormalities.

The unnamed narrator exposes his views of the external world in general and the city in particular through his regular sessions with the therapist Genevieve, who is so often baffled by both his actions here and now and his unsettling stories about his past and homeland: “This structuring device highlights the growing precariousness of his mental state, as well as the inefficacy of the therapist’s interventions, given the unbridgeable gap between her experiences and sensibilities and his” (Seiler, 2009: 234). He explains to his therapist the reason he tried to commit suicide:

I had attempted suicide out of a kind of curiosity, or maybe as a challenge to nature, to the cosmos itself, to the recurring light. I felt oppressed by it all […] everything was about defying the oppressive power in the world that I can neither participate in nor control. (4–5)

The city comes to occupy that position of oppressive power in terms of those mounted policemen who came to his rescue “when I was spotted hanging from a rope around a tree branch”, and in the court that forced him to see a therapist in “a small office, in a public health clinic” (4) whose walls and stairs lead him every time “out into the cold, bright city” (6). The city seemingly exercises imprisoning effects that the narrator imagines to be sinister acts that necessitate internalization.

Internalization is a psychological term which refers to inner issues that pertain to human behaviour and mentality and the way we conceive the external world. Sue Walrond-Skinner views internalization as a “process whereby the individual transfers a relationship with an external object onto his internal world” (1986: 186). In effect, it has grown out of object-relations theory, which psychoanalytically explains the formation of the psyche in relation to others in the same environment. This object-relations theory is ego-related and is “a relationship where at least one of two people is alone, but where the presence of the other is important” (Jacobs, 1995: 44). Internalization refers to processes that “lead to the psychological contents of significant others being brought inside one’s mind and, to a greater and lesser degree, made part of it” (Akhtar, 2009: 150). Roy Schafer observes the process of internalization in light of an imagined apparatus triggered by a specific environment: “Internalization refers to all those processes by which the subject transforms real or imagined regulatory interactions with his environment, and real or imagined characteristics of his environment, into inner regulations and characteristics” (1968: 9). Schafer’s conceptualization of internalization focuses on the subject. Likewise, Charles Rycroft defines internalization as a term to “describe that process by which objects in the external world acquire permanent mental representation, i.e., by which percepts are converted into images forming part of our mental furniture and structure” (1986: 84–5). The internalized object becomes an inseparable aspect of a newly formulated identity. The unnamed narrator, therefore, sees in the mirror a reflection of his own image and shockingly what he sees there does not frighten him:

Soon I stood barefoot, looking for my six pairs of slippers. I looked in the mirror, and I searched again for my slippers. In the mirror I saw my face, my long jaw, my whiskers slicing through the smoke around me […] I closed my eyes and thought about my dilemma. (19)

Sarcastically, his dilemma turns out to be that his “welfare cheque was ten days away” (19). The narrator has completely internalized the object of the cockroach to the point that it no longer seems alien to who he is and how he perceives his entity. It is significant to notice here how the transformation into the vermin coincides with thinking about his welfare cheque. The vermin in this context manifests when the narrator recalls a thought, which clearly suggests he is indolently feeding on income assistance benefits. His internalized feelings of being redundant, unemployed, and useless to society are externally represented by the form of the cockroach.

Rycroft asserts that internalization is “synonymous with introjection” (1986: 84). He describes introjection as “the process by which the functions of an external object are taken over by its mental representation, by which the relationship with an object ‘out there’ is replaced by one with an imagined object ‘inside’” (Rycroft, 1986: 87). Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) stress the importance of considering the original meaning of introjection, which is basically “intro-jection” (casting inside), as suggested by Ferenczi, who explains the encroaching effects of introjections as the following:

I describe introjections as an extension to the external world of the original autoerotic interests, by including its objects in the ego […] In principle, man can love only himself; if he loves an object he takes it into his ego […] I used the term “introjection” for all such growing onto, all such including of the loved object in, the ego. (cited by Torok, 1968/1994: 112)

In their analysis of Ferenczi’s understanding of introjections, Abraham and Torok argue that introjection must be defined as “the process of including the Unconscious in the ego” (1994: 113). This introjected Unconscious is the sum of “nameless, or repressed, libido”, and thus, introjecting the object as represented by the cockroach, is about “introjecting the sum total of the drives, and their vicissitudes as occasioned and mediated by the object” (1994: 113). In this sense, the steady transformation of the narrator into the sum total of vermin reflects his antagonistic attitude. He is introjecting a parasite that will infect the seemingly healthy ambience of a city that he believes to contrastingly be quite inhospitable.

In his investigation of what causes the emergence of this “influence,” Schafer infers that an introject is “essentially a product of the imagination, however much its construction may draw on memories of real experiences” (1968: 82). He associates introjection with daydreams: “The ordinary daydream moves in a wish-fulfilling direction and so may provide some gratification. Its ability to gratify gives the daydream a major place in psychic life” (1968: 85). Schafer asserts that daydreams are essential to the subjective self in order to internalize introjects, because such daydreams are gratifying “and some of the gratification they provide is relief that guilt, shame, and anxiety have been averted” (1968: 86). Similarly, one of the main gratifying attributes that the unnamed narrator entertains is his ability to escape anxiety and danger through introjected daydreaming:

I am a master of escape […] As a kid, I escaped when my mother cried, when my father unbuckled his belt, when my teacher lifted the ruler high above my little palm […] I fanned my cockroach wings. I let the air cool off my swollen hands as I stood in the corner. (23)

His dire need to daydream escaping his afflictions — domestic violence, civil war, exilic feelings — serves as the major reason for his delusional and desired transformation into a cockroach. To escape being servile to these different forms of anxiety, mainly the feeling of being “trapped in the cruel and insane world saturated with humans” (23), he introjects a cockroach in order to be “the master of the underground” (23). As a Byronic hero or a Miltonic rebel, he would rather rule in the underground than serve in the city.

This enigmatic condition is ordained by a city that freezes all hope and predestines its new immigrants to an unresolved world of turmoil and exile. The image of Montréal as a city of eternal winter whose dwellers are faceless “armies of heavy boots […] and the floating coats passing by in ghostly shapes” is inexorable and suffocating:

As my feet trudged the wet ground and I felt the shivery cold, I cursed my luck. I cursed the plane that had brought me to this harsh terrain […] Goddamn it! Not even a nod in this cold place, not even a timid wave, not a smile from below red, sniffing, blowing noses […] I asked myself, Where am I? And what am I doing here? How did I end up trapped in a constantly shivering carcass, walking in a frozen city with wet cotton falling on me all the time? (8–9)

It is the way he views the city as a desolate place where freezing toes and wet socks walk on the streets that largely defines his own existence or non-existence. The implication here is that ever since he began traversing the icy streets of this city, everything in his life has been frozen. This freezing effect signifies the severance from his homeland where the sun rules, heated arguments collide, the fires of civil war rage, and warm emotions clinch departures. Instead, he now lives in a city that waits for immigrants the way its “treacherous cold pools […] wait for your steps with the patience of sailors’ wives, with the mockery of swamp monsters” (9). The feeling of being entrapped prevails; the narrator feels he is doomed simply because he lives in such a godforsaken place.

The image of Montréal as a city of immigrants never dissipates. The Artista Café serves as a microcosm of the city at large. This is a place where disgruntled immigrants gather to fumigate their discontent. In effect, the Artista symbolically stands for the Middle Eastern immigrant community:

It is open twenty-four hours a day, and for twenty-four hours it collects smoke pumped out by the lungs of fresh immigrants lingering on plastic chairs, elbows drilling the round tables, hands flagging their complaints […] with the intensity of Spanish bulls on a last charge towards a dancing red cloth. (6–7)

The various immigrant inhabitants of the city are well represented through the Artista Café on St. Laurent: groups of exiles that the narrator calls “miserable dogs”, as all “they can do is howl about the past, and their howls are lost between taxi fumes and their own shrinking cigarettes” (144). One of the most notable frequenters of this café is Professor Youssef, who is “an Algerian pseudo-French intellectual […] an unfortunate exile” (10–11). There is also Reza, an Iranian musician who has sworn to protect the beautiful fellow Iranian immigrant Shohreh from Arabs like the narrator. Nevertheless, the narrator thinks that Reza is “charmingly compulsive, a master charlatan who for years had managed to couch-surf in women’s houses, bewitching his hosts with his exotic tunes and stories of suffering and exile” (25). All those exiles, and many others, suffer financially and emotionally “in this cold world, in this city with its case of chronic snow” (17). Given that Montréal remains indifferent, fragmented, and cold, the effect is not only estranging but also quite provocative.

The irrevocable association of violence with the narrator’s homeland is well-accentuated when he sits on the “interrogation chair” (47) during his visits to the therapist to talk about his “tale of growing up somewhere else” (4). These sessions become very unsettling as the therapist brings on “a feeling of violence within me that I hadn’t experienced since I left my homeland” (5). The therapist believes that it is something in the past that provokes his eccentricity, whereas he stresses that for him it is all about here and now, “about defying the oppressive power in the world that I can neither participate in nor control” (5). This act of defiance has a method to it that started and developed where he grew up. In response to a question about his childhood, he tells his shrink that he was an “insect […] a cockroach, I said […] because my sister made me one” as they played “underground” (5). His memories and cultural ties to his dead sister, and to Abou-Roro, who taught him mischievous survival skills — what he calls “the trade” — are not transferable to the new host country. They do, however, continue to dictate his actions and thoughts, rendering him “incorrigible […] a self-confessed compulsive seducer of women and an inveterate liar and thief, as well as […] mentally unstable (Seiler, 2009: 233). The notion of homeland as the source of both agony and pleasure, which the immigrant carries on across the borders of time and place, resonates throughout the novel.

As a result of this increasing sense of alienation, the protagonist suspends reality and introjects the insect, which discloses his inflicted low self-worth, his abhorrence of the human race, and signals resistance to assimilation through “his longstanding kinship with insects”. This has made him a “master of escape” and given him an invaluable ability. He honed his skill as a thief when he was in his war-torn homeland under the mentorship of Abou-Roro, a slightly older compatriot who lived in the danger-filled neighbourhood in which he grew up (Seiler, 2009: 235). The act of introjecting the cockroach generates a defence mechanism. He describes his stealing and escaping skills to be similar to that of an insect: “I crawled under beds, camped under tables; I was even the kind of kid who would crawl under the car to retrieve the ball […] find the coins under the fridge” (23). The speaker imagines being transformed into a cockroach at certain moments of depression caused by the urge to escape from the icy clutches of the city, or by recourse to robbery to avenge oneself against those who are privileged and sheltered from injustice:

At the couple’s home I stole his gold ring, his cigarettes, a Roman vase, his tie, and his shoes […] I slipped under the garage door. And I crawled, glued to the wall, my insect’s wings vertical now and parallel to the house’s living room window. (90)

The aforementioned couple are rich people dining “behind thick glass” in a fancy restaurant. He stops to look at them and a man, “in a black suit, came out and asked me to leave. When I told him that it is a free country, a public space, he told me to leave now, and to get away from the sports car I was resting against […] Not even two minutes later, a police car came” (86) and he is forced to leave. The unnamed narrator observes how the couple “in the restaurant seemed entertained by all of this […] as if I were some reality show about police chasing people with food-envy syndrome” (87). In response to their excitement, he thinks to himself: “Bourgeois filth! I want my share!” Feeling that he was antagonized by the couple, he chases them to their house just to make sure he infiltrates their protected world.

His dismal attitude towards the city is not all without good reason. He feels that Montréal, being indifferent to him and to his likes, directs its attention toward others — those favoured by its government — sending them warm signs of welcome:

Lately I find the city is being invaded by whining Parisians […] Indeed, the Parisians are highly sought after and desired by the Québec government […] The Québeçois, with their extremely low birth rate, think they can increase their own breed by attracting the Parisians, or at least for a while balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and crumbling cities. (27–8)

The sense of alienation that the narrator experiences, which causes the act of introjection, is largely because he comes from the Middle East, probably from Lebanon (the original country of the author), which is one of the old French colonies whose emigrants seem to be tolerated in their new country rather than accepted. The city is hospitable only to the chosen ones. The unconditional hospitality that the city offers to Parisians, who are noticeably named in the novel after their renowned city, becomes regulated and conditioned in dealing with foreigners who come from crumbled cities. The notion that immigrants are defined by the country they come from and valued accordingly (largely helping or hindering their chances of integration) explains the sense of anxiety and exile that the unnamed narrator experiences as part of the enigmatic condition of living in Montréal.

Apropos, the protagonist defines his inescapable uprootedness in relation to a city that is not quite embracing of foreigners. Notably enough, the speaker implies that the city’s “inhuman temperature” necessitates a transformation into something similarly inhuman, which he ultimately internalizes:

It was a day to remind you that you can shiver all you want, sniff all you want, the universe is still oblivious. And if you ask why the inhumane temperature, the universe will answer you with tight lips and a cold tone and tell you to go back where you came from if you do not like it here. (193)

Displacement can be dehumanizing when it drastically alters someone’s way of life. In “Dehumanization: An Integrative Review”, Nick Haslam argues that dehumanization is related to “topics such as immigration and genocide” (2006: 252). He points out that dehumanization is about labelling groups and is “an intergroup conflict” (2006: 252) which involves racist agendas. Dehumanization in Hage’s Cockroach is not born out of a blatant racism that the protagonist may have encountered but rather out of what the narrator conceives to be the city’s xenophobic attitude. The mystery of “how I ended up here” resonates throughout the novel; it clearly questions the position of the inquisitor in relation to the estranging city:

I wondered how I had ended up […] here. How absurd. How absurd. The question is, Where to end? All those who leave immigrate to better their lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matters, not the life, I thought. Maybe we, like elephants, walk far towards our chosen burials. (160)

The sense of loss that stigmatizes the narrator’s experience in exile increases the urge to escape the absurd, unlivable surroundings. The crushing insistence on the unbearable weather in an inhospitable city makes the act of introjection, of becoming a cockroach, not only imminent but necessary — an act of survival against xenophobia. In an interview, Hage captures the essence of the duality that the character experiences: “I think my character is torn between staying human and assuming the role of the primitive in order to survive” (“Hage’s Cockroach Crawls”, 2010). When the protagonist tells the therapist that he encountered a cockroach, she asks “Do you feel part cockroach?” In response he explains that he does not “feel fully human”, in the sense that “being human is being trapped”. The therapist then infers that to be an insect “is to be free” (p. 207). However, for the narrator to assume “the role of the primitive” is to assume a surmounting attitude. Hage himself asserts that the cockroach “is a conqueror who can never be eliminated, a carrier of filth and wisdom, an existentialist who never questions his own existence, a reminder that evolution never favors anyone” (2011: 235). The cockroach is also a menacing reminder of home; the romantic notion of finding a new home degenerates into aimlessness and loss.

Dehumanization is also prominent in the novel via the disparaging romantic notion that arriving in Canada marks the end of the immigrant’s woes, the final haven for asylum seekers, and therefore the story of immigration becomes a narrative about becoming human again. Hage expresses concerns that immigration literature may slip into reconfirming the rhetoric of salvation:

In a lot of Western literature, and maybe Canadian literature too, you cannot portray an immigrant as somebody that is evil […] But if you create characters who do only good, who are all oppressed, who were the victims of something and then come here and are saved, then you are not presenting them as humans. (Hout, 2012: 163).

In this context, the dehumanization suggests a departure from the “human” immigrant who is constructed in popular stories of thankful, saved immigrants who succeed. They only succeed because they have “the necessary financing, education, family connections, chaperoning parents, and/or dual nationalities at their disposal” (Hout, 2012: 160). In Hage’s Cockroach, the unnamed narrator subverts the redeeming image of the immigrant whose restored humanity is contingent on romanticizing the host country. Instead, we encounter the story of a failed immigrant whose story does not fit into the grand narrative of happy immigrants and therefore his humanity by definition is always undermined and incomplete.

Edward Said marks “the achievement of exile” as that of being “permanently undermined by the loss of something left behind forever” (2000: 173), which is a chronic state of utter estrangement. Exile, in a sense, is that third space between home and the self. It is located nowhere and everywhere, which is to Said a productive source of creativity, although psychologically quite crippling. Here, the creativity of exile is ridiculed and disfigured into the act of introjecting a cockroach to ensure survival. Moreover, creativity in exile degenerates into sheer acts of survival, as in the case of Reza’s deceitful story about meeting Ayatollah Khomeini (which attracted the sympathy of elite female listeners) or the acts of vandalism that the narrator commits against people he has literally abused: “None of them said a word […] They knew that I would slash their tires, enter their homes, poison their dogs, and break their stereos. They knew because I had showed them my scar. I made up stories about it” (183). Moreover, both men, Reza and the narrator, fancy their chances with those elite white women who may fetishize the Oriental Other. In effect, in Hage’s novel, the condition of living in exile is reflected in the way disfiguration and trickery replaces creativity; the transformation that newcomers experience is reduced to acts of sheer deception and fraud rather than portrayed as a unique shift in identity formation.

The unnamed narrator’s sense of divided self negates any hope for assimilation as part of the experience of living in exile: “I was split between two planes and aware of two existences, and they were both mine. I belong to two spaces, I thought, and I am wrapped in one sheet” (119). The narrator sees nothing beyond disruption; the split in terms of personality, culture, and memory seems to be interminable. Hybridity, therefore, is schizophrenic and disfiguring rather than transcultural, well-integrated, and appealing. It is reduced to its basic irreconcilable, opposing sides, and nullifies creolization as the ultimate desirable outcome of immigration. Hybridity becomes a sign of incompatibility as it

is evoked most dramatically through the narrator’s belief that he is part human and part cockroach, and through his closely related fascination with what goes on underground, an obsession that forces readers to share his expanded awareness of a bifurcated, hierarchical (and violent) reality. (Seiler, 2009: 234)

The protagonist’s irreconcilable duality is geared towards an assertion of defiance and dissidence. In “Exile: Inside and Out”, Bronislava Volkova (2008) speaks of a deep sense of duality in terms of values and memory:

There is a part of the soul that forever longs to go back to where it originated. The double nature we acquire as exiles never leaves us. We almost have two sets of values and feel somewhat schizophrenic, with two personalities, the original and the acquired […] this eternal split has become by now our nature. (2008: 168)

Accordingly, the urban environment’s oppressive presence freezes possibility for contrapuntal existence and Said’s “achievement of exile” degenerates into a feeling of impotence that aggravates estrangement and designates the unnamed narrator as a tax burden for the city:

But it is I! I, and the likes of me, who will be eating nature’s refuse under dying trees. I! I, and the likes of me, who will wait for the wind to shake the branches and drop us fruit. Filth, make-believers, comedians on a Greek stage! (21)

When he starts looking for work, his therapist feels ecstatic and remarks that it is time he contributed to this community: “It will be such a good step for you to integrate into society.” In response to that, he declares that it would be good to add to his welfare cheque (76). The city here is viewed through the eyes of its taxpayers who help provide income support and conceive all the city dwellers to be legitimate taxpayers. In effect, the narrator is considered an outsider, a non-contributor to taxation, which aggravates a feeling of self-alienation and isolation, which awakens the vermin.

In one session, the therapist tells the narrator that she has “a responsibility towards the taxpayers. Tax prayers? I asked. No taxpayers, people who actually pay taxes. Some of us do” (60; emphasis in original). The “us” here excommunicates those who do not pay tax; they are not considered of this city unless they contribute to its financial interest, and by extension neither are they part of the whole country at large. The implication here is that

immigrants did not share the national character and values but that they actively threatened its erosion and degradation; immigrants were defined as devoid of these exalted values. The cultural and social stranger was thus objectified as having an ontological integrity oppositional to that of the national. Where Canadians were defined as respecting “the rule of law,” as honest, fair, and [immigrants were] seen as hostile to these high values. (Thobani, 2007: 195)

Exile here takes up another meaning which is that of being exiled from the economic policies of the city. Only the taxpayers are the true citizens of the polis, the rest remain foreigners, distant, and sometimes servile and silent. Hence, the process of estrangement becomes increasingly self-assertive and compelling, seeking validation in an internalized object that is in essence a disgusting parasite that necessitates extinction.

The question of foreign identity is not quite alien to the Québec literary situation. Graham Huggan (1994) observes a space of “uncertain representation” which is constantly contested in Canadian societies. He remarks that contemporary Canadian writers expressed this sense of spatial uncertainty as they “seem less interested in evoking a sense of place than in expressing a kind of placelessness through which the notion of fixed location, and the corresponding possibility of a fixed identity, are resisted” (1994: 56). The choice of the city of Montréal as a trope of exile is well-rooted in the literary and cultural history of the province itself:

Any conceptual reading of Québec as a choice location for the study of literatures of exile will have to take into account the fact that the literary explosion in Québec in the fifties and sixties, characterized as it was by the self-affirmational national text, bears similarities to the anticolonial resistance of African intellectuals as well. (Dahab, 2009: 6–7)

The city, therefore, exemplifies the political implications of the anti-colonial struggle. Although the narrator here attributes his misery to the weather-stricken Montréal rather than to any straightforward bureaucratic system that would incite social protest, it is the Iranian taxi driver Majeed who reveals the other hidden side of the city:

Of course, Canada! Montréal, this happy, romantic city, has an ugly side, my friend. One of the largest military-industrial complexes in North America is right here in this town. What do you think? That the West prospers on manufacturing cars, computers, and Ski-Doos? (281)

The political aspect ultimately contributes to the narrator’s conceptualization of the city as hostile and alien. Now the city is not only harsh and indifferent but imperialistically antagonistic.

The city remains hospitable only to those, like tourists and taxpayers, who contribute financially to the economy and city revenues. What tourists call city attractions and taxpayers call services, he continually dismisses as sheer delusions and entrapments that he needs to escape: “Everything has turned into shapes and forms that confine you and guide you, between the city streets and building walls, to your final, inescapable destination” (270). The notion of escape is intricately linked with the city and life in general, which is evidently accentuated when the unnamed narrator confronts the gigantic cockroach in his kitchen. The unnamed narrator’s confrontation with the cockroach is a classic example of the subject experiencing the introject:

Too often, introjects are written about (and discussed in the clinic) as if they are actual persons carrying lives of their own, with energies of their own, and with independent intentions directed toward the subject. This is how patients often experience them and describe them. (Schafer, 1968: 83)

The giant cockroach accuses the protagonist of living a life of irresponsible manoeuvring and continuous evasion:

The world ended for you a long time ago. You never participated in it. Look at you, always escaping, slipping, and feeling trapped in everything you do. It is not escape, I said. I refuse to be a subordinate. It is my voluntary decision. Yes, yes, the creature said impatiently […] You are what I call a vulture, living on the periphery of the kill. Waiting for the kill, but never having the courage to do it yourself. (201–2)

The internalized object itself here provokes the protagonist into taking chances by stressing the character’s inability to take action and make a change in his life. Talking about the devastating effects of leaving one’s homeland, Hage himself refers to the stultifying impact of displacement: “To leave is often a product of a sense of stagnation, a refusal to initiate a change, a refusal that comes from a feeling of helplessness” (2011: 230). The cockroach reveals the reason for its own existence. It is out of this lack of opportunity to participate in the meta-narrative of new belongings and transcendence that the vermin was born: “I used a despicable insect as a metaphor for the ever-resilient mover for whom the architecture of human boundaries is nothing more than a stroll through the pipes and the underground, whose closeness to the ground mocks the idea of an afterlife, a being who defies upward mobility and its clouds of rewards” (Hage, 2011: 235). To the unnamed narrator, therefore, “living on the periphery” has never been optional since, he would argue, it is one of the prerequisites of being in exile. Being excluded by the city itself, the speaker will always be an intruder.

The residents are defined by the extent that they acclimatize to the city as a habitat. Figuratively, the city exercises a discriminatory effect in the way its forecast can be dreadful to newcomers and yet quite mild to taxpayers: “I smoked and watched the newcomers to this land dragging their frozen selves into the elevator of this poor neighbourhood’s clinic, where they would wait in line, open their mouths […] chase their running noses, wives, and imaginary chickens” (79). On the other hand, following his therapist stealthily outside the same clinic where she works, he notices that she is immune to the harsh city weather: “I noticed that Genevieve did not seem cold. Some creatures are oblivious to the heat and the cold wind, I thought as I crawled behind her toes” (80). The ineffectual impact of the weather on Genevieve indicates that she has been embraced by the city as a white, educated individual: “As English-speaking, white, well-educated people, they inevitably experience the success of entering a privileged place in Canadian society in which they become part of an ‘ethnic hegemony’” (Buss, 1992: 51). Genevieve’s easy acclimatization to the weather also signifies the social difference of the poor class of immigrants who are subject to the city’s severe cold in sharp contrast to the rich life of those elite groups who experience the hospitable side of the city.

The sense of alienation intensifies as he watches “his publicly-funded therapist’s mouth drop while he tells stories about the crimes he would commit in his homeland with his mentor, the neighborhood thief Abou Roro” (Tabar, 2009). Her shock widens the chasm between his grim reality and the therapist’s sheltered world. Although Kurtin and Matas (2013) propose that “the Arabian tradition of storytelling (One Thousand and One Nights comes to mind)” exercises “a source of inspiration” for the author, “especially in the treatment of serial confessions to the narrator’s therapist” (2013: 199), Hage actually turns all the narrator’s meetings with the government-appointed therapist into a parody of the Arabian Nights tradition: “The doctor, like sultans, is fond of stories, I thought. Maybe we should stop now, you must have a second appointment, I said. No, no, no. Go on, please” (102). He describes her as a city girl who is just too culturally removed from his world to understand his tribulations:

For no apparent reason, this made me curious about her past, her childhood of snow and yellow schoolbuses, quiet green grass and Christmas lights, her Catholic school that forbade flames, cigarettes, and orgasms […] But really, how naïve and innocent this woman is, I thought. If she only knew what I am capable of. (50)

His ineffective visits with Genevieve never help him change his dismal view of the city, which hosts one permanent colour:

The coffee kept my fingers warm for a while. The steam that escaped the cup danced against the backdrop of the grey roads, the grey buildings, the leafless grey trees, the grey people, the Greyhound buses, and then it lost its energy and turned cold — the fate of everything around me. (116)

The descent into the underground becomes surely inevitable.

The city of Montréal can never be home for the narrator as it incites in him the urge to travel:

I would trip the bodyguard, seize a gun, shoot the owner, the cook, and the dead chicken above the stove, pull a red Persian carpet from the wall, flip it twice in the air, and fly with my lover above this white city, through the chilling wind, and land on a warm beach where I would walk with her along the shore, shoes in our hands and the sun in our eyes. (216)

The city as home is, therefore, disavowed. To him, the need to flee the city never wears thin and he romanticizes his escape as he invokes escapades such as flying by Persian carpet. He mythicizes his situation as he alludes to the stories of the Arabian nights. Ironically, the cold city of Montréal is not the sunny city of Baghdad, and neither is Shohreh, his lover, Princess Jasmine. His short-lived affair with Sehar, his boss’s daughter, can be seen as a sardonic mimicry of any narrative romance. The unnamed narrator’s closest ties to the mythical Aladdin are that they are both Arabs and thieves. Aladdin was the master of the marketplace where the commoners live outside the walls of the Sultan’s palace; the unnamed narrator, likewise, craves to be the master of the underground, sheltered away from the rich lives of those who dwell in the posh bits of Montréal. He remarks, speaking of his underprivileged position compared to frequenters of high class restaurants, “I was the insect beneath them” (89). In Hage’s Cockroach, the city of Montréal embodies the narrator’s struggle to cope with the unsettling urban mode, the ethnic hegemony, and the bureaucratic, taxpaying system. The sordid irony is that to live there — just to live in Montréal, regardless of the agony of being severed from one’s homeland — is a cruel act of banishment from which he finally seeks refuge in the underground:

I crawled and swam above the water, and when I saw a leaf carried along by the stream of soap and water as it were a gondola in Venice, I climbed onto it and shook like a dancing gypsy, and I steered it with my glittering wings towards the underground. (305)

The internalized vermin here dramatizes the narrator’s sense of estrangement, which translates into inevitable social antagonism that initiates expulsion. Rosemary M. George argues that

the sentiment accompanying the absence of home […] can cut two ways: it could be a yearning for the authentic home (situated in the past or in the future) or it could be the recognition of the inauthenticity or the created aura of all homes. (1999: 175)

The unnamed narrator concedes to neither. He finds home in the underground where he believes he will ultimately find refuge from the city’s freezing weather and an escape from the panoptical, sociopolitical gaze that deems only the wealthy worthy citizens.

The city’s urban exterior is sickening and drives the narrator to the unhealthy, imagined underground world, which he can only accomplish by internalizing the vermin that would presumably ensure voluntary and easy transition from the place he despises to a world that he fancies. Torn between the memory of being native and occupying the cruel identity of an estranged immigrant, the unnamed narrator views the city in terms of a progression of ruptured, alienating images that he constantly tries to escape from through introjection. The vermin is internalized because it is empowering. It represents all the trodden and the underprivileged who will in the narrator’s mind rise and regain authority. It represents “the life of a trapped human being on the earth’s surface […] the underground life of an agile cockroach, able to acquire items stealthily, and resilient enough” (Hout, 2012: 161). This space of becoming offers him the possibility of mobility and of re-enacting his survival skills, which would enable him to recapture endearing memories and ultimately provide a sense of continuity. It is only by introjecting the cockroach that the unnamed narrator is able to make a political statement that designates dissidence, deconstructs amusing fallacies about immigration, and restores to his tortured soul a sense of tranquility underneath the professed glamour of Montréal.