ABSTRACT

Cockroach is about a migrant who has escaped the decade-long Lebanese civil war to arrive in "frozen" Canada and who imagines himself half-cockroach: wretched, driven underground, hungry and scrounging. Rawi Hage's novel is set in Montreal. His insect-like protagonist, scuttling around for food and love, is the swarming unconscious of the icy city. Unlike a lot of writing people have come to identify as diaspora literature, with the "ex-centric communicative circuitry" of its patterns of power, communication, and conflict, Hage's novel takes little interest in dismantling the colonialist centre-periphery binary that continues to polarise postcolonial geography. What Rawi Hage's Cockroach represents, by way of urban text, is the mental underground, laying claim to a psychiatric culture that had hitherto denied the colonised, the by-products of coloniality, and the wretched of the earth, the civilizational benefit of possessing an unconscious. Needless to say, the imaginative literature of Brexit remains to be written.