Verminous view of the world
The Age
Saturday July 18, 2009
Rawi Hage's powerful novel examining the plight of society's human "vermin" shows us once again that his is a distinct, uncompromising voice, writes Kevin Rabalais. Cockroach By Rawi Hage Hamish Hamilton, $32.95 WHEN the nameless narrator of Rawi Hage's second novel, Cockroach, is arrested after trying to hang himself in a park, a court forces him to see an analyst. "What do you expect from our meeting?" asks the analyst, Genevieve, to which the narrator, sometimes known as Cockroach, says: "I am forced to be here by the court! I prefer not to be here."Besides the title itself, with its nod to Kafka, Hage establishes his modus operandi in early scenes such as this. In doing so, he gives this confronting novel its existentialist overtones, which build throughout this intense follow-up to the author's IMPAC Award-winning debut, De Niro's Game.As in that previous, masterful novel, Hage infuses his characters' dilemmas with intricate layers of anxiety, anger and desire. He writes primarily about immigrants who share the streets with so-called natives but who, often because of their skin colour, are shunned in the same ways that those very natives shun vermin.And this is the point that Hage makes palpable with his title. His characters are the unseen and voiceless. He gives voice to these individuals who populate his novels by writing with an urgency that is difficult to ignore. As he writes early in Cockroach: "Yes, I am poor, I am vermin, a bug, I am at the bottom of the scale. But I still exist."The narrator of Cockroach has arrived in Montreal from an unnamed, war-torn country that resembles Lebanon, Hage's country of birth and the setting of De Niro's Game. In many ways, he could have stepped from the pages of that previous novel. But the voice and tone of Cockroach, while no less immediate than its predecessor, show Hage widening his gaze in an attempt to explore new territory: namely, the relationship in a society between insiders and outsiders.Cockroach follows the episodic misadventures of the narrator, a part-time thief, schemer and restaurant worker. Early in the novel, we find Cockroach hungry, out of money and, perhaps even most troubling by his standards, out of dope.Hage's narrator lives an alternate life as a vermin, one of the "crawling insects that would outlive me on Doomsday", as he writes early in the novel.Such dire circumstances aren't enough, however, to cause him to lose his charm or wit as he guides us through the underworld of his existence."Other humans gaze at the sky," Hage writes, "but I say unto you, the only way through the world is to pass through the underground."Hage captures with great detail and passion the fellow immigrants who circulate in Cockroach's underground circle. These characters have found themselves in predicaments similar to our narrator, a permanent outsider who navigates through a world that owes as much to Henry Miller as it does to Camus, Kafka and Dostoevsky.Throughout the novel, Cockroach continues to visit Genevieve. In these recurring meetings, Hage portrays the wide gaps between these characters' diverse backgrounds and their separate lives. By doing so, he examines with an unflinching eye the complex interactions between the privileged Westerner and the immigrant who has arrived from a war-torn country.With his first two books, Hage has established himself as an author of high order. He writes with an immediacy that demands our attention. On the whole, however, Cockroach is less successful than De Niro's Game. In particular, the second half of the novel begins to lose some of the feverish energy that Hage establishes early on and that characterises most of his work. But, even so, with Cockroach, he shows us once again that he is a distinct, uncompromising voice.Kevin Rabalais is the author of The Landscape of Desire, which is published by Scribe.
© 2009 The Age