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On Being the “Same Type”: Albert Camus and the Paradox of Immigrant Shame in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2017
Abstract
A characterization of the shame-inducing legacy of colonialism lies at the heart of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach. By employing Albert Camus’s aesthetic style, Hage’s novel investigates the ironic paradoxes in Camus’s philosophy of absurdism and his political stance regarding Algerian independence from France. Through the motif of the “gaze,” (the mode of looking that shames the specular object), the novel links shame to what Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks calls the “regime of the look,” a system of visualizing and encoding race. Through three textual manifestations of shame, Cockroach points out that Camus’s own representation of Arab bodies instantiates a paradox in his attitude about independence. Indeed, because of his commitment to the absurd and an ethics of fraternity, an oblique feeling of shame surfaces in Camus’s writing; this shame both disrupts the logic of Camus’s philosophy and contributes to the affective experiences of some postcolonial subjects.
- Type
- Articles
- Information
- Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry , Volume 5 , Issue 1 , January 2018 , pp. 69 - 89
- Copyright
- © Cambridge University Press 2017
References
1 Hage, Rawi, Cockroach (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2008), 3 Google Scholar.
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4 Justin Trudeau, “To those fleeing persecution, terror & war, Canadians will welcome you, regardless of your faith. Diversity is our strength #WelcomeToCanada.” January 28, 2017, 12:20 pm. Tweet.
5 Marie Wadden, “A Syrian Family’s Loss Became My Blessing,” The Globe and Mail, “Facts and Arguments,” May 25, 2017, http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/a-syrian-familys-loss-became-myblessing/article35111869/, accessed July 11, 2017.
6 Solomon Hailemariam, “Kindness Is Contagious in Canada,” The Globe and Mail, “Facts and Arguments,” June 23, 2017, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/facts-and-arguments/canadas-winters-are-cold-but-as-i-learned-first-hand-its-people-have-warmhearts/article35446550/, accessed July 10, 2017.
7 Anna Maria Tremonti, “Expecting Gratitude from Refugees Can Be Toxic, Says Author,” The Current, CBC Radio One, May 3, 2017.
8 Ibid.
9 Kumar, Amitava, Passport Photos, (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000), 10 Google Scholar.
10 Ibid., 4.
11 Along the same lines, settler-Canadians are not, of course, exclusively white. Canada is famously acclaimed as “a nation of immigrants,” a phrase so repeated it is impossible to locate its origin. But even those whose families have been in Canada for multiple generations are often mistaken—if they are not white—for recent migrants.
12 Seshadri-Crooks, Kalpana, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race (London: Routledge, 2000), 3 Google Scholar.
13 Ibid., 2.
14 Ibid., 19.
15 Ibid., 21.
16 To be clear, Seshadri-Crooks squarely places her analysis of race within a Western context—particularly North America—that relies on visible signs of identity differentiation. Other cultures rely less on visibility and race than on, for examples, sartorial markers of class to indicate social identity or rank, as in India. My argument about the coexistence of shame and race relates only to those contexts in which “the regime of the look” or systems of visibility assign value to race.
17 Ibid., 159.
18 Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Atlantic, 1991), 12 Google Scholar.
19 Kamel Daoud, The Meursault Investigation, trans. John Cullen. (New York: Other Press, 2015 [2013]), 1.
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25 Ibid., 87.
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28 Ibid.
29 Ibid.
30 Giovannucci, Perri, Literature and Development in North Africa: The Modernizing Mission (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2008), 59 Google Scholar.
31 Among public intellectuals, Camus was quite alone in his commitment to pacifist solidarity within a colonial situation. Far more emblematic of the critical response to France’s position in Algeria were statements like Fanon’s: “Colonialism is not a machine capable of thinking, a body endowed with reason. It is naked violence and only gives in when confronted with greater violence.” See Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 2005), 23 Google Scholar.
32 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 5–6.
33 Ibid., 6.
34 Ibid., 16.
35 Ibid., 6.
36 Ibid., 53.
37 Ibid., 29–30.
38 Ibid., 40.
39 As noted previously, Camus was horrified by the physical violence perpetrated against local Algerian Arab populations, but he believed the brutality could be amended by administrative reform rather than decolonization. He was unable, it seems, to believe that the violence of colonialism was systemic and irrepressible; as Sartre put it, “[Colonialism] is our shame; it mocks our laws or caricatures them. It infects us with its racism.” See Sartre, Jean-Paul, “Colonialism Is a System,” Interventions 3.1 (2001): 140 Google Scholar.
40 Camus, The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays, 123.
41 Just, 904.
42 Ibid., 907.
43 Ibid., 908.
44 Ibid., 911.
45 Albert Camus, The Outsider (L’Etranger), trans. Joseph Loredo (London: Penguin, 1982 [1942]), 58.
46 Ibid., 50.
47 Ibid., 59.
48 Ibid., 60.
49 Seshadri-Crooks, Desiring Whiteness: A Lacanian Analysis of Race, 7.
50 “The Lands Within Me: Rawi Hage,” Canadian Museum of History, http://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/cultur/cespays/pay2_07e.shtml, accessed May 18, 2017.
51 Hage, Cockroach, 27–28.
52 In her response to Hage’s novel, Maude Lapierre points out that the narrator consumes such tales as hungrily as the Canadian women who listen to the musician Reza’s “sad stories,” offering meals in exchange (Hage, Cockroach, 69). Indeed, the similarity between the therapist’s desire for the narrator’s tales and the narrator’s desire to know his fellow migrants’ tales suggests, to recall the language of Cockroach’s epigraph, the shared “degeneration” of the human “species” by virtue of its parasitic interest in (or “appropriation of,” as Lapierre writes) others’ suffering. See Lapierre, Maude, “Refugees and Global Violence: Complicity in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach,” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 50.5 (2014): 561 Google Scholar.
53 Hage, Cockroach, 11.
54 Ibid., 3.
55 Attitudes regarding migrants as security risks to the social body have been on the rise in Canada since the 1980s, according to Maggie Ibrahim. It is not only that migrants are (wrongly) believed by a substantial portion of the Canadian public “to pose a threat by supporting insurgency movements.” See Ibrahim, Maggie, “The Securitization of Migration: A Racial Discourse,” International Migration 43.5 (2005): 172 Google Scholar. Migrants also become associated—through racism rather than substantiated experience—with “health risks, increased criminality, and the potential collapse of the welfare state” (Ibid., 173).
56 In the 2014 “Canada Reads” contest held by CBC, Cockroach’s celebrity advocate, Samantha Bee, discusses the seeming connection between Hage and Kafka.
57 Hage, 32.
58 Camus, L’Etranger, 58.
59 Hage, 33.
60 Camus, L’Etranger, 115–16.
61 Hage, 29.
62 Ibid., 87.
63 Ibid., 199.
64 Ibid., 102.
65 Ibid., 107.
66 Ibid., 7.
67 Ibid., 122.
68 Ibid., 122.
69 Ibid., 86.
70 Ibid., 87.
71 Ibid., 89.
72 Ibid., 88.
73 Ibid., 89.
74 Ibid., 90.
75 Ibid., 91.
76 Ibid., 90.
77 Ibid., 159.
78 Abdul-Jabbar, Wisam Kh., “The Internalized Vermin of Exile in Montreal: Rawi Hage’s Cockroach,” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 52.1 (2017): 175 Google Scholar.
79 Ibid., 169.
80 Hage, 81.
81 The narrator describes several of Weegee’s photos and is fascinated by one captioned “Their first murder”: “The image showed a crowd of kids and adults, a close-up of their faces. The photographer must have been very close to the crowd, thought the stranger. Some of the kids were even laughing and playing and stretching their heads towards the lens, and in the background a woman, surrounded by the crowd of kids, was crying” (82). Weegee, like the narrator, seems to have been fascinated by the idea of the anonymity of individuals within crowds.
82 Hage, 83.
83 Ibid., 32.
84 Ibid., 83.
85 Ibid., 160.
86 Ibid., 203.
87 Ibid., 202.
88 Ibid., 305.
89 Ibid., 99.
90 Ibid., 112.
91 Said, 92.
92 Ibid., 97.