The Roach’s Revenge: Suicide and Survival in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

What does it mean to “exist and not to belong?” asks the narrator of Rawi Hage’s Cockroach (210). This article analyses the themes of exile and alienation in Cockroach in relation to current discourses of global migration and state surveillance. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s idea of the refugee as “pure man” (116), I argue that Hage’s novel calls into question the degree to which the discourse of the human (and human rights) can exist beyond state apparatuses of citizenship and belonging and how refugees, migrants, and sans papiers are excluded from the “realm of common humanity” (Razack, Dark Threats 8) via state apparatuses of security and surveillance. Examining the novel as a revenge narrative, I focus on how Cockroach’s unnamed protagonist—an impoverished Arab migrant living in Montreal—shifts between human and insect form to indicate how the discourse of the human fails to create the political and socio-economic conditions necessary for his survival.