Immigration and Liminality in Rawi Hage’s Cockroach Jesse Hutchison Abstract The official policy of Canadian multiculturalism would have it that immigrants might “fully participate in Canadian society” while still being able “to identify with the cultural heritage of their choice”. Cockroach rawi hage essay. 9 de dezembro de 2018 Cockroach rawi hage essay. 4 stars based on 37 reviews moniquetrips.com Essay. My personal characteristics essay invisible man motif essay. African literature and culture essay on spain African literature and culture essay on spain. Download Cockroach By Rawi Hage Pdf free software. Cockroach, a 2008 novel by Rawi Hage; Kockroach, a 2007 novel by William Lashner under the name 'Tyler Knox' The Cockroaches (novel), the. Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates. Sep 01, 2008 Rawi Hage’s second novel Cockroach takes place during a frigid Montreal winter and details the picaresque adventures of an unnamed protagonist, a recent immigrant from the Middle East and self-professed thief who often envisions himself as a giant cockroach.
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IMPAC Award-winner Rawi Hage's second novel combines an uncompromising vision of humanity with razor-sharp portraits of society's outsiders, and a startling, poetic sensibility with bracing jolts of dark humour.
Cockroach is as urgent, unsettling, and brilliant as Rawi Hage's bestselling and critically acclaimed first book, De Niro's Game The novel takes place during one month of a bitterly cold winter in Montreal's restless immigrant community, where a self-described thief has just tried but failed to commit suicide. Rescued against his will, the narrator is obliged to attend sessions with a well-intentioned but naive therapist. This sets the story in motion, leading us back to the narrator's violent childhood in a war-torn country, forward into his current life in the smoky emigre cafes where everyone has a tale, and out into the frozen night-time streets of Montreal, where the thief survives on the edge, imagining himself to be a cockroach invading the lives of the privileged, but wilfully blind, citizens who surround him. In 2008, Cockroach was a finalist for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Governor General's Literary Award, and the Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. It won the Paragraphe Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction, presented by the Quebec Writers' Federation.
Publication Details
FormatRawi Hage (Author)
Rawi Hage won the 2008 IMPAC Dublin Literary Award for his novel De Niro's Game. He lives in Montreal.
“We are all outlaws in the eyes of America! In order to survive we steal cheat lie forge fred hide and deal!” Jefferson Airplane wrote these cheerfully absurd words for “We Can Be Together,” their 1969 anthem for a largely middle-class teenage audience playing at being revolutionaries; the lyrics would be a fitting epigraph for Rawi Hage’s second novel, “Cockroach.” Hage is a highly esteemed 45-year-old Beirut-born writer now living in Montreal. His first book, “De Niro’s Game,” won the 2008 Impac Dublin Literary Award, given for the best English-language book published anywhere in the world. “Cockroach” was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award and other Canadian prizes. Yet the Airplane anthem of teenage “revolution” is the perfect soundtrack for it.
The plot of “Cockroach” could have been dramatic. The narrator, a morally correct thief who targets hypocrites and the undeserving rich, is able to turn into a bug when he needs to gain entry, sparing the thief (and the writer) the technical difficulties of, for example, getting into the back seat of a car in plain sight of its rotten bourgeois owners. He has lived through war and domestic violence in his home country, including the murder of his sister; he is in love with a beautiful, high-spirited Iranian woman named Shohreh who loves sex but has no interest in being anyone’s girlfriend; he becomes entangled in a revenge plot against a onetime secret policeman who raped and tortured her in Iran. When we meet him in his therapist’s office, we learn that he has just tried to commit suicide.
This dramatic material, however, is not dramatically realized. Most of it develops as told to the narrator’s unbelievably stupid and credulous therapist in language like this: “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. The question of existence consumed me.” It is hard to take such thoughts seriously, and indeed the character stops being suicidal after the first few pages. The story of past suffering and revenge is jumbled together quickly and with a strange lack of emotional weight; most of the narrator’s energy goes into descriptions of various petty thefts, conversations, “existential” thoughts (“What really fascinates me is the bits of soap foam floating down the drain, swirling and disappearing. Little things like this make me think”) and contempt for the hateful phonies around him. This means pretty much everyone, except for Shohreh and a few of her friends. It especially means anyone who is French or who has French affectations; a line of French dialogue or a mention that a character is eating French food signals that said character is a pig.
It is possible, of course, to tell a dramatic story mainly through flashbacks, in the form of thoughts about what has happened rather than what happens. But to make it work, a writer has to be a master stylist. Here, Hage’s style is mannered, preening and clumsy: “I peeled myself out from under layers of hats, gloves and scarves, liberated myself from zippers and buttons, and endured the painful tearing Velcro that hissed like a prehistoric reptile, that split and separated like people’s lives, like exiles falling into cracks that give birth and lead to death under digging shovels that sound just like the friction of car wheels wedging snow around my mortal parts.”
It is also possible (and sometimes a lot of fun) to have a great central character who loathes everyone around him. Gf zemen unicode font. But the loathing eye is most effective when it sees precisely the unique and baroquely mixed quality of a character’s evil, the worm safely nesting in the beautifully built personality — especially when the voice that accompanies the eye inadvertently reveals its own secret worm.
Such revelation may be what Hage intends, but his negative characterizations are broad clichés, much too easy and too flattering to the narrator and the reader. He spends pages describing a brainless French Canadian woman he took monetary advantage of, along with her uniformly brainless friends, whom he easily seduces (they are automatically thrilled to be dallying with an “exotic”). When he robs these women during dinner at a French restaurant, they are even more thrilled — and so are their boyfriends, who are excited to be in the company of a “noble savage.” He goes on to describe how these disgusting decadents use drugs, wave guns around to impress him and eat their own excrement out of boredom, concluding in all seriousness: “I see people for what they are. I strip them of everything and see their hollowness.”
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These characterizations are laughably bad, and strangely so considering that when he wants to, Hage can actually write. “De Niro’s Game,” despite its silly title, had depth, passion and emotional nuance; you believed the characters and cared about what happened to them. At a French book fair (!) I heard Hage read a moving passage from it, about a petty criminal being tortured by a militia goon who nearly drowns him again and again. As the criminal comes to expect and accept death, he thinks lovingly of how his mother used to smoke while she stole water from a neighbor’s reservoir. The scene has great power not only because of the subject but because of the art with which it is told.
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At its best, “Cockroach” has moments that recall the power of this scene. Its most positive quality, however, despite its posturing, is its whimsy, which sometimes becomes genuine earthy charm. When the narrator breaks into someone’s home, he rarely does more than raid the fridge, crawl into the bed and watch TV; he’s prone to pranks like changing the radio station to hard rock and cranking the volume. Some of the cockroachian imagery is funny and sharp. The narrator admires the gallantry of bar waitresses; his sexual devotion to Shohreh and her bodily fluids is playful and erotic. Shohreh is a potentially great character, made tragic by her degraded past, but also fiercely up for a good time, sexy clothes, good food and trouble. The portrayal is vivacious but finally shallow; we don’t fully feel the depth of her tragedy or the greatness of her spirit. This is not for lack of trying — Hage clearly means to honor her — but his language is too hackneyed to create the portrait she deserves.
Having read both of Hage’s books, I see his talent. However, I wonder at how extravagantly he’s been praised and at how fast he’s been elevated to the status of an internationally important author. One of the people Hage’s cockroach looks down on is a fellow immigrant, a musician who manipulates the naïve sympathies of well-meaning Canadian women with his stories of hardship and oppression by religious fundamentalists: “Gullible heads would nod, compassionate eyes would open, blankets would be extended on sofas and beds, fridges would burp leftovers, and if the rooster was lucky, it would all lead to chicken thighs and wings moistened by a touch of beer or wine.” Yet the cockroach happily does the same, describing himself as the “exotic, dangerous foreigner” who gives Canadian fools “a sense of the real.” I doubt he intends it, but this could be Hage talking about some of his adoring critics. If so, his contempt would be justified. To overpraise is a subtle form of disrespect, and everybody knows it.
I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who has responded to Hage’s work has done so insincerely. But when I see it being compared to Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Genet, Rimbaud and Burroughs — I can’t imagine that anyone with a mind believes that. In making such overblown comparisons, these “admiring” critics have respected Rawi Hage far less than I have.
Cockroach By Rawi Hage Pdf Creator Online
COCKROACH
Cockroach By Rawi Hage Pdf Creator
By Rawi Hage
De Niro's Game Rawi Hage
305 pp. W. W. Norton & Company. $23.95
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