Shame and Migration in Canada

In a 2017 interview with Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio’s The Current, University of Waterloo scholar Vinh Nguyen reminds listeners of Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau’s response to American president Donald Trump’s executive order 13769, which had recently attempted to block entry to the United States of citizens from seven Middle Eastern and North African countries. Obliquely condemning the order by stressing Canada’s contrasting attitude to foreign visitors, Trudeau tweets, “To those fleeing persecution, terror and war, Canadians will welcome you.”Footnote ⁴ Public utterances of compassion toward refugees, like that expressed in Trudeau’s tweet, portray the Canadian nation as a space of inclusion. As Nguyen explains, however, implicit in such sentiments is the belief that Canada’s ostensible openness ought to be matched by refugees’ feelings of gratitude for being welcomed to Canada. Such utterances are prodigious in Canadian public forums. For instance, a Canadian volunteer editorializes the satisfying emotional experience that came with participating in Canada’s 2016 resettlement plan for Syrian refugees: “How often in our lives do we get a free ticket into the lives of strangers who respond to the tiniest gesture of kindness with the deepest gratitude? The first word I learned in Arabic was shukran (thank-you), and it has been said to me more times than I care to count.”Footnote ⁵ Another example of this “welcome narrative,” in which Canadian heroism “teaches” both Canadians and migrants to feel grateful for Canadian openness, comes from Solomon Hailemariam, who moved to Toronto from Ethiopia. Hailemariam writes a letter to The Globe and Mail describing an experience among settler-Canadians that made him “a living witness to warm hearts.” With sincerity, Hailemariam contributes to Canada’s image of itself as welcoming: “Such a penchant for kindness must be hereditary as Canadians have helped generations of refugees. This is, I presume, what distinguishes Canada from the rest of the world.”Footnote ⁶

In the aforementioned episode of The Current, however, two immigrant activists express frustration; Iranian refugee Dina Nayer feels burdened by the West’s “toxic . . . expectation of gratitude.”Footnote ⁷ Golsa Golestaneh also struggles with the “heaviness” of needing to demonstrate a “very grateful” attitude to Canadians who ask about her refugee experience, which they use to shore up their own identity as “savior[s].”Footnote ⁸ But, Golestaneh counters, “There are a lot of stigmas around being a refugee in Canada and it’s not really the heaven that a lot of people think. I experience racism every day. . . . I get eye rolls. Whenever I’m on the train and I feel scared because of my skin colour to be attacked; that is not the safety. . . . I fled my country for.”

The traumatic histories consumed by the West validate the West’s conception of itself as “savior.” Yet, the criticisms Golestaneh, Nayeri, and Nguyen lodge at Canada’s self-perception as heroically welcoming rest on the problematic of a double expectation, both of which Trudeau’s tweet implicitly captures: the refugee must first project the image of a traumatized victim, and then express gratitude to the nation that provided salvation from that trauma. Trudeau’s list of horrors—“persecution, terror and war”—yields tales of suffering that stir (pleasurable) pity only if they are told within the specific narrative framing of gratitude for the chance—provided by Canada—to escape. Such a narrative, however, often requires a migrant to rely on her body to convey the signs of past suffering. It is this notion of the migrant’s body as an image signaling specific meaning to the Western gaze that Amitava Kumar takes up in his book Passport Photos, an examination of the chasm that spreads between the migrant body and its Western “reader”—a chasm characterized by a failure to understand intimately or even adequately the bodily signs (scars, for instance) that have such specific meaning for the migrant attempting to gain access to Western spaces. Beginning with the paradigmatic “scene at the customs desk,” in which the immigration officer reads both the migrant’s passport and the bodily signs that may or may not overtly support the claims suggested by formal documentation, Kumar understands the wide space between the official’s limited knowledge about the applicant and the applicant’s thorough self-knowledge as a space filled with shame.Footnote ⁹ The hopeful immigrant knows her body and passport operate as textual objects; how those objects are read determines whether entry is granted. The shame of having the depth of personal history bound to such unreliable and politically determined signs as the body and the passport—and the powerlessness to escape that signifying moment—is, according to Kumar, emblematic of the “historical process” of “decolonization and the presence, through migration, of formerly colonized populations in the metropolitan centers of the West.”Footnote ¹⁰ To be “read” within an exchange so infused with the historical legacy of imperial power is to experience objectification; the Western gaze relies on a predetermined mode of looking at the signs of migrant bodies.

Of course, the most dominant sign determining the migrant body’s symbolization is race (and here it becomes clear that objectification does not impact equally upon all migrants—at least not those whose whiteness releases them from obvious differentiationFootnote ¹¹ ). In her analysis of the psychology of race, Kalpana Seshadri-Crooks identifies whiteness as the “inaugural signifier of race,”Footnote ¹² which configures itself within “a regime of looking.”Footnote ¹³ Invoking Lacan’s theories of subject-formation, by which language or the “discourse of the Other” constructs the subject, Seshadri-Crooks points out the degree to which Western culture “reproduce[s] the visibility of race as our daily common sense, the means by which we ‘tell people apart,’ a logic that is best enshrined in the Canadian phrase ‘visible minorities.’”Footnote ¹⁴ However, this quotidian mode of categorization actually rests upon a fundamental anxiety—another instantiation of what Lacan understands as lack. As a master signifier, whiteness is the sign all bodies unconsciously desire, and the lack of whiteness (which is not the same as “caucasian”) perpetuates an interminable desire for whiteness.Footnote ¹⁵ Although Seshadri-Crooks does not explicitly embed her analysis of race within the psychology of shame, the fact that she considers race as bound to a system of visibility suggests that “seeing” race may well hinge upon the same psycho-structural dynamics that characterize the shaming gaze. Given the weight of signification that bears on the raced body’s lack of whiteness, the connection between race and shame, I would argue, always coexistsFootnote ¹⁶ ; seeing race within a structure of hierarchical signs—the uneven binary of white/nonwhite—presupposes values and judgments, which the gaze interprets as cultural or natural attributes. In other words, what the gaze sees in the “regime of the look” that characterizes all subject formations depends on an unconscious recognition of lack; that idea of lack immediately binds itself to race. In this sense, the raced subject—or for our purposes, the raced/migrant body—becomes meaningful not just as a symbol of differentiation but, within Canadian narratives about migration and welcome, as signs that encode white Canadian identity.

At the heart of this problematic “seeing” of the migrant Other lies the challenge of escaping the psychology of race and the regime of the look. Coeval with this system is the difficulty for the raced migrant body to signify anything besides trauma and victimization on one hand or success and gratitude on the other. These “types” develop as associated signifiers within the entrenched narrative of benevolent white Canadian identity. The “seeing” of various migrant types—the victim and the success story or, when these types fail to emerge, the ingrate and the criminal—ensures the anonymity of individual, complicated, and divergent identities. The consequence of the obscurity ensured by such scopic misinterpretation, Kumar suggests, is shame. Yet identifying shame as a central affective element of Seshadri-Crooks’s regime of looking is not to suggest that all exchanges between migrant and settler-Canadians are doomed to racist assumptions and exclusions; in other words, not all migrants experience the shame assigned by the gaze. Canada comprises a multitude of bodies and minds; it is precisely the possibility of diverse intersubjective relationships that makes it possible to theorize the gaze or shame at all and to render colonialist aesthetics as potentially archaic. As Seshadri-Crooks points out, however, awareness of race as a visual mechanism of categorization does not necessarily provide access to dismantling racism.Footnote ¹⁷ It is to this double bind that arises between the desire for (extraracial) justice and the pervasiveness of the “look” that I now turn.

Aesthetic Relations: Albert Camus

The “shameful” migrant is in many ways the political descendant of the “shameful” colonial, that subaltern figure eclipsed by imperial discourses. The impotent rage and suffocating shame Fanon expresses in Black Skin, White Masks arises precisely because of how his body is expected to represent constructed “types” of black identity. His drive to cast off the “shameful livery”Footnote ¹⁸ of racist signifiers resembles subsequent attitudes expressed by writers like Kumar and many of the central theorists of modern diasporas, who argue that migrants, especially those from formerly colonized regions, inherit the legacy of type-cast identity. In other words, the figuration of migrant shame discussed previously finds its origins in the representational models of colonial discourse; Hage’s Cockroach responds to both of these linked histories.

In Albert Camus’s fictional and nonfictional writing, the colonized Arab man (and, occasionally, woman) hovers in the margins, discreetly present but rarely acknowledged, a ghost haunting the writer’s imagination, particularly his knowledge of himself as someone who embraces his family’s exile from France. As frequently noted by other commentators, when Algerians figure in Camus’s works, it is usually as criminals or victims, as with the Arab criminal whom Daru, a pied-noir, allows to decide his own fate in “L’Hôte,” or the Arab man of L’Etranger, whose shooting death propels the moral crisis of his pied-noir killer, Meursault. Indeed, Kamel Daoud takes up the inconsequentiality of Meursault’s victim in his novel The Meursault Investigation, which begins with the brother of Meursault’s victim explaining that Meursault was so adept at telling stories that “he managed to make people forget his crime, whereas the other one was a poor illiterate God created apparently for the sole purpose of taking a bullet and returning to dust—an anonymous person who didn’t even have the time to be given a name.”Footnote ¹⁹ Indeed, Daoud’s project partly contends with the problem that in Camus’s writing Arab characters are never named; aside from their roles as plot devices, Algerian characters enable the writer’s own self-reflection, such as when Camus remarks that in local cafes, he can identify his “age in faces [he] recognized without being able to name them.”Footnote ²⁰ For Camus, Algerian Arabs are “barbarians” whose beauty signifies the purity of nature and a time that is eternally present, ahistorical: Algerian Arabs are, to him, a “race devoid of spirituality.”Footnote ²¹ Their consequential vacuity reflects the internal emotional and philosophical inquiries the author makes about the European intellectual. In contrast with the natural simplicity of the Algerian Arab, Camus wrestles with the tragic fall of his own type, the philosopher-poet: in our (Western) time, he bemoans, “We turn our backs on nature, we are ashamed of beauty. Our wretched tragedies have a smell of the office clinging to them, and the blood that trickles from them is the color of printer’s ink.”Footnote ²² To Camus, the history of thought, which belongs to Europe, results in the painful loss of the simple beauty of barbarian life.

As a writer, Camus is celebrated for his contributions to art and philosophy rather than for his politics, the consideration of which inevitably unsettles an otherwise unified chorus of admiration. In his essay “Narrative, Geography and Interpretation,” Edward Said works to correct such exclusive praise. He expresses frustration with Conor Cruise O’Brien, Camus’s biographer, who claims that “No other writer, not even Conrad, is more representative of the Western consciousness and conscience in relation to the non-Western world.”Footnote ²³ Said insists that such a view allows Algeria as it appears in Camus’s writing to operate as “a receptacle emptied of all but its capacity for sentience and reflection.”Footnote ²⁴ Seeing Camus as “a moral man in an immoral situation,”Footnote ²⁵ as O’Brien understands Camus, ultimately gets Camus off the hook from the responsibility of representing Algerian Arabs as real characters or of taking a fully ethical response to France’s colonial presence in Algeria.

Born in Algeria to an impoverished pied-noir family, Camus famously resisted Algerian independence (Algeria was colonized by France in 1830). Fervent in his love for his birth country, Camus worried that violence would necessarily accompany decolonization but, just as crucially, he also feared that Algerian independence “would lead to the expulsion of people, cultures and values deemed foreign but . . . intrinsic to the diverse fabric of Algeria.”Footnote ²⁶ Thus, despite his unwavering commitment to social justices like desegregated education, Camus felt that independence would result in forced removal from Algeria of thousands of European descendants who considered the country their home with the same attachment as the indigenous population. Consequently, Camus’s response to the independence movement, which turned violent in the mid-1950s, was “excoriated by his contemporaries on all sides.”Footnote ²⁷ Nevertheless, Camus’s longing for peaceful, colonial coexistence in Algeria persisted well beyond the point when such a structure could ever have become a possibility. At the height of violence between the Front de Libération Nationale and French forces, Camus mourned that, as a result of bloodshed and because of the goal of decolonization, “there will be no real winners in this war.”Footnote ²⁸ It is hard, from twenty-first century and postcolonial perspectives, to understand how Camus, so committed to issues of justice and equality, could have resisted decolonization. As Claire Messud reflects, however, Camus did not consider himself a member of the French colonial class; his origins were among the severely impoverished, and “it was France itself that lifted the most humble from their poverty and afforded them every opportunity.”Footnote ²⁹ French education delivered Camus from the financial hardship experienced by his own parents. Camus’s love for his home country was therefore matched by his gratitude to French culture; what he failed to accept—perhaps because of an idealism about the possibilities of French fraternalism to Algerian Arabs—was that his escape from destitution was possible only because of his European origins.

A blind spot, then, prevented Camus from committing to Algerian independence. Where writer-activists like Memmi and Fanon could recognize that “political self-determination is antithetical to colonial authority,”Footnote ³⁰ Camus held fast to the belief that Algeria and France could thrive from a loving union—and he was, of course, largely ignored for this belief.Footnote ³¹ I would suggest, however, that Camus’s political blind spot in regard to Algerian independence operates as an unarticulated—or obliquely articulated—feeling of shame in his literary and philosophical writings. In other words, there is a level on which Camus may have known the untenability of his political position in Algeria. His desire to avoid confronting the consequences of this untenability, however, required him to subordinate appeals to specific, local, and political justice beneath appeals to general, universal, and humanist justice; the contradiction between these two visions of justice erupts as a confrontation that marks the very essence of his own theory of absurdism as well as the irony and shame that, because repressed, unsettle the moral questions articulated in his writing.

To recognize the profound irony of Camus’s blind spot regarding colonial Algeria, it is important to understand Camus’s central philosophical idea, absurdism, which he arrived at via an inquiry into the logic of suicide. Suicide, he claimed, is often a natural decision arrived at by the person who understands life has no innate purpose. In The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus’s thesis on the absurd, he writes, “Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, . . . the absence of any profound reason for living, the insane character of that daily agitation, and the uselessness of suffering.”Footnote ³² The “stranger” whom a man becomes in “a universe . . . divested of illusions and lights”Footnote ³³ is one who encounters in a fundamental way the feeling of absurdity, a feeling encapsulated by the questions: “[H]ow far is one to go to elude nothing? Is one to die voluntarily or hope in spite of everything?”Footnote ³⁴ Yet, despite the implication that suicide offers a solution to the “divorce between man and his life”Footnote ³⁵ —that is, knowing as true the essential meaninglessness of living—Camus ultimately rejects suicide. Indeed, it is neither living nor suicide that stands for absurdity, but the rejection of suicide, even while accepting that the option is reasonable. Occupying that paradox with awareness is, for Camus, the very condition of the absurd; life, Camus decides, “will be lived all the better if it has no meaning.”Footnote ³⁶

Camus’s theorizing about suicide offers a way for him to think through the underlying problem of other irresolvable contradictions. Suicide functions as the most fundamental example of a more general crisis, which might be broadly described as the desire to find sense in the insensible. He explains:

With this description, Camus tells us that absurdity emerges within the nonsensical space between an idea and the impossibility of that idea’s realization. For instance, one might be struck by the absurdity of a chicken trying to fly to great heights; the animal’s desire contradicts the reality that deems its desire insatiable. Similarly, we might say a trial ends absurdly when its verdict seems in every way at odds with the law and the details of the case which, under the law, ought to have assured the opposite outcome; we might recall the witch hunts of King James’s England to visualize the absurdity contained within the dictum that a woman innocent of witchcraft would find absolution as she sank to her watery death. What these situations—from the chicken to the trial—share is what Camus understands as an irreconcilable confrontation between two or more realities. Especially in his later philosophical work L’Homme Révolté, Camus repeatedly imagines these confrontations colliding over issues of justice, from the experience of knowing that ethical appeals are frequently at odds with the conditions that necessitate appeals to ethics. As Camus puts it, “the absurd is sin without God.”Footnote ³⁸ In other words, there can be no particular logic within a framework that lacks sense. The absence of reason (or the senselessness of seeking reason in a reasonless universe) that lies at the core of the absurd, however, does not for Camus equate with an absence of ethics (or the senselessness of seeking morality in an amoral universe).

Although Camus could identify the absurd in, for example, the plight of the oppressed against the might of the oppressor (such as victims of Hitler’s Germany), he failed to read the contradictions of the colonial situation or his position as a French Algerian desiring peaceful coexistence. The irony of such a failure is all the more distinct given Camus’s furious despair in L’Homme Révolté, where he condemns the murderous brutality of fascism, Nazism, and communism, systems pursuing utopian futures through the sacrifice of the present; violence inevitably attends these nihilistic quests, but always in the name of a faulty logic, of using a belief in the possibility of future meaning to justify violence in the present. To Camus, this requires an unethical rejection of the absurd, which must embrace the protection of immediate life (to do otherwise would require believing that life has a meaning that the future might deliver). Arguing that murder contradicts the essence of solidarity-in-revolt, Camus stood vehemently against violence. Thus, his literary works articulate an ethics of fraternity; Meursault of L’Etranger is condemned for valuing his individuality and for living an unexamined, solitary life—for using murder to break his contract with a brotherhood of men.

However, the ethics of fraternity expounded in L’Homme Révolté and characterized in L’Etranger and much of Camus’s other fiction is ultimately universalist. These texts remind Europeans that a necessary allegiance to absurdism requires a rejection of violence—of suicide and murder—even in the name of revolution. But it is exactly this general rejection of violent rebellion and general support for fraternity that allows Camus to sidestep the brutal systemic violence of colonialism and its real, local consequences.Footnote ³⁹ In this way, Camus’s literary works enact the very type of confrontation that causes us to recognize absurdity according to his philosophy. In pursuit of awareness about the injustices signaled by contradictory realities, he claims in The Myth of Sisyphus that “there is no sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Yet Camus cannot bear, in the end, to know the “night” cast by the “light” of French Algeria. Driven by a horror of the violence of murder that characterized the atrocities of Europe’s wars, he incongruously overlooked the innate violence of the colony.

Writing novels as allegories for the violent confrontations of his time, Camus’s appeal to an ethics of solidarity and pacifism overlooked the local contradictions of French imperialism. For instance, the rats of Oran become, in La Peste, the metaphorical creatures of the insanity and violence of Nazism and communism, which are overcome by Rieux and his compatriots, whose dogged commitment to present life eventually triumph; even while the cemeteries are presumably crowded with Algerian Arabs, Camus’s narrator never directly mentions the indigenous population. Ultimately, his characters seek abstract solidarity and pacifism; accordingly, the violence of Clamence’s monologic narration in La Chute gives way to the fraternal dialogism represented by his interlocutor’s doubtful interjections. With a similar gesture to fraternity, Meursault’s experiment with murder resolves in L’Etranger through a consciousness of his moral obligations and an acceptance of the absurd life, which his arbitrary violence had negated. Yet, despite these novels’ rejections of violence and despite their attention to the need for a group consciousness, brotherhood is always imagined among Europeans. Thus, because of the Arab character’s notable absence and because of Camus’s understanding of the absurd as a confrontation between contradicting realities, Camus’s literary works enact an element of the absurd that the author himself did not recognize. How else can we understand his commitment to justice, his vehemence against revolution, and his portrait of solidarity-in-the-present (both despite and because of universal meaninglessness) against the historical context of France’s colonization of Algeria? The Algerian Arab is the peripheral—but therefore all the more central—presence documenting this absurd contradiction. Finally, the peripheral nature of indigenous characters in Camus’s works suggests that shame is at work—perhaps shame over the knowledge, repressed or disregarded, about the unethical position he occupied.

Shame in the Works of Albert Camus

In his article “From Guilt to Shame: Albert Camus and Literature’s Ethical Response to Politics,” Daniel Just argues that Camus uses shame in his fiction “as an ethical and political concept that promotes coexistence.”Footnote ⁴¹ Considering how Camus’s characters ultimately reject solitude for a fraternal consensus about the need for pacifism, Just maintains: “In a situation when acts can be neither political nor ethical and yet are never without political and ethical motivations and consequences, shame … can serve as a guiding principle of action.”Footnote ⁴² Just believes that Camus’s investment in forms of community relies on shame as a means by which individuals become aware, via “the shaming gaze,”Footnote ⁴³ of their necessary implication in one another’s lives. Indeed, it is precisely Meursault’s humiliated recognition of the courtroom audience’s regard for him during his trial that drives him toward his moral insights at the novel’s end. However, the kind of shame Just identifies in Camus’s work—shame as an ethical guide, by which debased self-awareness directs the ashamed subject to others and to social obligation—implies a similar inclination to universalism as developed by Camus’s own poetics and politics. That is, Camus’s shame, according to Just, operates as a moral shame, a conception of shame that shares more with guilt and existentialism than with the identity-based shame that Fanon, for one, gives such agonizing voice to. Understanding shame in Just’s terms, as an affect affirming ethical intersubjectivity,Footnote ⁴⁴ neglects the local shame produced as a consequence of the specific cultural and political contexts of colonization. The colony engenders a special kind of gaze and a particular object of that gaze, and this form of shame cannot be subsumed within appeals for moral brotherhood. In other words, there is a different shameful presence in Camus’s works, and it does not have a moral nature—at least, not in the way Just elaborates. Instead, this other shame emerges beyond Camus’s allegorical lessons; it emerges as a result of objectifying the Algerian Arab and as a result of neglecting the urgency of indigenous appeals for independence.

Consider, for instance, the murder scene in L’Etranger. When Meursault approaches the “Arab”—as he calls him—in a “drunken haze” produced by the “dazzling red glare” of the sun, the Arab is lying partly in the shade.Footnote ⁴⁵ With no defining features or characteristics, the Arab’s still passivity recalls an earlier scene, when Meursault and Raymond find themselves across the road from “a group of Arabs” (including Meursault’s eventual victim) who, Meursault notices, “were looking at us in silence, but in their own special way, as if we were nothing more than blocks of stone or dead trees.”Footnote ⁴⁶ When he approaches the solitary Arab on the beach, Meursault detects a similar indecipherability in the man’s expression, which he again imagines as wholly related to himself: “Perhaps because of the shadows on his face, he seemed to be laughing.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Meursault feels vaguely threatened by the man’s regard, understanding his movements as irresolvable judgments beneath the overwhelming pressure of heat and sunshine. The calm of Meursault’s life—unexamined until the moment after his crime is committed—fractures beneath the sky, which he imagines as “splitting from end to end and raining down sheets of flame.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Meursault murders because the Arab—blank and unreadable—is there at the moment when Meursault’s own internal crisis reaches its apex. The Arab acts as a foil for Meursault’s moral dilemma, his failure to understand the ethics of fraternity. Importantly, however, the Arab does not represent in any political sense the colonial subject who requires recognition; he does not function metonymically as a figure of dispossession. In fact, if he operates as a metonym at all, it is only as a figure of Meursault’s estrangement from the world. In terms of characterization, then, the Arab’s body is a screen reflecting Meursault’s own uncertainty and isolation. Although he does not obviously project prescribed traits assigned by racist symbolization, neither does he project any traits at all—except obscurity. For the poetics of Meursault’s crisis and Camus’s philosophy, the Arab could be anybody. Except, of course, that the drama of L’Etranger could not pivot around just any body. The crisis must be reached via an Algerian Arab’s body because only that body could matter little enough that Meursault’s choice to kill could be turned into a parable about the European subject.

Camus’s Arab, then, is a blank, an absence. What could be more shaming than for one’s “group” identity to serve entirely the identity of the one who looks? Camus’s Arab therefore serves as a model example for Seshadri-Crooks’s “regime of the look,” by which a visual terrain signifying both lack and layered social meanings together “constitute the logic of domination.”Footnote ⁴⁹ If the most notable aspect of the colonial Arab’s figuration is the inscrutability of his threatening gaze (and these assignations—the inscrutable and the threat—are deeply entangled), then even the potential power and autonomy of looking back serves the “master” group’s own self-image. The political (im)potency of this gaze, I argue, is a structure of shameful intersubjectivity that Hage’s novel centrally explores.

Rawi Hage’s Cockroach

Fittingly, it is Rawi Hage, a Lebanese-Canadian novelist-cum-photographer, who brings the psychological impact an immigrant may experience as the object of the Western gaze most strikingly into Canadian fiction. Recognized for photos dealing with “immigration, war and racism,” Hage hopes his exhibits resist “hurried consumption or sensationalist use.”Footnote ⁵⁰ Keenly aware of how the Western gaze sees immigrants, Hage strives both in his visual art and his literary work to resist the very “types” of migrancy that Trudeau and other Canadians celebrate and Kumar, Nguyen, Golestaneh, and others reject. In Cockroach, Hage stages the encounter between the West and the migrant as one permeated by the act of looking-but-not-seeing—a shameful encounter between established and new Canadians that compels the object of the gaze to seek strategies of projecting less prescribed images onto Canada’s imaginative landscape. Hage perceives structures like the Western gaze and discourse about migrants as causally related to imperial discourses; his narrator characterizes diasporic identity as directly impacted by colonialism, sneering that the Quebecois “think they can increase their own breed by attracting the Parisians [to] balance the number of their own kind against the herd of brownies and darkies coming from every old French colony, on the run from dictators and crumbling cities.”Footnote ⁵¹ Recognizing the political inequities at play in migrant experiences means, for Hage, knowing the ways in which diaspora extends from colonial situations. Therefore, though his novel directly confronts attitudes toward immigrants, it is as if Hage writes in the space of the gaze between Meursault and his Arab victim. In other words, Cockroach investigates the political, philosophical, and psychological crises that emerge in Camus’s confrontational look and in his absurd allegiance to a fraternity that neglects the identities of those bodies he only represents in obscurity.

In Cockroach, an unnamed narrator from an unidentified Middle Eastern country struggles to keep afloat in Montreal after a suicide attempt. Forced into therapy by the state, the narrator recounts (often falsely) his history of abuse and crime in his country of origin, where his sister was murdered by her husband; the novel eventually reveals this as a loss for which the narrator feels responsible. Between therapy sessions, he scrapes together a living as a restaurant cleaner while interacting with a range of fellow migrants, most of whom tell him their own private tales of suffering.Footnote ⁵² Throughout the novel, the narrator either imaginatively or literally (the novel never makes the distinction clear) changes into a cockroach; this avatar identity seems to have begun in his childhood, when he and his sister would hide under blankets “and turn the world into an insect’s play.”Footnote ⁵³ In Montreal, however, the narrator identifies with cockroaches for their vermin qualities, claiming to share their “slimy feelings of cunning and need.”Footnote ⁵⁴ At opportune moments, he transforms into his insect-self, sneaking into the apartments of adversaries: his therapist, a wealthy industrialist, and a couple who stares at him from a restaurant window.

With the narrator’s criminal acts, chiefly his home invasions, Hage caricatures the belief espoused by anti-immigration rhetoric that migrants pose a threat to Canadian security; in many ways, the narrator’s behavior seems to justify such concerns.Footnote ⁵⁵ Hage redoubles the caricature with the narrator’s transformation, wherein the immigrant embodies the plague-like threat of the cockroach, the pestilent figure who takes over the clean space of a settler. With the insect metaphorphosis, Hage writes back not to Franz Kafka, as some readers presume,Footnote ⁵⁶ but to Camus, whose own chronicle of a plague (spread by rats rather than cockroaches) operates—like Hage’s novel—as an examination of the moral connections binding humans to one another. Whereas Camus’s novel celebrates the heroism of individual men who navigate moral decay through dogged commitment to goodness in a universe lacking moral certainty, however, Hage’s novel condemns such a congratulatory assessment of human nature. Camus’s Oran, where Arab people are shockingly absent, inverts in Hage’s Montreal, where the Arab immigrant represents the pestilence itself—but a pestilence born of racist discourse around migrancy. In Cockroach, the migrant embodies the threat that unsettles the Canadian imagination; rather than a welcome opportunity to demonstrate Canada’s benevolence, the migrant becomes an uncooperative challenge to the body politic. Ultimately, the narrator’s metamorphosis results from his ownership of how his image is inscribed within the “regime of the look” (to recall Seshadri-Crooks’s invaluable term); that is, the migrant’s cockroach body absorbs and reflects the settler’s shameful and shaming gaze and the discursive systems that condition that gaze.

Cockroach asserts its relationship to Camus’s work early on; as noted, the narrator attends sessions with a therapist (a French-Canadian woman named Genevieve) because of his suicide attempt, which he says he was pushed toward by “the bright light that came in [his] window and landed on [his] bed and [his] face.” The narrator suffers beneath “the ray of light,” realizing “how insignificant [he] was in its presence, how oblivious it was to [his] existence.”Footnote ⁵⁷ Like Meursault, who wants “to escape from the sun,”Footnote ⁵⁸ Hage’s narrator once sought reprieve from the blinding idea of the meaninglessness of his life, becoming “obsessed with escaping the sun.”Footnote ⁵⁹ However, Hage’s narrator lacks the freedom that comes with Meursault’s understanding of himself as merely one of “thousands of millions of other privileged people who . . . called themselves [Meursault’s] brothers,” all of whom—thanks to the equality of the absurd—“would be condemned one day.”Footnote ⁶⁰ This is not to suggest that Meursault does not himself experience shame; indeed, awareness of himself through the shaming gaze of others ultimately conjures Meursault’s sense of fraternity, which is why critics like Daniel Just can read Camusian shame as an ethical awakening, guiding characters to social engagement. In contrast, Hage’s narrator never enjoys the comfort of the universal freedom suggested by Meursault’s final position because although on a philosophical level Hage’s narrator reiterates Meursault, he is also always positioned as Meursault’s victim, the inscrutable “Arab” whose shadowed face remains forever configured by Meursault’s (and, by extension, the West’s) act of looking—an act so dehumanizing in L’Etranger that it becomes deadly. Indeed, throughout Cockroach, the narrator fixates on how others see him; he recalls, for instance, the French-Canadian waiter who “looked at [him] with fixed, glittering eyes, and said: . . . Le soleil t’a brule ta face un peu trop (the sun has burned your face a bit too much).”Footnote ⁶¹ Likewise, he notices a couple watching him from a restaurant, “as if from behind a screen, as if it were live news. Now [he] was just a part of their TV dinner.”Footnote ⁶² Thus, although the narrator shares Meursault’s philosophical crisis about universal meaning, he also animates the subject position of Camus’s Arab—a figure observed and, as a consequence, overwritten or nullified by imperial discourse.

Hage’s narrator is fundamentally aware of how the Western “look” constructs him as the “fuckable, exotic, dangerous foreigner”Footnote ⁶³ or as a traumatized exile; he notes how Genevieve’s pen makes “its way inside her lips”Footnote ⁶⁴ as he reveals details of his painful past in his country of origin. Ultimately, the narrator’s awareness of how he is perceived in Canada emphasizes his sense of unbelonging, and this discord carries a particularly shameful feeling. “Look at the snow, Farhoud,” he appeals to a friend, another migrant. “It falls without shame. How did we end up here?”Footnote ⁶⁵ Yet, the shame that arises from not fitting in and from being easily identified as “Other” is not, in the end, an affect the narrator rejects. Rather, perhaps because of pre-existing feelings of self-loathing and regret over the violence that propelled his exile, the narrator embraces his shameful feelings, inviting a metamorphosis of his already objectified body into the very figuration of repulsiveness. Transforming himself into a cockroach provides the narrator—or so he imagines—an opportunity to “rule the earth,”Footnote ⁶⁶ to avoid his shamed position at “the bottom of the scale”Footnote ⁶⁷ by fully and triumphantly embodying the ashamed subject—but an ashamed subject who thrives on violence. Thus, the metaphor of the cockroach makes literal the narrator’s shame over occupying the position determined by the Western gaze, but he uses shame as a challenge to that gaze. “Yes,” he admits. “I am poor, I am vermin, a bug . . . But I still exist. I look society in the face and say: I am here.”Footnote ⁶⁸ In other words, the narrator’s transformation enacts an incarnation of shame, but only to mirror the violence of the oppressive gaze itself. In this way, the narrator’s shameful feelings never connect only to his subject position; they also attach to the Western subject. Shame travels along the gaze in both directions.

The narrator imagines his cockroach-infused power as the power to return the gaze that oppresses him, and he makes a hobby of walking past “fancy stores and restaurants [to] watch the people behind thick glass.”Footnote ⁶⁹ Nonetheless, his “looking society in the face” is never met with mutual regard; in fact, one attempt to return the gaze leads to his apprehension by police, who insist it is “unlawful to stare at people inside commercial places.”Footnote ⁷⁰ The powerlessness of his returned look, then, compels his decision to employ a different sort of “looking” by accessing the hidden, domestic spheres of those Montrealers he considers his adversaries; the narrator’s home invasions therefore take on the specular significance of looking upon an object of power. Because the distance between the Westerner and the migrant is too saturated with imperial and diasporic histories, the narrator wants to look without being looked upon, to gain power over dominant subjects by knowing them, literally intruding into their privacy in the same way that he feels their gazes as—quite literally, given the law enforcing the gaze—a mode of control over his body. When, for instance, the police usher the narrator away from the couple in the restaurant, he transforms into his cockroach self, then scurries into the couple’s car: “I was the insect beneath them,” he explains triumphantly.Footnote ⁷¹ After listening, unseen, to the couple’s racist complaints about “all kinds of people” making Montreal “too noisy and crowded,”Footnote ⁷² the narrator smuggles himself “under the door” to their house, where he secretly watches their evening rituals before crawling “up the bedroom wall” to watch them sleeping “from above.”Footnote ⁷³ Not content with merely looking down on them (literally and figuratively), he puts himself “inside [their] dreams,” helping himself to the shrimp cocktails of their dream-party, surveilling the contents of their sleeping minds with the pleasurable anonymity of a fellow guest.Footnote ⁷⁴ Finally, after exiting their dreams and stealing some of their belongings, he crawls away, part insect and part skunk, “swaying from side to side and urinating on car wheels,”Footnote ⁷⁵ overwhelmed by the rage and repulsiveness he attaches to not belonging to Canada’s “dreadful suburbs,”Footnote ⁷⁶ the safe spaces where Euro-Canadians retreat to avoid the “filth” of “all kinds of people.”Footnote ⁷⁷

Here, the narrator’s transformation and infiltration arise out of his frustrated acceptance of his object-status, and he makes monstrous the stigmatized signs of his body as the Western gaze regards it. In his own reading of Cockroach, Wisam Kh. Abdul-Jabbar arrives at a similar conclusion; Hage’s narrator, Abdul-Jabbar argues, is literally “dehumanized” as a result of “the city’s xenophobic attitude.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Yet, although Abdul-Jabbar rightly suggests that the narrator’s cockroach self is a “product of introjection” that “serves as a dramatization of the narrator’s subaltern agency,”Footnote ⁷⁹ the narrator’s gestures of returning the gaze—of “looking society in the face” or infiltrating their spaces—lack the empowerment associated with expressions of agency. In fact, when the narrator crosses as a cockroach into spaces he understands as Western, he experiences the transgression as a form of estrangement that ironically functions to annihilate his individual subjectivity just at the moment when he is so invested in asserting his own powerful gaze. For instance, in the novel’s most crucial scene of intrusion, when the narrator crawls into his therapist’s unoccupied apartment, the narrator shifts from first-person to third-person narration, referring to himself as “the stranger.”Footnote ⁸⁰ This explicit reference to Camus’s novel, of course, places Hage’s character again in the split role of both Meursault and his Arab victim. Hage draws further attention to the space between these figures and the inflections of power characterizing Meursault’s gaze by furnishing Genevieve’s apartment with a coffee-table book of prints by the American photographer Weegee, whose 1940s-era images captured New York City’s destitute immigrants and criminals, especially as they are observed by police and elite onlookers.Footnote ⁸¹ Weegee’s photos serve to remind the narrator that he is alienated, uncertain about his place in a world where his attempt to control the power of the gaze only turns him back into “the stranger,” incapable of escaping the knowledge that his body will always be identified as the Other, the body Meursault murders. He longingly scrutinizes a photo of his therapist “hugging a handsome man with blond hair and good teeth, both of them smiling back at the intruder in the living room, not seeming to mind his presence. . . . In the background there was a blue beach glittering with pools of sunrays, which explained the need for the sunglasses that crowned the lovers’ foreheads.”Footnote ⁸² Unlike the narrator, Genevieve and her lover are comfortable in the sun, having no need to escape its “flashing and exposing”Footnote ⁸³ brilliance; meanwhile, the narrator feels “at home”Footnote ⁸⁴ in her apartment only because his presence goes unnoticed. His cockroach figure—the “stranger”—comfortably disfigures his identity, so that he belongs, paradoxically, by virtue of not belonging, of being unwelcome, of vengefully adopting the form of the intruder.

The narrator’s cockroach form suggests his estrangement not only from other Canadians, but also from his own humanity. In fact, the “stranger” whom the narrator becomes instantiates his loss of self—a metaphorical suicide that achieves what his first attempt at dying could not. Indeed, the novel intimates the narrator’s long project at self-annihilation; where it begins with suicide (the moral question at the heart of The Myth of Sisyphus), it ends with murder (the moral question propelling L’Etranger and L’Homme Révolté)—an act that announces a different end to his life. Learning of the long-ago rape of his lover, Shohreh, the narrator finds an opportunity to enact revenge against her rapist, who dines at the restaurant where he works. But while the narrator’s vengeance purportedly seeks justice for Shohreh, it also satisfies his longing for revenge at the very model of a society that would turn him into a cockroach; he rebels against the conditions of racism whose discourse and specular authority ensure his body signifies Otherness, all the more so because he resists integration.

Wandering alone through a frozen Montreal, the narrator considers his arrival in Canada: “I wondered how I had ended up here. How absurd. How absurd. The question is, Where to end? All those who leave immigrate to better their lives, but I wanted to better my death. Maybe it is the ending that matters, not the life.”Footnote ⁸⁵ He kills Shohreh’s torturer partly because he wants his own death to matter, but the final scene does not describe his literal death. Instead, when he murders, he becomes fully cockroach, no longer human. At last, he belongs entirely “down in the underground,”Footnote ⁸⁶ where his allegiance is to a “project to change this world.”Footnote ⁸⁷ His transformation is complete; he heads for the kitchen drain, “and when I saw a leaf carried along by the stream of soap and water as if it were a gondola in Venice, I climbed onto it and shook like a dancing gypsy, and I steered it with my glittering wings towards the underground.”Footnote ⁸⁸ The narrator finally escapes the sun and retreats from society into the stream of the unidentifiable—the undocumented bodies whose potential violence haunts the Western imagination. It is important to note, however, that when he disappears as a cockroach into the sewers beneath Montreal, he does not merely become invisible. Hage does not simply suggest through dramatic emphasis that the neglected inhabitants of Canada will always be relegated to the swamps of social injustice. The shadows to which Hage’s protagonist retreats reinforce the potential power of the invisible, just as his invasion into his therapist’s home and his ironic observation of the Weegee photos reinforce the latent threat of the object regarded by Western gaze. The sewer into which the cockroach sails marks the location of what the mainstream, settled population of Canada fears most: the dark space harboring, unseen, the creatures that horrify—not grateful, after all.

Ultimately, Hage gives the Arab figure a voice (but not a name); he characterizes that figure, but not to free him, not to rescue or ennoble him. The voice he gives his narrator expresses the vendetta of the shamed. Simultaneously, Hage gives life to the characters who, in Camus’s works, are only a part of the landscape. The narrator of Cockroach expresses the individuality that Camus could not see, but also the conditions of shame and anger that Camus helped to create. Yet, the narrator tragically falls into the trap of believing there actually is something essential to his identity; he may “return the gaze,” as it were, but he returns it only from the object position to which he is assigned by the regime of the look. This is a regime from which the narrator never escapes. Here, a clear distinction between the narrator’s voice and the narrative itself emerges; because the narrator is held in the sway of the Western gaze, he fails to move outside of it or to notice other, nuanced possibilities, such as the idea that just as migrant identity is not monolithic, neither is settler-Canadian identity. These are ideas several other of the novel’s characters hint at, but the narrator brushes off Genevieve’s frustrated rebukes that, for example, “Not everyone who grew up here has a job or a house,”Footnote ⁸⁹ just as he sweeps aside Farhoud’s angry rejection of the narrator’s desire to “settle a score” with his oppressors.Footnote ⁹⁰ With the narrator’s final, triumphant transformation, then, Hage focalizes the true violence underlying the gaze: the obliterating power of shame flourishes in the moment that the object of the look accepts the look as a valid measure of identity—the moment when the Other becomes, as it were, a cockroach.

The Politics of Absurdity

In exploring the political and psychological structures of shame, Hage redefines the idea of the absurd. He is concerned with similar kinds of moral dilemmas as was Camus, but his response to Camus is that it is precisely the injustice of Western imperial consciousness that establishes the conditions of the absurd, characterizing what Camus himself would call a “divorce” between intention and reality. Recalling that Camus defines the absurd as that which emerges from the “distance between the two terms” of a comparison, Cockroach dramatizes the distance between the immigrant and the settler-Canadian. Hage understands the dilemma of an individual living in a world in which death is inevitable—this is Camus’s essential definition for the condition of absurdity. But Hage replaces that fundamental predicament within a further disorienting context—that of the Other exiled in the West (or of the repressed and nameless living a life among those with documented stories). By telling this story, the novel underscores the privileged position Camus occupied, laying absurdity upon absurdity: the absurd life of inevitable death lived within an absurd context in which the reality, depth, and individuality of migrant life are not only denied but written across with lies, expectations for gratitude, or assumptions of a narrow range of “types.” Finally, Hage’s novel identifies shame as the device that permits the gaze its deathly authority, transforming the body upon which the gaze looks into a reified object. Hage’s project thus falls in line with Said’s appeal for a defiant investigation of the underlying bias informing Camus’s works: “The interrelationship between geography and the political context pitting French colonialism against Algerian natives,” Said argues, “has to be reanimated exactly where, in the novels, Camus covers it with a superstructure celebrated by Sartre as providing ‘a climate of the absurd.’”Footnote ⁹¹ Hage fulfills Said’s entreaty by adding atop Camus’s absurdly “cosmic indifference”Footnote ⁹² the additional cruelty of local indifference—the indifference of those with privilege toward those with none.

If the look is the apparatus that prompts awareness of oneself among others, in Cockroach it is characterized as a device of colonial/settler inscription. Although the narrator knows he is “marked” by the look, he manipulates it, knowing it is something that ensures a kind of ironic blindness in the one who regards the immigrant Other. He transforms himself into the object (the cockroach), promising a vengeance that is ordained by the structure of the look itself. Of course, the transformation is also the narrator’s own tragedy—even if he will obliterate the “oppressor,” he is also obliterated in his transformation and his irreversible turn to the underground. Herein lies the absurd tragedy of the narrator’s choice: nameless, he finally also becomes voiceless and faceless. There is nothing left to look at; all that remains is the specter itself: the Other. Hage reverses the shame of being subjected to the look, casting it back at the one whose gaze holds such discursive power. “Shame on you,” is the sentiment of Cockroach, a castigation lodged at those who inherit, unquestioningly, the philosophical tradition established by Camus. Yet, within this specular model of intersubjectivity, pointing the shame back at the source of the gaze does not recuperate the Other from his object status.

Hage’s novel expresses, on one hand, a loving tribute to Camus and the humanist crisis of uncertainty that he drew upon with such beautiful, poetic precision. On the other hand, Cockroach revolts against the imperial premises whose injustice Camus accepted as necessary, and implicitly accuses Camus and the legacy of his oeuvre for participating in the kind of world-making that helped solidify a cruel image of the Middle Eastern Other in the Western imagination. Moreover, what Cockroach offers in response to Camus’s Orientalist representations operates as a mode of turning the structure of shaming upside down, reorienting the monstrous underbelly as a murky, barely repressed presence constantly threatening accession. Although the novel suggests that such an outcome—the migrant as the ashamed product of the Western gaze—may often be inevitable, it does suggest other possibilities, underscored by Weegee’s photos, which call attention to the regime of the look, by Genevieve’s occasional interjections into the narrator’s monolithic interpretation of Canadian identity and by Farhoud’s alternative approach to self-articulation in Canada. Of course, the narrator, determined to “win” the struggle against the West within the terms set by the colonial victors, refuses to consider these other possibilities. Thus, the novel rings a warning bell, as if to say: imperialism contradicted the conditions of absurd ethics and, in doing so, created a different kind of absurdity—a structure in which violence is inevitable.