The Grotesque as an Instrument of Sociopolitical Critique in Rawi Hage’s Migrant Fiction

Abstract

This essay considers the function of the grotesque mode in Rawi Hage’s novels Cockroach (2008) and Carnival (2012). The grotesque is an artistic form with which Hage draws attention to the predicament of the class of poor and disadvantaged new immigrants in contemporary Montreal. He thereby offers a recent immigrant’s unsettling, ex-centric perspective on the Canadian multicultural ideal that proclaims the acceptance of ethnic and racial difference.

Formal aspects that generate a grotesque effect include the first-person narrator’s self-image, his disruptive discourse of resistance, his disorienting view of urban reality, and spatial metaphors in the context of the protagonist’s social alienation and marginalisation. Influential theories of the grotesque, introduced by Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Kayser, help to describe recurrent shifts in the literary text from “the carnivalesque” to “the demonic grotesque”. In addition, Julia Kristeva’s related notions of “the abject” and “semiotic discourse” throw light on the sense of fear and repulsion felt towards the urban poor, and on the protagonist’s deliberate identification with vermin in the context of his discourse of resistance.

Even though the underprivileged migrant is able to answer back, Hage’s novels are devoid of true regenerative and liberating power. As soon as the literary carnivalesque shifts towards the demonic grotesque, the narrative gives prominence to the migrant’s isolation and socio-economic outsider position. Nonetheless, the grotesque mode, being typically associated with flux and the rupturing of boundaries, does function as a powerful tool with which the author depicts the recent immigrant as an individual with an indomitable spirit.