Written by Madu

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The American cockroach is the largest of the thousands of species of the common cockroach, not really native to the Americas, but introduced sometime in the 17th century, possibly through the Transantlantic Slave Trade. The reddish-brown creature, sometimes known as the waterbug, is incredibly resilient. It’s a pest that loves damp areas, though it can also be found in dry places. They prefer higher temperatures but they can also survive some extremely low situations. They prefer to live outside, but any poor person can attest to having seen these creatures scattering about in their houses, hiding away in small corners and holes in the after infesting and contaminating any food source. They are one of the most disgusting and annoying living things in the world. 

In our first house on the west side of Detroit in the early 2000s, it was common to see these cockroaches not only when the kitchen lights were turned on at night. Sometimes, they would be so bold as to crawl around casually in the daytime as if they owned the house—and we were the ones invading their space. 

You might assume that roaches love dirty spaces and expiring or dying foods. This is true but incomplete as an assessment. The two-story house that our family of eight was staying in those days was in a poor neighborhood. As a home, it was full of love but it was also a spacious and claustrophobic stage where my siblings and I came of age. And it wasn’t the most well-maintained structure, with its dampness, dead insects, dead leaves, fungi and so on. By the time we had moved there, it had become such a comfortable home for the roaches as well that it felt like they had declared that it was theirs and that they would not be leaving so easily—no matter how much my mother cleaned the house.. 

To get rid of roaches, you have to go to war with them. You have to be proactive, merciless, and hypervigilant. No matter how many you kill, there’s always more. And the second you think they’re gone, when a few days or a week have passed without seeing one sneaking around in the cupboards, you’ll turn the lights on in the kitchen to get some water at midnight and see that they are alive and well, and sometimes invisible, because they are always getting better at hiding from you. 

There were always cans of Raid roach killer sprays around the house. When my mother’s excessive cleaning failed, my father  would sometimes take these cans and spray them with a burning passion in so many crevices and surfaces that the smell would be overpowering and choke him and the rest of us. Sometimes, when the infestation would be too much, or my father’s anger would reach its peak, he would buy a pack of the Raid foggers. You could push down on the top and activate a cloud of fog that would fill the room with poisonous smoke. He would set one in each room of the house and all of us would go to the park for the day. When we returned, we would air out the house and spend a few hours cleaning and clearing out the dead roaches. The foggers were very successful. Yet, somehow, a few months later, the roaches would be back. 

Then the process would repeat itself. 

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There are more than enough reasons to hate roaches. Along with how they contaminate foods and surfaces, one of the biggest reasons that this creature is an enemy of God and man is that they are a great source of shame for poor people. 

Roaches have a sadistic streak. They know exactly when you have company over and show themselves then. This timed appearance  lets your visitor know that you and your family are poor and supposedly live in filth, and that they shouldn’t eat or drink anything from your house since it might be infected with the diseases that the roaches carry. It also reminds you in a very targeted and infuriating way that this is the condition of your life. 

It piles up on you. Living paycheck to paycheck, trying to survive to the next day, trying to find the small happinesses in life, balancing it with constant work and stress. The roach is the symbol of this kind of life that is not a life. A kind of non-life. This way of existing in life’s basement. The roach, by being present, brings you down with it into the dirt, as if you yourself are a pest, a dirty disgusting insect that sustains itself on the dead things and leftovers of the world. 

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For many years, I watched my father fight against the roaches. My mother dealt with them simply as a nuisance. They bothered her as much as fruit flies and sometimes mice did — she killed them and set out traps, but she was busy with housekeeping on top of working to think of them as anything more. But my father hated them and his  anger towards them never calmed. e He never accepted them into our home and seeing them would distract him from whatever he was doing before they made themselves visible. He killed them with shoes, cans of Raid, and the foggers that would leave him coughing for the rest of the day. The poisonous smoke might have even gotten in his lungs, but he was betting that he would be more resilient than his enemies. And in a way, each battle was a declaration that  he wanted more from life, for himself, and for his family. When he threw away the food that the roaches would crawl on, he was saying that he could afford to replace them.

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Eventually, we moved out of that house. I don’t remember if we ever got rid of all the roaches, if that was even possible, but we left that house for a better one. One where roaches showed up once in a while but were mostly absent. This didn’t stop my father from being vigilant. He still kept his cans of Raid and foggers available, just in case. Since you never know when the roaches will find your new home. Or how every poor person should understand, no matter how far away you get from the days of living with roaches, you never truly feel comfortable. You feel as if the metaphorical rug will someday be pulled from underneath you. That one bad event, one misstep, will push you back into poverty. You’ll fall back in the basement with those disgusting creatures. 

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It’s funny sometimes to realize that we inherit behaviors and anxieties from our parents. A few years ago, I moved from Detroit to Brooklyn in New York City. I moved into a well-maintained pre-war apartment that costs more than $2000 a month and has a doorman. When I got the keys to the apartment, I felt a great sense of accomplishment, that feeling of finally making it. When I talked to my dad about where I lived, he was happy that I was able to pay for it and live in the city on my own. 

A few months after I moved in, I had only dealt with the normal problems—a clogged toilet, heating issues, a fridge that for some reason felt too loud for me, even though none of my friends seemed to think that it was. One day, after coming home from a trip to Detroit, I turned on the light in the kitchen and saw a roach scurry behind the new fridge. Like the rats in New York City, it was much larger than the normal ones that I was used to. The city seems like a paradise of abundance of these creatures of filth. I felt intense anger at seeing the roach in my apartment. I moved the fridge and searched everywhere for this roach until I found and killed it. 

Looking at its lifeless body on the tiled kitchen floor, I felt like I had been found out. That no matter how far my dad and I had run from these creatures and the condition of being poor that came with them, that they had found me in Brooklyn to remind me that I was just like them. I stepped on it once more. It was dead, but I wanted to remind it that I would never be like it again. 

That night, I went down to the superintendent’s office and filled out a sheet in front of the door that scheduled pest control. In the first week of that next month, the exterminator came and asked if I had seen any bugs or roaches. Even though I hadn’t seen any outside of the one that I killed, I told him that I see them sometimes around the apartment. He sprayed whatever he was carrying around the corners of the apartment. I’ve had him come in every month since, just in case. You have to stay hypervigilant with roaches. The instant you relax is when they’ll take over your house and your life again.

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