Uncomfortable Encounters

Uncomfortable Encounters: Cockroach Narratives, Selfhood, and Togetherness Nathaniel Otjen (bio) Why do we turn from insects in loathing? Our competitors are not only cold blooded, and green- and yellow-blooded, but are also cased in a clacking horn. They lack the grace to go about as we do, softside-out to the wind and thorns. They have rigid eyes and brains strung down their backs. But they make up the bulk of our comrades-at-life, so I look to them for a glimmer of companionship. — Annie Dillard Seeking a break from the bustle of conference activities, I set a few hours aside one rainy spring morning in 2016 to explore the Harvard Museum of Natural History. While wandering through the museum’s arthropod exhibit, I came upon a minidisplay of Madagascar hissing cockroaches. Dozens of “hissers” crawled over and clung to the wood branches, stump, and detritus that constituted their aquarium habitat. Upon seeing these shiny, creeping arthropods, I stopped moving, my breathing grew shallow, and I experienced a series of chills course through my body. Overcome by an unsettling emotional and physiological response, I momentarily experienced feelings akin to vulnerability, disgust, and even fear. In a word, these beings made me feel uncomfortable. Luckily enough, I experienced a similar uncomfortable encounter with cockroaches just two months later while visiting the Shedd Aquarium in Chicago. The same unsettling response came over me as I observed several Peruvian cockroaches sunning themselves under a heat lamp. Through these repeat encounters, I began to wonder what ecological [End Page 88] opportunities emerge from sustained encounters with beings that cause discomfort. Because the cockroach simultaneously disturbs and fascinates many of us and because the roach has cooccupied our dwellings for millennia, this creature has long been a figure of literature and lore. As Marion Copeland notes, “Cockroaches have been part and parcel of human story since humans began telling stories.”1 According to Copeland, an “ecocentric theme” characterized by “empathy and compassion” tends to run through the cockroach novel of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.2 These accounts “show concern for the health of the biotic community . . . and for championing humans’ acceptance of their own membership in, and therefore their responsibility to, that community.”3 A similar “ecocentric” approach characterizes contemporary nonfiction accounts of cockroaches, which often feature narratives that describe uncomfortable encounters with these arthropods. During the last two decades, several uncomfortable-encounter narratives have developed as part of the larger literary subgenre I am calling the “multispecies memoir.” Multispecies memoirs describe how one’s sense of self emerges through relationships and encounters with other species. A subset of multispecies memoirs explores relations with beings that make people uncomfortable. With its status as the most disliked creature on the planet, it is no surprise that the cockroach has been a favorite critter of uncomfortable-encounternarratives.4 By examining the ways in which all beings, including human groups, mutually shape one another and get along together, multispecies studies provides a framework for interpreting personal narratives of cockroach encounters. Recognizing multiple worlds of species and material agents constantly creating themselves anew in acts of transformation, multispecies studies examines the moments, sites, and manifestations of cobecoming. As Thom van Dooren, Eben Kirksey, and Ursula Münster explain, “A multispecies approach focuses on the multitudes of lively agents that bring one another into being through entangled relations that include, but always also exceed, dynamics of predator and prey, parasite and host, researcher and researched, symbiotic partner, or indifferent neighbor.”5 With a focus on the processes, relations, and transmutations that bring “multitudes of lively agents” into being, this orientation centers and celebrates modes of togetherness. What [End Page 89] are environmental humanities scholars to make, however, of beings, such as cockroaches, that complicate togetherness? Many people, after all, seek to disrupt or end any relations that brought themselves and cockroaches together in the first place. Is togetherness possible with cockroaches and other discomfiting species? If it is, how does it differ from accounts in multispecies studies, and how might it lead to a reconsideration of the concept altogether? Indeed, if scholars are to take seriously Donna Haraway’s call of “staying with the trouble” and

Aesthetics · Art · Feeling · Literature · Narrative · Oath · Psychoanalysis · Wonder · Animal and Plant Science Education · History · Philosophy · Psychology · Social Psychology

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