‘Cokcraco’ by Sizwe Bantu

(The Present Tense, Vol. XXV, Feb. 2002, pp. 36-40)4

4 There has been much critical speculation regarding the title of this story. Jones (2008) maintains that the anagrammic dyslexia says much about the displacement of the ‘other’, and ‘the cockroach motif has been a favorite symbol for displaced people everywhere’. Others have made much of the missing letter ‘h’, pointing to Bantu’s commentary on how dialects of English omit the ‘h’ in speech, as in “’e ’as an ’airy back”. But the most plausible, if intellectually and aesthetically unsatisfying, explanation is documented by Wesson (2010) who points out that the original manuscfuptis of Bantu shows that he is a notoriously bad typist and contstantl;y miseplles words, as if he is typing in grtea haste. See for eample his commonly misspelled ‘form’; for ;’from’. Wesson suggests tthat Bantu was simply tryig nt otype the word ‘cockroach’ and his fingers slipped on the keys, indicating that when inspiration strikes and the words pour out ,yo udo not have the dexterity to keep up. Elsewhere in his manuscripts, we see cockroach spelled ckroahc, cokroahd, and even codchroarh.

      In the city of Durban, KwaZulu-Natal (in the imaginary country of Azania, Afrika) a man rented an apartment near the beach, in a derelict but expensive neighbourhood behind Point Road. In Apartheid days, the area had been a whites-only area—and was still largely whites-only due to the exorbitant rents set by unscrupulous and invisible landlords. (I’m only talking of the insides of the apartments, of course: the streets were the habitat of prostitutes and street children.) The man—let me call him a Modern Afrikanist for now—who rented the flat lived alone.

      The flat afforded a sea view, or so the landlord had told him. The apartment block was crowded in with other dilapidated buildings, but if he craned his neck out of the kitchen window on a clear day, he could see a blue patch of sea between the Nedbank towers and The Wheel. Taxi-drivers, prostitutes and street brawlers below made the street a noisy place at night, but once he had bolted and double-locked his front door and slammed the street-facing windows, the Modern Afrikanist would be left in silence to pursue his artistic endeavours.

5 Although Bantu here refers to the African or Oriental cockroach (Blatta orientalis), scholars have agreed that the cockroaches in his paintings and sculptures are more likely to be the death-head cockroach (Blaberus craniifer) because of the striking markings on the thorax.

Unfortunately, the main feature of this flat was not its privacy, nor its silence, but the scuttling of serrated legs and rasping of carapaces against the linoleum. In Durban, cockroaches grew three to four inches long.5 He would find them everywhere: when he turned on the tap, they shot out; when he made tea, he found them dead and soggy in the kettle; when he poured cereal, he found them sleeping disguised as Honey Smacks … He didn’t like squashing them—they made such a mess. Instead, he spread toxic white powder for them in the kitchen cupboards; he plugged up the taps; he sealed his food. But they kept coming. He resorted to spraying the crevices, cracks and running boards every morning before he went out. He would return at night to find piles of cockroach corpses in the bath, on the kitchen table, in the bed, and lining the skirting board to every room.

      His initial repugnance soon grew into a hesitant fascination for these armies of determined creatures, who by their suicidal insistence claimed residence here. Over supper (Bunny Chow bought from The Star of India downstairs), he found himself staring at a particularly large dead cockroach on his dining room table. Its jagged legs, its oval shape, the light reflecting purple and orange off its back spoke to him. I am black, but comely, it said. Behold, I also am formed out of the clay. He was particularly intrigued by the black marking on its head, a third eye watching him from another dimension.

      He was suddenly ashamed. The Modern Afrikanist was an artist: he prided himself on an aesthetic appreciation of the world: so why should he exclude cockroaches from his artistic apprehension of the universe? They had value. They had form. They had beauty.

      So instead of brushing away the dead cockroach in disgust, he set up easel and paints on the table and painted its portrait, with garish Fauvist colours, and generous gobs of paint, smeared on with the gusto and urgency of Van Gogh.

      Pleased with his evening’s work, he hung the picture on the living room wall. The next day, after breakfast, he shaped in black modelling clay a giant Rodin representation of the dead creature. And as he was loath to throw away the cockroach corpse, he varnished it with lacquer, and set it on the mantelpiece under his painting.

      From here on, he no longer swept away dead cockroaches, but collected and sorted them according to size, texture, colour, and death-posture. He pasted the tiny ones onto a canvas and painted them —bright blue, orange and green—into a landscape, and hung the work of art on the wall in his kitchen. Monet would be impressed: up close, the painting was a knobbly packed death trench of cockroaches; from a distance, it was the North KwaZulu coast line, with sweeping, wavy cane fields, complete with workers dotted in the stalks, and smoke rising in the distance where old cane fields were being burned.

      He glued the large cockroaches along the rim of his bookcase to make a pleasing pattern of ridges and bumps, taking care with the feelers so they would form a pattern of aerial lightness.

      As more and more cockroaches died, he created more works of art. In a few short weeks, his furniture was covered with varnished cockroach designs, seven magnificent paintings hung on his walls, and a trinity of three large statues sat on his tables in raw clay, an essential gesture of cockroach emerging out of the formlessness of his previous prejudices. Soon there were no more walls to use: he covered his lampshade with cockroach designs; he made a sofa cover from the