While Maharaj’s Samuel encounters outrage at immigrant birth rates, he doesn’t live in a province that actively courts one particular race and nationality to mitigate the demographic threat minorities pose. The experiences of Hage’s narrator are far more negative than those of the privileged white Parisians so “highly sought after and desired by the Quebec government.” Immediately after envying “their inherited knowledge of wine and culture” that allows them to prosper in Montreal’s restaurant scene, he recounts his interest in becoming a waiter at the restaurant where he works as a busboy. His boss mocks his swart skin: “You are a little too well done for that...the sun has burned your face a bit too much.” In response, he unleashes a jeremiad designed to aggravate Quebec’s cultural anxiety: “Infertile filth!...Your days are over and your kind is numbered...no one can barricade against the powerful, fleeting semen of the hungry and the oppressed...Doomed you will be, doomed as you are infested with newcomers!...All shall be changed to accommodate...”

That last word carries an allusion to Quebec’s struggle with reasonable accommodation, the notion that our Charter’s equality rights demand allowances for ethnic minorities. Clearly, Hage’s narrator finds the city insufficiently accomodating. And despite Montreal’s various religious communities, he laments that “there is only one god left” because one “is all we are allowed.” While an Indian doctor complains to Samuel that he’s saddled with Torontonians’ expectations of a mystical subcontinent, Hage’s narrator finds “the exotic has to be modified...not too authentic.” The opposite of Samuel’s multicultural centre, Hage’s narrator lives in a society that tries to be “flat, square, and one-dimensional.”

Hage’s narrator expends considerable energy defying what he sees as oppressive powers in a world he can “neither participate in nor control.” Little surprise, then, that Cockroach deals more explicitly with colonialism’s legacy than The Amazing Absorbing Boy. Hage’s misanthropic narrator harbours particular antipathy for those who escape the “dictators and crumbling cities” of old French colonies only to mistreat their fellow exiles in Quebec: “They consider themselves royalty when all they are is the residue of colonial power.” Of course, these immigrants generally occupy a higher socio-economic realm and are better adjusted to their new homes; the very act of integrating into a society becomes a submission to colonialism.

“We come to these countries for refuge and to find better lives,” says an Iranian cab driver, “but it is these countries that made us leave our homes in the first place.” He particularly objects to Western support for the brutal Shah, whose ouster led to the mullahs who plague Iran to this day. A Canadian-Iranian arms deal near the end of the novel emphasises that the West’s imperial intrusions are no relic of the past, and Hage leaves us wondering how we’d feel joining a society that helped ravage our homeland. (Those looking for an anodyne affirmation of immigrant gratitude are better off rereading the American section of The Kite Runner.)

Upon Cockroach’s release, Hage wondered if he would be seen as a thankless immigrant. Such a perception would be unfair but understandable. Some of the novel’s immigrants profess gratitude for their new home, but these moments are tempered with colonial subtext. “I am here now. And that’s what counts,” says Farhoud, a gay man who fled Iran’s Islamic revolution. “I am here now, alive.” However, Farhoud enters Canada thanks to a diplomat who takes him as his lover and then targets him with xenophobic insults. The narrator also expresses thanks for the country he inhabits, but not to the nation-state or the descendants of Europeans who comprise the bulk of its population. Seeing an aboriginal cook working at a diner, the narrator considers thanking him not only for the meal, but “for the trees, the mountains, and the rivers.” The novel’s Quebec is a colonial construction, ever afraid of erasure by subsequent supplanting. Its culture wasn’t imprinted on virgin slate, and the immigrants in Cockroach, like so many immigrants in Quebec, are merely added inscription.

National literatures speak to the core of their society’s self-perceptions. They are narratives that expound on the larger narratives, fictions that address deeper fictions. Neither The Amazing Absorbing Boy nor Cockroach forms a sustained argument, but, by exploiting the singular strengths of their form, each peers into the fissures in Canada’s multicultural veneer. Literature has the unique capacity to expand our awareness of the infinite variety of human experience, and when a narrative is as deeply rooted in a particular consciousness as these two novels, it offers even more: a glimpse, however fleeting, of what it is to inhabit a foreign perspective. These characters’ thoughts commingle with our own, and as we’re allowed a first person view of these new places and challenges, we’re permitted access to these immigrants’ experience of the world. In this sense, reading is itself assimilative, an act of enmeshing and defamiliarization through which we’re absorbed into another consciousness as the peculiar nuances and inflections of our own voices are momentarily aligned with — even subsumed by — those of another. In this way, we are able to step outside ourselves, to emigrate, briefly, into an immigrant nation. As representations, these books offer an image of our society, and as readers entering them we add yet another layer to the palimpsestic makeup of contemporary Canada.

“Canada is not so much a country as a holding tank filled with the disgruntled progeny of defeated peoples,” writes Mordecai Richler in Solomon Gursky Was Here. “We do our damn best to exclude more ill-bred newcomers, because they remind us of our own mean origins.” That first sentiment captures the downside of Toronto’s model, while the latter exposes the irony of Quebec’s attempts at cultural preservation. Even though their assimilative traditions differ, both grapple with similar problems, as The Amazing Absorbing Boy and Cockroach help make clear.

Literature offers no solution to these problems, but the intimacy, insight, and sensitivity with which these books bring us into their protagonists’ perspectives illustrate the complexities of assimilation in ways mere statistics and anecdotes can’t. Just as Samuel eventually becomes “a patch of every amazing thing” he has absorbed, so too are we left with lingering remnants of these borrowed viewpoints, these new ways of seeing something both familiar and unknown — the appeal of a Toronto that is both home and foreign land, the dark alleys of an unrecognizable Montreal, “a dust here and a dust there” of the myriad peoples that make up our mongrel nation.