On February 16, 1988 John Waters unleashed a bug that would go on to multiply, lay eggs in my young brain and the young brains of thousands more.  In his most shocking act yet, the legendarily filthy filmmaker released a movie with a PG rating: Hairspray.  So at the tender age of ten, I found an unlocked door that led me, through Hairspray, to his other, decidedly NOT PG work.  And I was forever changed.

And I’m sure yall know that I can’t get through a season of the Missing Witches podcast without mentioning John Waters - but what does any of this have to do with a kinship with cockroaches?

In the movie Hairspray, my gateway to a new way of seeing and being in the world, our Pope of Trash (a nickname that was coined by another bug freak William Burroughs) presents a recurring motif for us to examine and unpack: the roach.  Juxtaposed alongside a story that is, at its core, about segregation, John places the cockroach.  The idea of hairspray, the product, is all about aesthetic presentation and control.  The roach is the opposite.  It acts as a symbol of filth and chaos, defiant insubordination, and beneath it all, survival.

In the film’s triumphant finale, the Corny Collins show is racially integrated, and another integration.  Tracy, fat, lower middle class, put in Special Ed because of her hairdo, wears a pink silk gown, covered in a huge graphic roach pattern, and is crowned queen.   The illusion of control is broken. 

There’s a quote that’s attributed to the philosopher Neitche, sometimes the poet Rumi, I can’t find the primary resource citation, but whomever said it, it rings true:

“If you crush a cockroach, you’re a hero. If you crush a butterfly, you’re a villain. Morals have aesthetic criteria.”

And indeed Scientific research proves that flies carry more disease-causing pathogens than cockroaches, but one survey showed that restaurant patrons are more likely to eat food touched by flies.

Of the survey respondents, 61 percent would continue eating their meal after a fly touched and contaminated it. While only 3 percent of survey respondents reported they would continue eating food on which a cockroach crawled.

“Many restaurant patrons may not be aware that house flies are twice as filthy as cockroaches,” says entomologist Ron Harrison, Ph.D.  

And we’ll get into how remarkably clean cockroaches actually are in a bit, but the message remains clear:  Morals have aesthetic criteria.

In Hairspray, the roach is made beautiful, in all of John Waters works, weirdos infiltrate square worlds and make those worlds more beautiful.  A study funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service found that the most hated animal in America is the cockroach.  So it tracks that John Waters would choose them as icons of the veneration of bad taste.

So let’s join this veneration today.  To look upon the most hated animal in America, and rejoice in it.

I am cockroach kin, and I’ve referred to myself as a cockroach for a long time - I don’t need much to survive, but I have survived, multiple personal apocalypses later, and I’m still here.  I’m adaptable.  I slip between cracks.  As National Geographic points out, “all cockroaches want is food, water and warmth.”  In all our complexity, we are simple creatures.  All of us.  Earth air fire water is all we really need.

When my deeply fastidious clean freak of a roommate spotted a roach in our kinda sketchy apartment building, she called the cops, AKA the health department. An inspector arrived and while she was sympathetic to our fears, she only saw one roach, and deciding that our situation didn’t warrant a formal complaint, she used the time to regale us with stories of those infestations she’d seen where cockroaches carpeted the floors and paneled the walls.   We started packing immediately and moved out as soon as we could.  

Because the scariest thing about seeing a cockroach, they are after all, quite tiny and unthreatening on their own, the scariest thing about seeing a cockroach is that if you see one, it means there are likely thousands more hiding in the darkness.  This is true of Witches too.

We Witches are all cockroach kin, operating in the darkness for our own survival.  Flick on the light and we scatter back into the places between places, to continue our work undercover.  Quick!  Hide!  There’s safety in the shadows.

In a piece from Animal Acts: Performing Species Today, and in a performance you can watch on youtube called With What Ass Does The Cockroach Sit? Carmelita Tropicana writes in the voice of Martina the cockroach, both Carmelita and Martina draw on the story Elian Gozales :

On November 21, 1999, Elián's mother, her partner, and Elián fled Cuba by boat as part of a group of refugees attempting to reach the United States. The boat sank during the journey, and Elián's mother, along with most of the passengers, drowned. Elián was found floating on an inner tube and rescued by two fishermen, who turned him over to the U.S. Coast Guard.  At six years old, Elian became the center of a high-profile international custody battle…

Through Carmeilta, Martina reminds us that all outsiders are cockroach kin.  That we have learned how to play dead… how to pretend to be something we’re not, we know how to hide…This is theater of survival. No stage, just survival. To “play dead” is both instinct and performance, a rehearsal of disappearance. 

Martina says “We roaches live… even if our lives are full of insult.”

The cockroach and the Witch carry what gets projected onto us and keep moving anyway. There is no need to be transformed (and speaking of metamorphosis, did you know that Kafka never names Gregor's new form as roach?  This is just the creature we’ve decided on in our readings?) but for Martina, the roach doesn’t need to be redeemed, or transformed. Just… continuous.  This is the message of With What Ass Does A Cockroach Sit?  Continue.  Keep going.  Despite the insults, despite the anxiety, despite the fact that danger lurks - keep going.  Continue.  Survive.

Martina doesn’t ask for sympathy. She offers something more unsettling: a model of existence that survives without recognition, without cleansing, without narrative reward.

If the heroic animal ascends, the cockroach persists.  If the human seeks meaning, the cockroach practices duration.  Eyes that have viewed the world for millions of years.

ST. ROACH by Muriel Rukeyser from The Gates, McGraw-Hill, 1976

For that I never knew you, I only learned to dread you, for that I never touched you, they told me you are filth, they showed me by every action to despise your kind; for that I saw my people making war on you, I could not tell you apart, one from another, for that in childhood I lived in places clear of you, for that all the people I knew met you by crushing you, stamping you to death, they poured boiling    water on you, they flushed you down, for that I could not tell one from another only that you were dark, fast on your feet, and slender.    Not like me. For that I did not know your poems And that I do not know any of your sayings And that I cannot speak or read your language And that I do not sing your songs And that I do not teach our children           to eat your food           or know your poems           or sing your songs But that we say you are filthing our food But that we know you not at all.Yesterday I looked at one of you for the first time. You were lighter than the others in color, that was      neither good nor bad. I was really looking for the first time. You seemed troubled and witty.Today I touched one of you for the first time. You were startled, you ran, you fled away Fast as a dancer, light, strange and lovely to the touch. I reach, I touch, I begin to know you. 

Just know that if you do touch a roach, it will immediately start cleaning itself of that touch, so let’s return to this:

Everyone thinks roaches are dirty

But cockroaches are actually more like walking hand sanitizer!  They secrete an antibacterial substance and beyond that, they clean themselves constantly.  And this too is a survival mechanism.  Roaches don’t overthink things like we do, in fact they can live for weeks without their heads, because their system is decentralized.  They operate with a combination of instinct and senses, and when the antennae on their legs, wings and mouths and head get dirty, they lose the ability to perceive food, water, danger.  

Did you ever hear the old joke:  What will survive armageddon? Cockroaches and Cher. 

Cher has become a symbol of survival for the same reason cockroaches have:  because they adapt and evolve, and just like Cher, they have evaded all attempts to keep them down. Cher and cockroaches both exhibit rapid evolutionary response.  For roaches, their high turnover rate means that they can produce many generations in much less time than it takes us humans to come up with new poisons.  And we often find that, and many scientific studies back this up, that by the time we’ve found a new way to kill them, they’ve already evolved and adapted themselves into rejecting the bait.

And this needs to be us too, Witches.  Evolve.  Adapt, hide if you have to but keep going.  The world is changing constantly and the big They is always coming up with new ways to put us Witches down.  We’ve been burned and outlawed, but we adapt, evolve and carry on.  As I said, roaches can live without their head, they can live without food for a month, water for a week, and while we Witches might not have that level of self-sustainability, we can take an anti-consumerist message from cockroaches to help us fight late stage capitalism:  what do we really need?  What can we live without?

Cockroach

By Anne Sexton

Roach, foulest of creatures,

who attacks with yellow teeth

and an army of cousins big as shoes,

you are lumps of coal that are mechanized

and when I turn on the light you scuttle

into the corners and there is this hiss upon the land.

Yet I know you are only the common angel

turned into, by way of enchantment, the ugliest.

Your uncle was made into an apple.

Your aunt was made into a Siamese cat,

all the rest were made into butterflies

but because you lied to God outrightly--

told him that all things on earth were in order--

He turned his wrath upon you and said,

I will make you the most loathsome,

I will make you into God's lie,

and never will a little girl fondle you

or hold your dark wings cupped in her palm.

But that was not true. Once in New Orleans

with a group of students a roach fled across

the floor and I shrieked and she picked it up

in her hands and held it from my fear for one hour.

And held it like a diamond ring that should not escape.

These days even the devil is getting overturned

and held up to the light like a glass of water.

These days, everything is getting overturned, and held up to the light.  We persist.

Ode To Cockroaches by O Anna Niemus

Have you seen a cockroach's face

as he turns potato chips.. into lace

as he, guru of simplicity

survives on the glue in bookbinding

God's garbage men and women

removing waste

gentle.. not

stinging like bees

or biting like mosquitoes

hiding at night from

the crushing tread or

slamming fist

Are God's strongest smartest

creatures His most despised?

The scariest thing about seeing a cockroach, they are after all, quite tiny and unthreatening, is that if you see one, it means there are likely thousands more hiding in the darkness.  This is true of Witches too.  Because our numbers are growing, and that’s scary.  Because we know that for survival and evolution, adaptation beats control.

In the end, our kinship with roaches is an invitation to notice a shared choreography of exclusion and return. Both Witches and roaches have been named as infestations, treated as signs of disorder, and targeted with rituals of removal that reveal more about the fears of the persecutor than the nature of the accused. The Witch, like the roach, is imagined as multiplying, hiding, slipping through the sanctioned boundaries of the home and the body. Yet what persists beneath these projections is a quieter truth: we mark forms of knowledge and survival that refuse central control. 

We embody our knowledge, our magic beyond our mere brains and into every cell of our being,

The Witch carries herbal, communal, and embodied ways of knowing; the cockroach carries an evolutionary grimoire of endurance, adaptability, and life in the margins. We unsettle the fantasy of purity. We expose how systems define themselves by what they cast out. To view roaches as Witch kin, as OUR kin is to recognize that what is called unclean or dangerous often names a resilience and resistance that cannot be easily governed or exterminated. Remember Witches, survival, especially under pressure, rarely looks like virtue. It looks like persistence in the dark, a continued presence where one is not supposed to be, and a refusal to disappear.

Before I leave you for today, a big raucious reminder that tomorrow, May first, we kick off our SIXTH ANNUAL Missing Witches Reparations fundraiser.  Witchcraft and the New Age have too often benefitted from an extractive relationship with First Nations - the people the culture, the magic, the land, so every year, Risa and I pay forward our community membership earnings to the Native Women’s Shelter of Montreal and invite you, our Coven at large, to seek out your local indigenous led support organization, native women’s shelter, water and land protectors and make an investment in our shared future.

Make a donation of $10 or more, take a screenshot of your receipt and email it to witchreparations@gmail.com 

Every ten dollars gets you one entry in a draw with the chance to win one of more than 25 prizes - so fifty dollars in five entries, a hundred is ten and so one.

Plus everyone who donates will automatically receive discount codes from Haus Witch in Salem, Madame Phoenix in Toronto, and North Atlantic books.

Go to missingwitches.com/reparations for all the details

……

Remember, it’s not a gift, it’s a debt.  It’s not a donation, it’s a reparation.