The Roach is Coming

The Roach is Coming

In The Roach is Coming (2018), two specifically white adolescent boys visually labor under my vocal direction: choppy grappling, breathless chasing, forceful collisions suspended in endless loop. Over this, I fold in audio of me bathing a childhood friend, now police officer, Adam. The juxtaposition establishes the film’s central dissonance—the softness of water, touch, and care against the hard embodiment of law enforcement and state power.

The work was also shaped by a recorded ride-along with Adam as we searched for a child predator. I was struck by the contradictions: Adam positioned at once as protector, prey, and predator; and my own awareness of how discourses of predation are so often mapped onto Blackness and queerness; onto my body. At one point during the ride-along, Adam himself asked me to stop recording, fearing the footage could be seized as evidence—an interruption that revealed how fragile art-making becomes when it brushes against surveillance and the machinery of the state.

The title invokes the rhythm of horror: tension building, silence thickening, the camera panning towards a dark crevice, and the audience bracing for violence—only for a roach to emerge, but for all of our sakes the violence never boils over.

Claudia Rankine’s ideas of performative whiteness reverberate throughout. Rather than assigning performance to people of color, I asked what it means to stage whiteness itself. The boys become stand-ins for me, for Adam, for my childhood self, for my first love, even for themselves. Their likeness is never just likeness—it is mirroring and distortion, reflection and contradiction, collapsing past and present, intimacy and estrangement, unfinished business and unresolvable desire.

The Roach is Coming holds these contradictions in suspension, insisting that love, violence, race, and memory are never singular, but always doubling back, always scurrying just out of view.