New York Times
November 24, 2005
News Analysis
In France, Artists Have Sounded the Warning Bells for Years
By ALAN RIDING
PARIS, Nov. 23 - So life often imitates art. Yet with the recent uprisings in some French immigrant neighborhoods, this cliché came with a new twist: art, in the form of movies and rap music, has long been warning that French-born Arab and black youths felt increasingly alienated from French society and that their communities were ripe for explosion.
Certainly anyone who saw Mathieu Kassovitz's 1995 film "Hate" had no reason to be surprised by this fall's violence. At the time, Mr. Kassovitz's portrayal of a seething immigrant Paris banlieue (or suburb), even his choice of title, seemed shocking and exaggerated. Today, the movie could almost pass for a documentary.
In "Hate," burning cars light up the soulless space between high-rise public housing projects as residents protest the beating of a young Arab, Ahmed. "Don't forget, the police kill," graffiti on the wall proclaim. Three angry, restless youths - a Jew, an Arab and a black - visit Ahmed at the hospital and are themselves beaten by the police. They plan revenge.
After "Hate" had been shown around the world, Mr. Kassovitz wrote, "I made this film with the conviction that the police brutality of the time should be denounced, and that we should point our fingers at it, but also to dissect it, to understand what its inner workings are." In other words, a movie director, then in his late 20's, recognized something politicians chose to ignore.
This month, Mr. Kassovitz went further, accusing France's hard-line interior minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, of provoking the latest troubles. "As much as I would like to distance myself from politics," Mr. Kassovitz wrote on his Web site (mathieukassovitz.com), "it is difficult to remain distant in the face of the depravations of politicians. And when these depravations draw the hate of all youth, I have to restrain myself from encouraging the rioters."
Even in the mid-1990's, though, "Hate" was hardly an isolated protest. Rather, it spawned a genre known as banlieue movies, which explored the problems of children of Arab and African immigrants and effectively announced the birth of a new "lost generation." (Coline Serreau's "Chaos" also focused on young Arab women trying to escape male-run households.) The message of these films was uniformly disturbing.
Why did these movies not ring alarm bells? Clearly, screen fiction has a distancing effect: it is "only" telling a story. Yet television documentaries and news reports can have much the same result. For most middle-class French, nightly car burnings and police clashes with stone-throwing youths have been taking place on their television screens, not in their neighborhoods.
Where fiction has an advantage portraying reality is in giving individual faces to well-documented social and economic problems. Banlieue movies have also proved more effective in analyzing these problems than have newspapers and politicians, who, of late, have variously expressed shock and surprise, as if the riots were as unpredictable as a natural disaster.
French artists are not alone in taking a lead. In Britain, for instance, Udayan Prasad's movie "My Son the Fanatic" (1997) explored Islamic fundamentalism in a Pakistani community eight years before this summer's suicide bombings in London. And many Britons only discovered their society's multiculturalism through Zadie Smith's best-selling novel "White Teeth" and Monica Ali's "Brick Lane."
In Germany and the Netherlands too, fiction - cinema and literature - is helping to record societies being irreversibly altered by immigrants and their locally born children and grandchildren. And here's the point: across Western Europe, de facto segregation exists, reinforced by the fact that immigrants usually live in their own communities and do lower-paid jobs. Only through fiction do many Europeans meet the "foreigners" in their midst.
The French banlieues, though, have found a voice in talented rap musicians. They burst on the scene here 15 years ago, borrowing a musical style from African-Americans, but using lyrics that spoke to the irate, frustrated and unemployed youth of immigrant extraction in the very banlieues where many of the rappers were raised.
This month, the left-of-center Paris daily Libération had the clever idea of revisiting popular rap songs and interviewing the artists about their sentiments today. As with the banlieue movies, the warning signs were clear in some lyrics.
As far back as 1991, for instance, a group called NTM addressed politicians in one song:
Go visit the banlieues
Look at young people in their eyes
You who command from on high
My appeal is serious, don't take it as a game
Young people are changing, that's what is worrying.
And, four years later, NTM sang: "How long will this last?/ It's been years since everything could explode."
Rim-K of the group 113 was just 20 in 1999 when he wrote "Facing the Police," which included these lines: "There'd better be no atrocity or the town will explode/ The community is a time-bomb that will go off/ From the commander to the intern, everyone of them is hated." Rim-K told Libération that he had expected trouble after dozens of African immigrants housed in run-down Paris hotels died in fires this summer.
For Henri Gaudin, a prominent French architect, along with discrimination, poverty and unemployment, the architecture of the banlieue housing projects, or cités, has also contributed to the uprising. Inspired by Le Corbusier, these stand-alone high-rises promised low-cost housing, but lack urban infrastructure, like streets.
"The youths in the cités have nowhere to be anonymous; they are constantly viewed," Mr. Gaudin said in an interview. "The only places they can go to escape their family is to hang out in hallways or in basements, or form groups at the foot of buildings. They have no city, no public space."
Disiz la Peste, a black rap singer, captured this sense of hopelessness just a few months ago in lyrics that ended:
Those who treat me with disdain
Who make rotten jokes
Which don't even make sense
Neither humor nor love
And France cares little what I do
Forever in its mind
I'll just be a young man from the banlieue.
So, in truth, life has not been imitating art. Rather, cinema and rap music have been mirroring the life and mood of France's immigrant underclass. The problem is that, in the corridors of power in central Paris, no one was paying heed. Until now, that is. This week, a group of conservative legislators asked the Justice Ministry to investigate whether seven rap groups had incited violence and racism through their lyrics. Shooting the messengers, though, may not be the most effective solution.
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