Hip-hop and the banlieue narrative

594068
research-article2015
FRC0010.1177/0957155815594068French Cultural StudiesDotson-Renta
French Cultural Studies
‘On n’est pas condamné à l’échec’:
Hip-hop and the banlieue narrative
French Cultural Studies
2015, Vol. 26(3) 354­–367
© The Author(s) 2015
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DOI: 10.1177/0957155815594068
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Lara Dotson-Renta
Brown University, Providence, RI
Abstract
A number of contemporary French rappers such as Kery James, Médine and Youssoupha have
reconfigured the artistic and societal image of the banlieue space and racial and religious otherness
as ‘also French’ by undertaking a deconstruction of French identity and historical narratives. These
musical artists, also predominantly Muslim, posit that the French model of cultural and religious
assimilation actually precludes full societal integration: ‘Mon respect s’fait violer au pays dit des
droits de l’Homme / Difficile de se sentir français / Sans le syndrome de Stockholm’ (Kery James,
‘Lettre à la République’). Through lyrics that acknowledge marginalisation while also staking a
claim to French identity, these artists displace concepts of centre and periphery by speaking to
and about the nation from a space that is both within and outside the French national project.
By challenging la laïcité as the only legitimate avenue to ‘Frenchness’ and insisting upon the
quotidian urban banlieue narrative as that which also constitutes a genuinely ‘French’ experience,
French Muslim rap artists have constructed an alternative discourse in which elements of society
viewed as ‘an/other’ within France are reimagined as simultaneously disruptive and fundamentally
constitutive of French national identity.
Keywords
banlieue, French rap, hip-hop, Kery James, laïcité, Médine, Youssoupha
As a result of the unifying emphasis on liberté, égalité and fraternité (and its implication of ‘sameness’) that permeates French national discourse, French hip-hop frequently contests and examines
the contours and parameters of a national French identity, proposing that not everyone within
France shares the same relationship to the historical legacies and events upon which French
national ideals were built. The site at which the fractures and discontinuities in French national
identity are most visible is frequently the banlieue, a place of exclusion that is nevertheless an
imbricated part of French society. As Pierre-Antoine Marti proposes:
Corresponding author:
Lara Dotson-Renta, Box 1970, Watson Institute for International Studies, Brown University, 111 Thayer Street,
Providence, RI 02912, USA.
Email: [email protected]
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Or la dimension territoriale est essentielle dans le rap, qui se définit en partie par ses attaches géographiques
… S’ils [les rappeurs] ne sont pas tous à proprement parler ‘banlieusards’, ils sont tous les habitants trop
bruyants de cette banlieue imaginaire qui hante la conscience nationale, en tant qu’espace fantasmé
accueillant en son sein les parias de la République, regroupant les malaises d’une société en questionnement
identitaire: violence, carences de ‘l’intégration’, chômage supposés ou réels. (Marti, 2005: 97)
Whereas the discourse of French national constructs is not limited to the banlieue, the complex
suburban space of the French city does provide a fertile landscape in which to enunciate an evolving
and hybrid French identity. As Marti proposes, the banlieue as a physical location as well as an idea
is central to the creation of an alternative discursive space in which the geography of exclusion is
overwritten by the lyricism and sound of a medium known for simultaneous affirmation and dissent.
Indeed, if the banlieusards are ‘les habitants trop bruyants de cette banlieue imaginaire qui hante la
conscience nationale’, the work of hip-hop is to disrupt the silence and exorcise an amnesiac national
consciousness. If, as Benedict Anderson posits, ‘Communities are to be distinguished, not by their
falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined … [a nation] is imagined as a community because, regardless of the actual inequality and exploitations that may prevail … the nation
is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship’ (Anderson, 2006 [1983]: 6–7), then French
hip-hop seeks to reshape the French concept of community as one that is plural, conflicting and
interwoven, but never singular. Banlieusard identity (and its implications of ‘other’) is (re)claimed
as an affirmative identity marker and a means by which to refashion the national imaginary.
A number of contemporary French rappers such as Kery James, Médine and Youssupha1 have
reconfigured the artistic and societal image of ‘otherness’ (non-white, Muslim and/or banlieusard)
as ‘also French’ by undertaking an expansion and reconfiguration of French belonging, working
both with and against formative pillars of French identity such as language, literature and history.
The genre of hip-hop serves as a vehicle by which to both enter and disrupt a discourse that speaks
of, but does not include, a nation’s ‘others’. As Tricia Rose notes:
Hip-hop emerges from complex cultural exchanges and larger social conditions of disillusionment and
alienation. Graffiti and rap were especially aggressive public displays of counterpresence and voice. Each
asserted the right to write – to inscribe one’s identity on an environment that seemed Teflon resistant to its
young people of color; an environment that made legitimate avenues for material and social participation
inaccessible. (Rose, 2006: 222)
While Rose refers to the black American cultural environment that gave birth to the hip-hop genre,
the ‘right to write – to inscribe one’s identity’ is particularly salient in the French context. In the
absence of avenues of discourse and expression that validate and allow for a hybrid or de-centred
French identity, French rap artists posit that the French model of cultural and religious assimilation
actually precludes full societal integration.
The artists’ avowed distance from a sense of unified French identity is intricately interwoven
with French colonial history, as well as the construction of laïcité and its careful delineation of a
religious subject. The fissures of laïcité, and the ways in which its implementation may be viewed
as racialised and spatialised, are particularly evident in the banlieue, where Islam is highly visible.
As a result, Kery James, Médine and Youssoupha (all practising Muslims), not only undertake a
rescripting of the colonial narratives underpinning French history, but they also frequently interject
and make reference to Islam as a fault-line in French society, and the deployment of ‘Muslimness’
as a marker of ethnic and racial differentiation. As Olivier Roy posits in Secularism Confronts Islam:
But secularization is not antireligious or anticlerical: people merely stop worshiping and stop talking about
religion; it is a process. Laïcité, on the contrary, is explicit: it is a political choice that defines the place of
religion in an authoritarian, legal manner. Laïcité is decreed by the state, which then organizes public space
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(but it does not necessarily cast religion into the private sphere, contrary to a persistent legend; it rather defines,
and thus limits in every sense of the word, the visibility of religion in the public space). (Roy, 2009: 8)
The rap artists are careful to note ways in which they perceive race and ethnic background to be
interwoven with views on Islam, effectively assigning a religion a racial dimension, and creating a
monolithic image of the banlieue. Through lyrics that acknowledge marginalisation while frequently referencing Islam (so visible a marker of banlieue space), such artists alternately choose to
mediate and reaffirm a self-designed French identity while undertaking a redeployment of French
ideals. Frequently, Muslim rap artists stake a dual claim to a Muslim religious adherence as well as
a European identity by refuting the perception of the two as mutually exclusive. By challenging
laïcité as the only legitimate avenue to ‘Frenchness’ and insisting upon the quotidian urban banlieue narrative as that which also constitutes a genuinely ‘French’ experience, French rap artists
have constructed an alternative discourse in which elements of society viewed as ‘an/other’ within
France (and the histories they invoke) are reimagined as simultaneously disruptive and fundamentally constitutive of French national identity.
In this way, hip-hop may be seen as a narrative that collaborates with literature and history in
creating new spaces of discourse. If viewed similarly to and intersecting with literature, hip-hop
lyrics may be analysed as elements within a broader operation of dialectical reconfiguration. As
Michel Laronde posits:
The displaced literary discourse is no longer the one that is produced at the margin, but the one that has
been at the center, through peripheral subversion. The language of the center is controlled by the periphery,
transformed, and restructured to be used differently in its form and content. The carrier of a hybrid identity
is no longer the discourse at the periphery, but the discourse at the center. (Laronde, 2005: 189)
By speaking of and about ‘the margins’ and both refuting and affirming that marginal space as
constitutive of a French identity, French rap artists are mapping out new geographies of belonging
in which the periphery challenges, redeploys, and eventually changes the concept of ‘centre’.
(Dis)locations: shifting the margins of French identity narratives
Certainly, Kery James, Médine and Youssoupha (who when collaborating call themselves ‘La
Ligue’) are circumspect about their place within French culture, often omitting the French ‘us’ and
referring to themselves – racially, religiously and economically – as that which the French state has
already left behind. What these artists undertake is the creation of an alternative space, highlighting
a geography of ‘Other’ dans la marge of the French political and social landscape that nevertheless
belies constant encounters and negotiations with the established national identity tropes with which
Islam, as coexistent with the banlieue, is continuously at the fault-line.
In his 2008 song ‘Banlieusards’, Kery James undertakes a positive reclaiming of the term by
providing a call to arms not for destructive revolution (such as the 2005 Paris riots), but for the rise
of the banlieue residents as an active citizenry. The discourse of the bleu, blanc, rouge becomes
imbricated with that of the noir, blanc, beur. He proclaims:
On n’est pas condamne à l’échec, voilà l’chant des combattants …
Regarde moi, j’suis noir et fier de l’être
J’manie la langue de Molière j’en maîtrise les lettres …
In validating his own visibility (‘regarde-moi’), proclaiming that the predominantly black, Arab, or
Muslim youth of the banlieue are ‘pas condamnés à l’échec’, James undertakes a rewriting of the
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predominant narrative with regards to Muslim youth residing in places deemed impenetrable and
undesirable. James engages the iconic cultural figure of Molière in his ‘hymn’ to self-betterment,
thereby situating himself within French linguistic tradition. The deployment of the French language, so guarded by the parameters of government, canonical literature and the Académie
Française, is particularly notable. As Rada Ivekovic notes, the utilisation of language both keeps at
bay and engages with an underlying structural violence:
In violence through language, there is usually an anticipation: Through a discourse on a menace from
others (a threat through words), we legitimise and justify in advance our own very real ‘response’ to the
other’s presumed, narrated violence, and we are ready to act – that is how we pass from words to acts. This
is, of course, because violence, as a possibility (though not as a fatality) precedes language and is already
there in culture. Both violence and non-violence, as alternatives, are there. We should never think of
violence as opposed to or contrary to culture. Believing that ‘culture’ will spare us violence is naïve. There
is all the more violence in a language as it is the seat of power. The mother tongue, the national tongue,
praised by poets, loved by its speakers, is the conveyor of violence – as well as of its flipside: the possibility,
the choice, to resist it. (Ivekovic, 2011: 49)
James understands the hierarchy and power of language, referencing an institutionalised violence while employing words as resistance. If a culture contains and is rooted in both a historical
and epistemological violence (for which the language of the métropole was the porte-parole),
the appropriation of ‘classical’ French language in hip-hop form serves to defuse and disempower that embedded violence. The music video of ‘Banlieusards’2 adds to the song’s discursive
strength, as it deploys images of banlieue residents who have ‘made it’ as authors, politicians,
activists, artists, and athletes. Each one holds a frame over his or her face while James raps and
then passes the frame to another individual, thereby visually, lyrically and collaboratively
‘reframing’ a monolithic vision of a group represented as fundamentally dangerous to the
Republic. The lyrical content, combined with the profile feel of the music video, provide a sliceof-life counter-narrative against the inassimilable Muslim or immigrant. By advocating the
‘awakening’ and success of ‘la 2ème France’, Kery James affirms rather than rejects the ‘banlieusard’, thereby proposing a unified French identity rooted in (rather than eliding) society’s
most evident points of fracture.
‘Banlieusards’ sets the tone for perhaps one of the most notable popular culture counternarratives to the ideal of French singular identity, Kery James’s ‘Lettre à la République’,
released in 2012. In this pointed critique, James deconstructs and rewrites the French national
narrative, positing that French national ideals were built upon and are in fact contingent upon
the ‘2ème France’ that it now rejects. The song is structured as an open letter to ‘mainstream’
French society, an invitation to examine an alternative French history as a national narrative
intersected and interrupted by a colonial history that continues to stage itself on French soil. As
James begins, he declares:
Ce passé colonial, c’est le votre …
On n’est pas là par hasard
Here, Kery James insists that France take ownership of its colonial history and of its own role in the
arrival of immigrants to France, as ‘On n’est pas là par hasard’. In declaring that it is France who has
‘choisi de lier votre histoire à la notre’, James implies that it must also be France which now comes
to terms with the effects of its own endeavours. This colonial legacy is not presented as the mission
civilisatrice of French nationalist discourse, but rather as an exploitative endeavour that began a
cycle of violence and paradoxical dependence between coloniser and colonised. As Jean-Paul Sartre
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noted in the preface to Albert Memmi’s seminal Portrait du colonisé, ‘Une impitoyable réciprocité
rive le colonisateur au colonisé, son produit et son destin’ (Memmi, 1985 [1957]: 29). James continues his examination of this French alterity and intersectionality, rapping:
Mais pensiez vous qu’avec le temps
Les négros muteraient et finiraient par devenir blancs …
On ne s’intègre pas dans le rejet …
Parce que décoloniser, pour vous, c’est déstabiliser …
Bien que j’n’sois pas ingrat je n’ai pas envie de vous dire merci
Parce qu’au fond, ce que j’ai, ici, je l’ai conquis,
J’ai grandi à Orly dans les favelas de France
J’ai fleuri dans les maquis …
Dans votre France des rancœurs.
Interestingly, Kery James does not speak in an inclusive ‘nous’ when speaking about France.
Instead, he continually employs ‘nous’ and ‘vous’, a continual reminder of a French belonging that
he does not claim. Instead, he interrogates the foundations of the République and the discourse of
assimilation, implying that it was always doomed to fracture, questioning ‘Mais pensiez vous
qu’avec le temps / Les négros muteraient et finiraient par devenir blancs?’ Certainly, James’s claim
here is that French belonging has been racialised, and as a result is something to which immigrants
will never have full access. Moreover, this racialisation equates to a marginalisation that is both
spatial and emotive (‘On ne s’intègre pas dans le rejet / On ne s’intègre pas dans les ghettos français’), pointing to a continued type of colonialism within the state apparatus, as ‘Parce que décoloniser, pour vous, c’est déstabiliser’. For Kery James, the societal fractures within France point to
an uncompleted colonialism, whose dismantling would in fact prove disorienting to the French
Republic. James posits a hegemony that is mirrored elsewhere in the world, such as in ‘third world’
Brazil (‘J’ai grandi à Orly dans les favelas3 de France’), and which becomes most visible in a quotidian life whose undercurrent is one of latent and historical violence ‘dans votre France des
rancœurs’.
Despite the indictment of French national values with regards to its immigrants, Kery James
does not actually propose a wholesale rejection of French national identity. The reality is more
nuanced, as James admits to a simultaneous push towards and pull against Frenchness, which is
punctuated by his position as a black Muslim in a public realm in which both Islam and blackness
are consistent demarcations of what is inside or outside the French national sphere:
Mon respect s’fait violer au pays dit des droits de l’Homme
Difficile de se sentir français
Sans le syndrome de Stockholm
Parce que moi je suis noir, musulman, banlieusard et fier de l’être
Quand tu me vois
Tu mets un visage sur ce que l’autre France déteste
Ce sont les mêmes hypocrites
Qui nous parlent de diversité
Qui expriment leur racisme sous couvert de laïcité …
L’illusion qu’elle se fait d’elle-même
Je ne suis pas en manque d’affection
Comprend que je n’attends plus qu’elle m’aime! (emphasis added)
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After tracing back through French colonial history revised to the perspective of the colonised, Kery
James concludes his piece by circling back to the present, and speaking of and about a distinct site
of enunciation excluded from Frenchness – the banlieue – as a place where the ‘by-products’ of the
French empire are most visible. It is there that French history is laid bare and unsanitised, and
where the inhabitants are living revenants of a haunting4 imperial past. Indeed, James inverts one
of the core values of French nationalist thought, the ‘droits de l’Homme’, and rhymes it with ‘syndrome de Stockholm’, paralleling the double bind in which the immigrant continues to seek validation in a system that has a priori de-authorised him.5
Indeed, James goes on to list all the factors that exclude him from being a stakeholder in the
Hexagone: ‘Parce que moi je suis noir, musulman, banlieusard et fier de l’être’, subsequently noting that the insistence upon an unattainable assimilation equates to an erasure of the (ex-)colonial
subject, who is also frequently (and at times precariously) a French citizen. Sylvie Durmelat notes
that the public perception of the banlieusard is one that projects and revives a type of ‘mission civilisatrice’, as ‘On ne parvient pas à ne pas voir en eux les rejetons des anciens sujets coloniaux …
Ils sont représentés comme de nouveaux sauvages à anthropologiser ou à éduquer prioritairement’
(Durmelat, 2008: 159). In invoking a problematic colonial past, it is Kery James who inverts the
paradigm and seeks to ‘educate’ the French public about a history underwritten by its ‘anciens
sujets coloniaux’. This implies a tiered dimension to French citizenship, thereby destabilising the
ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité.
In his redeployment of national narratives, Kery James proposes two parallel yet intersecting
histories of France whose crossroads is embodied by the immigrant and Muslim subjects. When
James speaks of those ‘Qui expriment leur racisme sous couvert de laïcité’, he asserts that laïcité has
lost its objective meaning and has become a tool by which to justify the exclusion of groups who
bring with them a problematic, racialised presence and who, moreover, refuse invisibility. James
proposes that what he is doing is raising a mirror to France and inviting her to look at the totality of
herself, including the elements excluded from the national project. While the song itself can be construed as an attempt to both disrupt and engage with prevailing discourse on immigrants and Islam,
James concludes by disavowing any personal stakes in being accepted into French society, as he has
already conceded that this will not be forthcoming: ‘Je ne suis pas en manque d’affection / Comprend
que je n’attends plus qu’elle m’aime!’ James is not ‘incomplete’ without this reconciliation with the
French state. Interestingly, he presents himself as a complete (if complex) subject, comprising the
sum total of disparate and inharmonious national and personal histories, while the France of the
Hexagone struggles to adapt to and assimilate its own incongruences.
‘Double discours’ and the French counter-narrative Certainly, a recurrent theme in contemporary French hip-hop has been the validation of an/other
France that exists both parallel to and tenuously within the parameters of a unified national identity. If, as posited by Kery James, French colonial history is revived and recalled within the very
body of the postcolonial subject (which is then disparaged and ‘made invisible’), then Médine and
Youssoupha argue that the binary of ‘la 2ème France’ is supported and sustained by a public discourse that negates or denies the experiences and rights of those deemed ‘other’. In their respective
songs ‘Double discours’ and ‘Ménace de mort’, Médine and Youssoupha suggest that prevailing
discourses amount to an erasure of a narrative that is contrary to that espoused by ‘official’ outlets
and organisations. As such, these artists employ hip-hop as a counter-narrative, deploying lyrics
and images as an antidote to the media and dialogue they seek to contest.
Médine (born Médine Zaouiche of Algerian heritage) is a rapper from Le Havre. A practising
Muslim, he is a leading figure on the French hip-hop landscape, and co-author of a book titled
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Don’t Panik! (2012) with Pascal Boniface, the director of the think-tank L’Institut des relations
internationales et stratégiques. Actively engaged in the realm of public education and cognisant of
the scope and impact of media discourse with regards to Islam, Médine is particularly adept at
deploying established media and language as a means by which to reinterpret and ignite popular
debate. His song ‘Double discours’, released in 2005, poses immediate challenges to a discursive
system that he proposes is contingent on presumptive binaries:
parce qu’un arabe trop studieux ça couvre quelque chose.
Pourquoi tu parles de ma barbe dans le fond de ta moustache,
petit journaliste en stage?
Écoute mon jihad!
Médine begins with a reference to education, immediately placing knowledge (or lack of it) as a
central tenet of his creative project. Noting that a ‘studious’ Arab is as suspect as one presumed not
to have an education, he introduces the double-bind of the Arab subject in the first line. Mocking a
prototypical young intern journalist who questions his beard while wearing a moustache, he disrupts the narrative with the provocative ‘Écoute mon jihad!’ This a reference to the title of his
album, Jihad, le plus grand combat est contre soi-même, in which he reclaims the original meaning
of the word ‘jihad’ in Islam primarily as an internal struggle, rather than as a marker of terrorism.
The exclamation ‘Écoute mon jihad!’, then, may be read as an invitation to glimpse an internal
conflict as evidenced through his album and lyrics, not as a prelude to violence as has been more
commonly inscribed in post 9/11 discourse.
Framed as a conversation in which the ‘mainstream’ interlocutor is presumed to say something but cannot actually respond (thereby reversing the construct in which the ‘other’ cannot
speak), Médine counters each assertion as a type of foundational fiction6 that in fact constrains
both sides:
Parle-moi de l’occident bien habillé,
Je te parlerai politique ou bien planches à billets,
Je te parlerai de l’Afrique à moitié colonisée,
Je te parlerai d’un public à l’opinion terrorisée.
Parle-moi si tu le veux dans la langue de Molière,
Je te parlerai le langage de l’Arabian Panther.
Parle-moi de Ben Laden Oussama,
Je te parlerai de Bush ou de R. Condoleezza …
While media and textbooks may discuss a shared trajectory (‘destin’) and ‘l’occident bien habillé’,
Médine complicates the road to such ‘progress’ and speaks from a space of liminal history, signalling ‘L’Afrique moitié colonisée’ and a public with ‘l’opinion terrorisée’. The mention of a public
living with a ‘terrorised’ opinion is particularly notable, as it calls attention to a state of fear and
paralysis caused by the prevailing ‘script’ of public discourse, a state that does not allow an inclusive
dialogue to take place. By referencing Molière, Médine echoes Kery James in invoking French
canonical lineage and language as a tool of discourse appropriation, reminding the audience of
Médine’s undeniable Frenchness despite his marginalisation. Médine soon makes a temporal and
geographical jump following his Molière reference, citing ‘l’Arabian Panther’,7 recalling the Black
Panther movement in the United States as well as the black American origins of hip-hop as a dialectical register. Indeed, the verse concludes with a reference to the tenure of George W. Bush, mirroring French history with an American presidency the French public found deeply problematic.
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Médine’s refrain, however, is perhaps the most emblematic of his overall missive in the song.
Its reprise, evocative of the repetition and re-staging embedded in media messaging, is deeply
rooted in the French political and media sphere:
Un double discours, un double dialogue, un double langage …
La double culture mérite la double peine,
Et cette fois-ci c’est certain, voici la doublure de Le Pen.
Médine, dangereux M. C. pénalisé,
Un rappeur musulman sans double personnalité.
The phrase ‘double discours’ engages semiotics and the power of language, recognising the duality
of messaging and discourse’s capacity to mean more than it explicitly purports to say. Médine
engages both ‘la 1ère France’ and ‘la 2ème France’ in a critique of media and state messaging that
elides uncomfortable narratives while reinforcing a paradigm of exclusion for subjects that are
racialised, immigrant or Muslim. When Médine raps that ‘La double culture mérite la double peine
/ et cette fois-ci c’est certain, voici la doublure de Le Pen’, he makes a play on the reality of a multicultural society (‘la double culture’) as well as the fact that there exist two parallel cultures within
one state, both of which are worthy of discussion. When he references ‘la doublure de Le Pen’ he
explicitly condemns the exclusionary discourse of right-wing politician Jean-Marie Le Pen, while
also pointing out that the deeply divisive political figure of Le Pen is not an anomaly but rather a
representation of the thoughts of a real segment of French society, as media discourse tends to
replicate his thoughts and serves as his surrogate while simultaneously disavowing itself from the
extreme right. Despite the polemical dimensions of his discourse, Médine does not present himself
as intentionally controversial, rather as ‘un rappeur musulman sans double personnalité’, who
offers a streamlined discours from ‘between the lines’ to both ‘Frances’ in order for them to view
and engage one another.
‘À force de le dire’: Youssoupha and the remaking of national
narrative
The insistence upon challenging dominant messaging through the genre of hip-hop is also notably
expressed by Franco-Congolese rap artist Youssoupha (Youssoupha Mabiki). A complex lyricist
with a master’s degree in cultural mediation and communication, it was Youssoupha who found
himself in a political and media relations maelstrom following his 2009 song ‘À force de le dire’,
in which he strongly critiques the treatment and the presentation of France’s ‘others’ – immigrants,
Muslims and banlieusards – in the French public sphere:
Moi je fais du rap populaire dans tous les sens du terme
Nos esprits sont descendus à force de les réduire …
À force de le dire, à force d’écrire sur mon ghetto et sa malchance …
J’suis passé d’l’illégal à la Cigale à guichet fermés …
Youssoupha begins by claiming and validating the genre of hip-hop itself as ‘du rap populaire
dans tous les sens du terme’, implying that his music is not only successful, but remains about
and faithful to those it seeks to (re)present. Indeed, in the absence of meaningful discourse that
includes banlieusards, it is the medium of rap that engages la parole and gives agency, as ‘nos
speechs ne seront entendus qu’à force de les dire’. Youssoupha engages as the porte-parole of
the disenfranchised, declaring that his rhymes have proved able to exit the marginalised space of
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the ‘ghetto’, even as the doors to French society (both real and symbolic) were closed to him:
‘Adolescent à force de rap et de rythme effréné / J’suis passé d’l’illégal à la Cigale à guichet
fermés’.
Youssoupha continues to give voice and contour to the experiences of those situated at the margins of national discourses, identifying and refuting what he believes to be the monolithic treatment of those who do not fit within the parameters of ‘French’ identity:
À force de m’comparer à ceux qui ont détruit Manhattan
À chaque fois que vous parlez vous ne faites que des Islamalgames …
J’mets un billet sur la tête de celui qui fera taire ce con d’Eric Zemmour.
Youssoupha’s continual employment of ‘À force de’ as a refrain adds to the urgency and coherence
of his message, as the phrase not only refers to a cause and effect, but also to a conscious repetition
and restaging of a particular circumstance. When Youssoupha exclaims such lines as ‘À force de
me comparer à ceux qui ont détruit Manhattan’, and À force de juger’, he formulates a new logic
with regards to French society, whereby banlieusards are not ‘naturally’ at the margins, but rather
placed there by a discourse in which they face an a priori exclusion. This alterity is most commonly
located in the banlieue, the location in which Islam is most perceptible. Islam as disruptive to the
French national narrative is reiterated by Youssoupha when he pinpoints the ‘Islamalgames’ that
collapse Islam and terrorism, as well as the media that may support such views. Indeed, the line
‘Qu’à la télé souvent les chroniqueurs diabolisent les banlieusards / Chaque fois que ça pète on dit
qu’c’est nous / J’mets un billet sur la tête de celui qui fera taire ce con d’Eric Zemmour’ condemns
the media narrative of the banlieue, singling out journalist Eric Zemmour for his treatment of the
topic. This line was followed by the issuing of a summons on the part of Eric Zemmour, in which
the journalist alleged that the verse amounted to a ‘ménace de mort’. While an appellate court ruled
in favour of Youssoupha’s right to artistic expression in 2012, the episode led to the creation of
Youssoupha’s song ‘Ménace de mort’ in 2011.
Certainly, Youssoupha is keenly aware of the power of language to mediate and dictate cultural
and political values. As such, he undertakes a dismantling of the language of exclusion, tackling
the ways in which the public sphere in France foments spaces of non-belonging through its discourse of sameness. In effect, the banlieue is marginalised ‘à force de’ the undeniable difference it
celebrates:
À force de clichés pour expliquer tous les sifflets dans le stade de France
Est c’qu’il nous aime ce pays j’sais pas du tout
Eh Malik c’est la France qui nous insulte et c’est ça pas du lourd…
En argot et en français sont mes lettres mais j’oublie pas ma langue
Baninga bo lela té
Soki lelo na yé té
Muana a bosanaka nzela mboka na yé té. (emphasis added)
Like Kery James, Youssoupha speaks of the idea of France as a reality founded upon rejection, and
the continual delimiting of ‘Frenchness’ and ‘otherness’. This tension is even found among artists
in the same genre, as the line ‘Eh Malik c’est la France qui nous insulte et c’est ça pas du lourd’, is
a jab at the 2008 song ‘C’est du lourd’, by the highly successful Franco-Congolese artist Abd
Al-Malik,8 which suggests that the denunciation of France and French identity is a lack of gratitude
and a rejection of oneself, displaying a social critique that is far more conciliatory towards the
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French state. Youssoupha rejects this approach, continuously centralising the banlieue and creating
a revised geography of ‘Frenchness’ by carefully naming and individualising friends and places.
By insisting on hip-hop as a register of expression that can accommodate plurality, Youssoupha
offers his work as a ‘dialecte qui balance / En argot et en français sont mes lettres mais j’oublie pas
ma langue’, thereby claiming the parole of the banlieue as a counter-balance to ‘official’ discourses, and displacing formal French as the sole arbiter of expression by employing argot, French
and Lingala. By claiming ownership of the ‘official’ language and integrating an explicitly African
tongue on equal terms with French, Youssoupha once again asserts the validity of hybrid identity
and speech.
This (re)claiming of discourse was perhaps most obviously undertaken in ‘Ménace de mort’, the
song resulting from the court case brought by journalist Eric Zimmour, who is mentioned by name
in the song ‘À force de dire’. ‘Ménace de mort’ constitutes a response to the plaintiff’s claims of
threats against his person, and may be analysed both lyrically and as a media production.9 Indeed,
its accompanying video clip participates heavily in its messaging, and is emblematic of a rerouting
of pre-existing media attention to a very visible counter-narrative. Just as Kery James proposes a
‘2ème France’ and Médine targets a ‘double discours’, Youssoupha echoes the two, while opening
up a dialogue on the legal system and the conviction (of both an individual and a genre) in the court
of public opinion. Youssoupha raps:
Pas de ménace de mort, le rap ne sort pas de douille mais
C’est le seul son hardcore depuis que le rock n’a plus de couilles c’est …
D’une France qui oublie que les paroles de son hymne sont plus violentes que celles du
gangsta rap
Je défends la cause des frères au sud qui rêvassent du nord
Mais ma liberté d’expression en chute est sous ménace de mort.
Certainly, much of Youssoupha’s work is an ode to rap itself, suggesting that rap is the sole remaining medium by which to express perspectives outside the normative, as it is ‘le seul son hardcore
depuis que le rock n’a plus de couilles’. The validation of hip-hop as a discursive form is juxtaposed
with a video that integrates news and talk show clips from numerous French daily shows in which
journalists and politicians criticise rap as inherently violent and produced by disaffected ‘analphabètes’, several of whom have had concerts cancelled or have been sued for the content of their
lyrics. The artists are flashed during uncomfortable media appearances whose tenor and camera
angles give the impression of a public trial, raising the question of who in fact is a threat to whom.
As the video images unfold, Youssoupha reiterates his previous ‘Islamalgames’ assertion when
he says ‘ils confondent le crime et Islam’, synchronising the lyrics with images of members of the
French far right party the Front National (FN). The video shifts from Marine Le Pen, figurehead of
political right, to Marianne, and inverts the accusation of violence by proclaiming that the country
‘oublie que les paroles de son hymne sont plus violentes que celles du gangsta rap’. While ‘La
Marseillaise’ celebrates a sanctioned and foundational violence that sustains liberté, égalité and
fraternité as a discourse of affirmation, hip-hop’s discourse of contestation of the fractures within
the realisation of those ideals remains outside the public narrative. Here, Youssoupha seeks to
broaden the debate into one on cultural violence, proposing that any violence that is being criticised in fact already exists10 within the sanctioned parameters of French nationhood (as symbolised
by the revered Marianne) and was not created in the banlieue. His later line, ‘l’Hexagone va mal’,
is delivered while he points to a map of France depicting flames in major cities. This is a direct
reference to the riots of 2005, which laid bare fractures in the French assimilationist model as disaffected banlieue youth took to the streets.
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As Youssoupha proposes that violence is actually imbricated and is indeed a part of the fabric
of French nationhood, he also notes that such violence (discursive and literal) is perceived differently according to who perpetrated it. The video of ‘Ménace de mort’ projects images such as
Sarkozy’s infamous public ‘casse-toi, pauvre con’ remark in 2008, and Dominique Strauss-Kahn’s
deposition for rape accusations, as examples where violence is part of the public domain, but which
are received and discussed differently according to the perpetrator and their ‘central’ place within
‘Frenchness’. Youssoupha’s refrains note:
Les sentences sont inégales
Je fais du rap et ce que t’entends est illégal …
J’ai plaidé légitime défense dans ma déposition
Qui peut prétendre faire du rap sans prendre position? … (emphasis added)
The sentences for real or perceived crimes are ‘inégales’, while misbehaviour on the part of French
authorities is exonerated and rap borders on ‘illégal’. Yet Youssoupha offers an alternative through
his art, proposing that ‘Il n’y a jamais de tendance irrémédiable’, and that it is through discourse and
dialogue that circumstances may change. Youssoupha concedes that the rap he and others create is
embedded with anger (‘Bien sûr qu’il y a de la rage dans nos propos’), but presents this as a productive rage that does not allow the interlocutors to remain complacent. He defends both his art and his
discourse, saying ‘J’ai plaidé légitime défense dans ma déposition’, and concluding with a challenge, asking ‘Qui peut prétendre faire du rap sans prendre position?’ In this way, Youssoupha
moves the venue of debate from ‘official’ avenues of the state apparatus (such as the legal system
and the state-supported media) to the less predictable realm of public opinion. When the artist states
that it is impossible to undertake rap ‘sans prendre position’, it is an acknowledgement of the genre’s
power to unsettle, and an invitation to participate in its deconstruction of reductive binaries.
Conclusion
Certainly, the refutation of absolutes is proposed by contemporary French rap artists as a discursive
and social imperative. An undeniable French identity malgré lui is a subject encapsulated by
Médine, and supported by his counterparts Kery James and Youssoupha. In the immediate wake of
the 2005 French riots, Médine published a brief English-language article for Time magazine entitled ‘How much more French can I be?’ in which he approaches difference and identity in the
French context:
But I was born and raised in France. I’ve been a citizen since birth. How much more French can I be? And
there are many more people like me, not just Muslims but blacks, Asians and South Asians. It’s time for
the French to reject those outdated labels. And it’s time for minorities to reject the cult of victimization too.
Things aren’t perfect. There are a lot of problems. Those problems exploded last week, unleashing the
long-held resentment of people who feel unwanted, scorned and swept into the margins like so much trash.
To change that, the gap between the banlieue and the rest of France must be bridged. We need to make
peace with the things that make us different. I’m French, I’m Muslim, and there are millions like me. We
live here, and we’re not going anywhere. So let’s start getting used to it. (Zaouiche, 2005)
The banlieue is affirmed as a valid site of enunciation for French citizens, and one that will remain.
Notably, Médine’s self-referential essay is not a wholesale rejection of France but rather a call to
dialogue, a wake-up to both the ‘central’ and ‘2ème’ France to integrate themselves into one
another. Médine acknowledges the conditions that set the stage for the riots of 2005, but calls for a
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365
rejection of the ‘cult of victimisation’, similar to Kery James’s call for the rise of ‘la 2ème France’.
Médine plainly states that he and those ‘like him’ are already a part of France, and utilises his hiphop work as a way to both disrupt and access the discourse of a nation to which he shares a tenuous
belonging, as echoed in Youssoupha’s ‘Ménace de mort’. Interestingly, Médine’s English-language
piece still refers to the French suburbs as the banlieue, and the word remains in its original French.
Perhaps unwittingly, this preservation of the original term highlights the banlieue as unique and
untranslatable, a site that invokes the peripheries and fractures of a nation but that remains to the
world uniquely and wholly French.
Kery James, Médine and Youssoupha undertake a creative retooling of French ‘belonging’,
reclaiming the banner of banlieusard as an affirmative identity that is paradoxically both within
and outside the French national construct. The banlieue, as both a physical place and an imagined
site of enunciation, emerges as a locus that voices France’s internal instabilities, embodying a
complex colonial history whose consequences continue to be felt. Certainly, part of the discourse
that these artists put forth is one of historical retelling, a deploying of a narrative of ‘otherness’ that
includes the presence of blacks, Arabs and Muslims in France as a logical outcome of a historical
pattern. As Kery James declared, ‘Nous les arabes et les noirs, On n’est pas là par hasard / Tout
arrivé à son départ’ (‘Lettre à la République’), in a sense bringing French history full circle. In
reframing historical narratives, rerouting politicised media representations, and insisting on visibility as they are (not as the French state apparatus may wish them to be), these hip-hop artists push
the envelope on the French ideals of liberté, égalité and fraternité, at once denouncing the inconsistent application of these ideals with regard to France’s ‘others’, while simultaneously claiming
a tenuous belonging and stake in the French national project. Such is the tension of the artistic
démarche of socially engaged hip-hop in France – it speaks from outside the Hexagone while being
situated squarely within it, proposing a France that is not one but many.
Notes
1. It is worth noting that France has a long and established history of hip-hop, with prominent groups from
the 1980s and 1990s including acts such as breakout star MC Solaar and classic political ensembles such
as Suprême NTM, IAM, Assassin, and many others. French rap is keenly observant of developments in
rap and politics in the United States, but has always retained a style and lyrical content that is uniquely its
own. An example of this is the usage of verlan, which separates a word by syllable and then reconstructs
the word in reverse. Verlan comes from ‘l’envers’.
2. The music video for Banlieusards may be accessed at: http://vimeo.com/5391053.
3. ‘Favela’ is the Portuguese term for the shanty towns surrounding major Brazilian cities such as Rio de
Janeiro and Sao Paulo. Known for their impermeability to government and police forces, the favela
populations frequently rival or supersede those of the officially designated city space. The comparison
to the favelas of Brazil makes evident that the ‘third world’ – and its vast inequities – now resides within
the Hexagone.
4. In Specters of Marx (1994), Derrida writes:
Repetition and first time: this is perhaps the question of the event as question of the ghost. What is a
ghost? What is the effectivity or the presence of a specter, that is, of what seems to remain as ineffective,
virtual, insubstantial, as a simulacrum? Is there there, between the thing itself and its simulacrum, an
opposition that holds up? Repetition and first time, but also repetition and last time, since the singularity of any first time makes of it also a last time. Each time is the event itself, a first time is a last time.
Altogether together. Staging for the end of history. Let us call it a hauntology. (Derrida, 1994: 10)
If events are repetitive as well as unique or final, then the return of postcolonial subjects invokes and
continually restages a colonial history, disallowing a forgetting of a complex colonial past and haunting
the national narrative.
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5. Albert Memmi writes:
Le colonisé, lui, ne se sent ni responsable ni coupable, ni sceptique, il est hors de jeu. En aucune manière,
il n’est sujet de l’histoire; bien entendu il en subit le poids, souvent plus cruellement que les autres, mais
toujours comme objet. Il a fini par perdre l’habitude de toute participation active à l’histoire et ne la
réclame même plus. Pour peu que dure la colonisation, il perd jusqu’au souvenir de sa liberté; il oublie
ce qu’elle coûte ou n’ose plus en payer le prix. (Memmi, 1985 [1957]: 113)
In viewing the banlieue and the treatment of its inhabitants as a continuity of colonialist history, Kery
James is writing the (ex-)colonial subject into French history from the inside/outside space of the
banlieue.
6. For more on ‘foundational fictions’, see Sommer’s influential work (1993) in which she analyses how literary narratives that carefully delineated parameters of race and gender were used to consolidate national
identity in nineteenth-century Latin America.
7. For insight on hip-hop and black socio-political currents in the United States, see Rose (1994).
8. Abd Al-Malik critiques what he sees as a lack of ambition and bitterness emerging from the banlieue,
proposing that the banlieusards also see the possibilities of France:
La France elle est belle, tu le sais en vrai, la France on l’aime, y’a qu’à voir quand on retourne au bled,
la France elle est belle, regarde tous ces beaux visages qui s’entremêlent / Et quand t’insultes ce pays,
quand t’insultes ton pays, en fait tu t’insultes toi-même, il faut qu’on se lève, faut qu’on se batte dans
l’ensemble, rien à faire de ces mecs qui disent ‘vous jouez un rôle ou vous rêvez’.
While Abd Al-Malik presupposes a ‘Frenchness’ common even among banlieusards, artists like
Youssoupha problematise basing their identity on a national narrative they believe excludes them.
9. The music video for ‘Ménace de mort’ may be accessed at: http://vimeo.com/29326439.
10. As Pratt and Rolls note:
France is and has always been multiple, a difference highlighted even in its symbols of national unity:
…the official markers of national identity are always already other than themselves: like the original
complexity of Derrida’s trace, the symbols and allegories of France conceal, defer, and differ from,
substitute for and delay a series of Frances, of ‘not France’. It is this foundational plurality, this structuring diversity, which we define, drawing on a further but often occluded representation of France, as the
‘hexagonality’ of contemporary French culture. (Pratt and Rolls, 2011: 25)
Youssoupha highlights a multiplicity that already existed in French culture, a Hexagone that in effect
lacks a symmetry it presupposes.
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Author biography
Lara N. Dotson-Renta holds a PhD in Romance Languages and a Certificate in African Studies from the
University of Pennsylvania. She has a master’s degree in French Literature from New York University in
Paris, as well as a Bachelor’s degree in French and Spanish from Dartmouth College. Previously an Assistant
Dean/Assistant Professor at Quinnipiac University, she is currently a Visiting Scholar with the Middle East
Studies programme at Brown University. She has been published in several academic journals, and her
book, Immigration, Popular Culture, and the Re-Routing of European Muslim Identity, was published in
2012. She is also the founder and editor-in-chief of The Postcolonialist, an online interdisciplinary and multilingual publication on postcolonial societies and politics.