Institute of Contemporary Arts

'Babblings from France or Babel in the Île-de-France' by Marc Hatzfeld

There are three types of verbal artistry related specifically to spoken language that people in the banlieues deploy with gusto. The first of these is called the ‘dig'. The dig is a short, very sharp verbal jab directed at a target by a casual speaker in a display of quick-fire humour. People used to say mettre en boîte, meaning ‘to take the mickey (out of someone)'; in the south of France, they're more likely to say chambrer, i.e. ‘to tease (someone)'; in the housing estates, it's vanner: ‘to slag (someone off)'. You trap your opponent/friend in a verbal net, then you loose a well-aimed dart at the unfortunate target. The dig hurts, but above all it makes people laugh. When it comes unexpectedly or after a time-lag, it takes a person completely by surprise, leaving them without a comeback. The dig represents the sudden appearance of the absurd in a hyper-civilised and highly regulated yet sordid world. It's a sidelong glance at reality. Within certain groups, the boys slag each other off non-stop; it's a game that leaves few marks if played skillfully. It's frequently enjoyed not just by the young men but by the (sometimes sharp-tongued) women and girls too, as well as workers during their breaks and pupils in the school playground.

Verbal sparring is really just a longer-lasting dig; more precisely, it's a dig that provokes a riposte or one that's extended. Once the exchange has involved several players, a duel of words ensues and the spectators await the outcome of lightning exchanges of biting verbal jousting that sparkle with metaphor, semantic inversion, unsuspected imagery and situational comedy. It's partly and quite frequently a matter of getting one up on the other person, but sparring is more than just an exercise in single combat. It's initially successful when the listeners, who are there to be impressed after all, are made to laugh; beyond laughter, though, the aim of sparring is to earn the audience's knowing approval of the phenomenal oral and intellectual prowess of the combatants. But sparring depends above all for its success on a shared view of the world's essential absurdity, a view that's fierce and at the same time sharp-witted. In actual fact, it's the world around them that's the butt of the two or more players' savage humour; their target is often other people, those impossibly distant others who haven't the slightest clue about who we are, any more than they have about life, youth, what we're actually doing here at all; the others, those pathetic ‘fools' whose instinct for humiliation is repaid in equal measure by the mockery especially reserved for them.

The third linguistic device manipulated with great agility in the banlieue is ‘slam'. Originating in the black ghettos of the United States and readily adopted by corresponding social environments, slam is the verbal equivalent of a door slamming. It's just a domesticated version of the preceding devices and one that's a tiny bit elitist at that. Just as towards the end of the Middle Ages the troubadours merrily displayed their powers of improvisation, slammers, too, are expected to leave the safety of the perimeter and balance on a rope of words, like verbal tight-rope walkers without the benefit of a safety net. Slam in its original form is based on improvisation and competition among slammers. Whatever its origins, slam is a dramatisation of the type of metaphorical vivacity that we've already seen demonstrated in the dig and verbal sparring. Located somewhere between theatre and poetry, slam is an opportunity for those masters of verbal bling recently arrived from the heart of the African savannah or the shores of the Mediterranean or the forests of Colombia to take the floor.

Its greatest virtue for the purposes of our present discussion is primarily that it overthrows that symbol of linguistic dictatorship represented by the written word, the imperial written word. Slam, like the dig and verbal sparring, legitimises verbal artistry in an environment that keeps exponents of the written word at a distance: slam is the acrobatics of the spoken word raised to the level of a fine art. In this sense, it may well be reconnecting with certain cultural phenomena that pre-date the written word, a furious, destructive archaism that relocates the present moment, what's happening right now, at the centre of the world by rejecting the arguments and expertise of organised memory and capital. In this way, it restores a pleasure in the instantaneous and the volatile to both writers and listeners, qualities that are tending to disappear from creative possibilities. It encounters en route the John Cassavetes, the Antonin Artauds, the Rimbauds - all those who live for the moment. Its other not inconsiderable quality is that it confers a public status on artists and acknowledges them by publicising their work - something that never fails to surprise them.

Slammers are surprised because it doesn't even occur to them that they might have any particular status as artists, no more than it does to rappers or to street artists for that matter: they slam the way they talk, knowing full well that the insolence lies more in their language than in themselves. They're merely a temporary conduit for it. This language has neither name nor stable syntax but those who are fond of categories like to give it a name, so why not call it verlan?* The transgressive nature of the language of the banlieues reaches its logical conclusion in this French variation of backslang, since verlan no longer functions as a language as such: it disappears.

The nimble verbal manoeuvres that speakers of verlan engage in are well known. They reverse the syllables of their words even in conversations that are otherwise normal from the point of view of sense or of the information they're intended to convey. In its eagerness, verlan often suppresses vowels that would normally appear in black and white, as it were - a and i disappear, o becomes e or rather eu. So the word arabe becomes rebeu, femme becomes meuf and juif becomes feuj. But the word cité retains its colour and is pronounced as téci, while the chinois are noiches. These are just some of the classic verlan terms from the current decade that have had a long shelf life. But there is no guarantee that we will have the same verlan in five or ten years' time because it's highly dynamic and changes constantly like a chameleon. It refuses to stay put. It evades all attempts to systematise it or allow interpreters to decode it. Indeed, that's the whole point: the purpose of verlan is precisely to maintain secrecy. Its function is to conceal and also to remain hidden so that, like a resistance fighter used to crossing and re-crossing enemy lines, it's never the same from one location to the next, from one day to the next, or from one speaker to the next. Here, it picks up words from America, there it absorbs peculiar yet stylishly cool turns of phrase, elsewhere, it borrows rules from the neighbouring estate, and yet further afield adopts a secret syntax invented by a bunch of pals. It's the private language of a gang of school kids or a group of residents in one or other of the tower blocks, a team of nocturnal street artists or the regulars at a boxing club. In Marseilles, verlan has blended with the local accent and the taste for tall stories; in the département of Seine-Saint-Denis, it's interspersed with old expressions from Parisian slang; in eastern France, curiously enough, it has absorbed a lot of expressions from Arabic. Compared to the French language, verlan does everything the other way round.

 

*Tr's Note: term derived from vers-l'en, where the syllables of the word l'envers (the other way round, or the opposite of the norm) are reversed.