My parents called me Sunday morning to make sure that I wasn't in one of the 1,000 cars set ablaze across France Saturday night. I was not.
Since Oct. 27, this country has found itself in what is being called the largest civil unrest crisis since the student protests of 1968. This is how it started: two French Arab youths were electrocuted when they hid in an electric substation in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois, home to 28,000 poor immigrants and their French-born children. Allegedly, they were chased and cornered to their deaths by police. The official account maintains the police were not pursuing them.
That is now irrelevant. The riots, which started in the Parisian suburbs, have spread across France to the coastal glitz of Cannes and Nice, and moved into central Paris on Sunday. The government seems stunned but, really, none of this all too surprising.
During the first weeks of my year abroad in Paris back in September, I noticed that the French speak Pig Latin. They don't have such a stupid name for it; they call it le verlan, which itself is a rearranging of the syllables of l'envers, French for backwards.
It didn't take me long to realize that this strange manner of speaking is often used for words already in slang form that you wouldn't want your average adult to understand, such as joint (un petard becomes un tarpe), being drunk (beurre evolves into rebou), and any number of insults, body parts or bodily functions.
I commented on this immature cluster of words to a friend who works under the French finance minister, Jean-Francois Cope. He told me, quite matter-of-factly, "Well, la racaille started it, you know."
La racaille is, admittedly, an unkind label used to refer to the culture of Paris' lower-class suburbs. The Robert dictionary, the most respected archive of the French language, defines racaille as a pejorative word meaning "a group of disreputable, feared, and scorned individuals."
Hoodlums, to you and I.
As confirmed by various conversations with French university students, my host family, and even a pair of little old ladies on the No. 83 bus, the mental image most often conjured by the word racaille is a band of North African Arab kids, who live in the projects located in the suburbs, dressed in hip-hop-influenced track suits and bling, obnoxiously carousing Parisian sidewalks, and throwing out catcalls to any female with two legs.
The people I spoke to also mentioned that the racaille has increased its presence in Paris in recent years, as the city's commuter rail has extended further into the outlying areas, which were basically built up over the past two decades so as to move working-class immigrants to the outskirts of Paris. The suburbs have become the equivalent to the United States' inner cities.
"The Champs-Elysees isn't what it used to be ten years ago," Anne, a Frenchwoman who has lived minutes from the famed avenue for the past three decades, complained to me. "We were used to fending off the tourists with their cameras, and now we have to deal with these gangs everywhere."
As my own apartment is located only two blocks from the Champs-Elys?©??, I find myself walking its frenzied sidewalks nearly every day. I feel "gangs" may be too strong a word for these groups of teenaged and 20-something men, but I do instinctively walk as far away from the entourages as I can, if I see them in advance. I do this mostly out of instinct: A girl walking by herself is keen to attract unwanted attention from a throng of similarly aged males.
One evening, I was fiddling with my iPod on my way to the metro station. As I looked down at the gadget in my hands, I was suddenly accosted by two kids, each no older than 17. "Where you going? Listening to music that's good to make loooove to?" Normally I would have pushed them off and kept on walking and ignored whatever obscenities they called after me. Instead, I felt I had an opportunity to talk to them, which was something every French person I spoke to hadn't really taken the time to ever do.
"I'm listening to Sinatra," I said, noticing they were surprised I hadn't responded in the way I usually would have. "So, hey, what do you think of when people call you guys la racaille?"
My attempt to forge a bond of socio-cultural understanding went unrewarded, as the two adolescents with uneven facial hair scoffed at me and coughed up some rapid-fire verlan I am as of yet unversed in, before turning to harass the next female coming up behind us, a redhead in knee-high boots.
I guess you could say I wasn't surprised. While I have heard far more from one side than the other, this much I have gathered: They haven't tried to listen to each other.
The so-called racaille started speaking in verlan so as to not be understood by the bourgeoisie, the police, and all other Establishment-aligning factions. And can you blame them? French passports notwithstanding, they are likely to be passed over for jobs even if they are just as or more qualified as their non-Arab compatriots. In fact, while the nationwide unemployment rate is ten percent, for French Arabs - the country's largest minority - it is three times that.
And now, when dozens of verlan words are part of the average French person's vernacular, thanks to their avant-garde use by young people and the media who caters to them, the racaille goes to great lengths to re-verlanize the words too many outsiders now understand.
Le verlan is clearly the upshot of classicism in France. It is the all-too-common story of a primarily working class group of people - in this case, Arab immigrants - who have gone mostly ostracized by the larger society, and rebel against the social order that won't accept them by rejecting said order's rules.
And, for its part, the greater French society never really bothered to ask why everyone has been speaking in Pig Latin, until now, when they find themselves ensconced in flames.
