“On a connu la hess,” raps Guizmo in “Attendez-moi”. The line is challenging to understand if your only exposure to French comes from the classroom. It’s a lyric at the crossroads of France’s colonial excursions: Guizmo is of Senegalese and Malian descent, but hess comes from the north African dialect of Arabic – the phrase can be translated as “we’ve known hardship”. A resident of Rabat, Algiers or Tunis may struggle to grasp what Guizmo’s getting at, but any Gen-Z Parisian would understand.
Lina Djoudi, a 22-year-old student who grew up in the melting pot of Marseille, has got a dictionary’s worth of this slang at her fingertips. There’s belek, which means ‘watch out’ – as in “Fais belek, ya les gendarmes” (“Watch out, there’s police”) in “Bande organisée”, a…
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Dazed & Confused (Digital) - 1 Issue, Spring 2025