There isn’t anything I can say about La Haine that hasn’t already been said, except for this: Saïd looks like a boy I would have grown up with. He looks like my brother, my cousins, the boys at school. He acts like them too, listens to the same type of music, walks like they do, makes the same offensive remarks, wears his fear like a bullet in a cartridge, like a cold blade pressed against shivering flesh.
Coming of age in a postcolonial world is an experience I can only compare to discovering that everyone else speaks a language you can’t understand. You’re not sure where to start, the others don’t seem to be struggling like you are, and it becomes much easier to simply adapt to the alienation because integration was never an option to begin with.
Instead of giving the colonizer a trauma-porn bastardization of a heroic journey where Saïd, Hubert, and Vinz learn the oppressor’s language, La Haine forces you to break your teeth stuttering through our mother tongue instead.
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