Estates

It's been a while, but after viewing La Haine for my European Studies class this afternoon, I feel moved to write.

The director said he wrote the film to raise awareness of the housing estates en Paris. To be 100% behind the people who have to live on the estates, who know they cannot escape. To be able to film there, they are living in one of the flats, in amongst the other estate tenants. But they maintain they have to lie low during the filming as they're a bunch of middle-class filmmakers and appreciate that people do actually have to live there, and can't escape that existence. Similar estates exist all around Europe and I've seen them in Melbourne as well. They don't really exist here in Perth; I know there are suburbs or pockets of state housing, but when you're not living on top of each as they do in Europe, they don't have the same kind of claustrophobic, desperate, impossible to escape air about them.

I think the film is great, it's an insightful piece of social realism, authentic and true to life. It does have fantastical moments in it, not as many as in Trainspotting which we're also studying, but they are both very real representations of the problems and issues that people living on housing estates are confronted with on a daily basis. In class last week whilst discussing Trainspotting, I volunteered that life on housing estates really is as bad and bleak for people as it is dramatised in the film. My tutor questioned this, I suppose he and most of the rest of the class find it impossible to conceive of people even living in places like that, let alone feeling as disaffected and disconnected as the youths do. But I've lived in these places. I've been poor, living on benefits in the UK, waiting for housing loans to come through so that we didn't have to sleep on a battered, stained single mattress on the broken-tiled floor of the 19th story council flat above London, which had no furnishings, carpet or blinds and the walls were a mix of revolting old wallpaper designs that were ripped back in most places. Thankfully there was hot water, heating and electricity, but no fridge or shower and a bath that took about half-an-hour to fill as there is no water pressure that high up in the sky. People would commit suicide off the sides of the towers, ours was but one of six, and there wer often syringes to be found around the grounds. The lift didn't always work - you try walking 19 flights of stairs with your weekly shop - and people would use them as toilets, many a landing smelt of fish or curry or whatever nationality was chucked in there this week, it truly was "Mile End".

But at the end of La Haine, whilst I was watching the director's commentary, I felt weird. Here I am, sitting in my middle-class parents house critiquing this film, yet his comments of "we had to lie low" insult me. I know he understands "the plight of the estates", being a director the only thing he can do is to make a film about it, and it is an incredibly successful film that has highlighted the issues, yet it all still feels false and hollow somehow. I'm angry that my knowledge of these peoples lives was questioned last week in class, I don't want to have to get up there and tell my life story, but if it wasn't for a bunch of benefit fraud and some nifty shoplifting by my partner whose flat it was, I can't say that I would be back here now able to reflect upon it all. That tower block was the site of my first brush with suicide, the first time I really felt like I didn't want to live. I'd only been in London a year when that happened, I don't think I was even 21. I must have only been on the estate for nine months. Things got an awful ot better, but I can't deny what I felt, as a citizen of that place and how angered I feel now to think of people dismissing my knowledge and my experiences.

It's not something I've ever really talked about a lot though, I don't know if I really want to talk about it much. But I just want it to be recognised, that I've done it hard, that I know what it's like to struggle and fight and not be heard or listened to. Nothing like what most people have, but I can tell you how incredibly removed it was from my middle-class existence of only a year prior.

And I think that all people who live on estates want is for the the source of their Hate to be removed. To have their feelings and struggles recognised, to be listened to, to be provided with opportunity, knowledge and understanding. And most of all, to be treated with respect, trust, civility and fairness.

I don't know why I'm so angry about this really, but writing helps to get it out. Time to go and cook a very middle-class curry instead ... oh, the guilt.