Single mother, refugee, campaigner and controversialist: meet M.I.A
It’s a spring afternoon in Hackney and I am sitting with Mathangi ‘Maya’ Arulpragasam in an airy, upmarket yoga bar, discussing her public persona. ‘I have a reputation for being difficult,’ she tells me. ‘I still don’t get invited to the BRITs. I think they’re scared of me. And I hardly ever get approached by corporations or brands. I have this massive “No” sign on my face.’ Is this reputation justified? ‘No,’ she snaps. Difficultly.
Dressed in silver loafers, black Adidas tracksuit bottoms and a fluoro-floral shirt — her signature hi-lo, borderless collision of styles — at first she barely meets my eye, darting looks at me from underneath a cascade of copper-black hair. But, between mouthfuls of a Leon salad that she shouldn’t strictly be eating in here, she considers her answers carefully, feeling her way, her responses coming in a soft South London accent intertwined with occasional transatlantic inflections. She turned 40 last year but she’s so fresh-faced and whelpish, you’d assume she were half that age.
In the decade or so that she has been creating music as M.I.A. — euphoric, provocative, tacky-glam music that makes other pop stars sound hopelessly homogenised — the Anglo-Sri Lankan artist has revealed an equal talent for controversy. She has offered confusing accounts of her father’s role in the Tamil separatist movement, and has herself been accused of being a terrorist sympathiser by the Sri Lankan government (and politically naive by just about everyone else). She has been sued by the National Football League in the US for making a one-fingered gesture while sharing the stage with Madonna and Nicki Minaj at the 2012 Super Bowl XLVI. In her most recent video, ‘Borders’, she sang from a dinghy full of actors pretending to be dead refugees in a doctored Paris Saint-Germain shirt (it read Fly Pirates, rather than Fly Emirates), which didn’t go down all that well with the French football club’s lawyers.
She appears to be unafraid of contradiction: the spokesrapper for the world’s underclass, who has a child with Benjamin Bronfman — a scion of one of America’s richest families; the anti-corporatist rebel who’s suddenly fronting a recycling campaign for H&M. But if I expected to find a conspiracy-minded loudmouth in person, instead I am struck by her introversion, her thoughtfulness. As we’re talking a beggar wanders in from the street — South Asian ethnicity, pleading mouth. He begins to ask all the Hackney yoga-mums for money. Maya seems genuinely pained, she has nothing on her and tries to offer him some food instead. Eventually some cash is found: ‘Don’t let that be an example to you of what immigrants are doing,’ she warns me, her first instinct to be defensive. It’s fine, I say, you can’t live in London and fail to notice the amount of beggars these days. ‘It’s always there — it’s just the cultures that come in that change,’ she reflects. ‘When I arrived in London in the 1980s, there were loads of Sri Lankans. It used to drive me crazy. Me and my sisters were trying to be cool London teenagers but we’d just be surrounded by Tamil refugees. But after that, it was Somalians, Bosnians, now it’s very Eastern European. It comes in waves.’
Arulpragasam was born in Hounslow in 1975 to father Arul, an engineer and activist who was later involved in the Tamil separatist movement, and mother Kala, a seamstress. Her parents returned to Jaffna in Sri Lanka when she was a baby, meaning her early childhood was marked by the Civil War then engulfing the country. After a spell in Tamil Nadu, India, her mother brought the family to England and they were housed as refugees. Maya grew up in the heart of the Tamil community in Tooting, while her father remained in Sri Lanka. Later, she ‘blagged’ a place at Central Saint Martins, studying fashion and film, and worked her way into the music industry via a friendship with Justine Frischmann of Elastica. Her debut album Arular (named after her father) was released in 2005 to enormous acclaim, followed by Kala (named after her mother) in 2007. The name M.I.A. is a play on Missing In Action and Maya, her assumed name.
In the early years of her success she moved to New York — and it is in America where she feels she has had greater recognition. Her migrant anthem ‘Paper Planes’, with its bang-bang-bang-kerching chorus, became one of the most downloaded songs of the digital era, while magazines such as Time rushed to herald her as the first superstar of the globalised era. She counts Madonna and Kanye West among her admirers, though she can be airily dismissive of her peers. When I suggest that modern pop is as much a style game as a music game, she cuts me down: ‘I wouldn’t say that Rihanna or Justin Bieber or even Lady Gaga have a distinctive style — it changes according to whoever’s styling them.’ Overall, she says she’s a loner. ‘I’m not really in touch with anyone.’ How about Julian Assange? She has visited the WikiLeaks founder at the Ecuadorian embassy in London. She gives me a WTF sort of look. ‘I can’t really talk about Julian.’
I ask what advice she would give herself if she were starting out again. She thinks about this for a long time before recalling something Kanye West told her ten years ago. ‘He said: “Whatever you do, don’t date people, don’t get pregnant, don’t fall in love. Love is like cancer.” At the time, I thought he was so wrong. I said: “It’s terrible you think like that!” But now I think he was right.’
When she first moved to the US, she had a high-profile relationship with dance producer Diplo, aka Thomas Wesley Pentz. The fiery dynamic was professionally productive but eventually too intense, though there has been a recent rapprochement (‘I want to find a new artist I can fight with all the time and make awesome songs with,’ Diplo joked last year). Later, in 2008, she was engaged to Benjamin Bronfman, the musician-environmentalist son of the former Warner’s CEO Edgar Bronfman Jr. They had a child, Ikhyd (now seven) and lived in Brentwood, LA, and Bedford-Stuyvesant, NYC, but the relationship ended acrimoniously with a custody battle. Maya is now single and living with Ikhyd in East London, although she says he sees his father regularly.
She feels that these relationships have overshadowed her work. ‘In the beginning, everyone was like: “Oh, Diplo did all your work.” Then it was like: “You had a baby with a billionaire, that undoes everything you lived before.” I wish I just said, “F*** you.” ’
Like any parent, she has been revisiting her own childhood as she raises her son. ‘I’m not very good at being a mother,’ she says. ‘I didn’t spend my childhood here so everything is new to me: the school system, the ABC, phonics… I don’t know what books to buy him.’ The regimented approach to life is in stark contrast with her own childhood in Jaffna, where she remembers running wild with a great big gang of kids in the neighbourhood. However, at least it’s better than New York. ‘When my kid was two he was saying things like: “Oh my God, you’re so in my personal space right now.” That’s when it was time to leave. Personal space! I slept in the same room as ten other people until I was ten.’
Mercifully, Paris Saint-Germain have dropped their legal warning after she tweeted their letter to her 678,000 followers. ‘I haven’t heard anything since then,’ she says. ‘It’s awesome. The support I got from my fans actually made them go away. I’m going to do that all the time now, ha-ha!’ And what happened with the NFL? At one point, she jokingly tweeted Madonna to ask if she could lend her £10 million as she defended herself against the corporation (Madonna was said to be highly unimpressed at being upstaged at the time, according to several newspapers). ‘That’s gone too,’ she says quietly. She’s not really allowed to talk about the precise terms, but she has her own views of male sporting institutions. ‘The way females fit into those cultures is simply as sex objects. You either get passed around the players, or you’re a cheerleader. It’s hard for a musician to relate to that.’ She was struck by ‘insane’ levels of fear among her fellow stars when she performed at the Super Bowl. ‘Nobody wants to upset the status quo, but then the status quo doesn’t change unless someone upsets it.’
I wonder what she made of this year’s Super Bowl in which Beyoncé gave a Black Power salute to the Black Lives Matter movement. She pulls a face. She didn’t see the performance, but doesn’t feel she could have missed anything. ‘It’s interesting that in America the problem you’re allowed to talk about is Black Lives Matter. It’s not a new thing to me — it’s what Lauryn Hill was saying in the 1990s, or Public Enemy in the 1980s. Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question. And you cannot ask it on a song that’s on Apple, you cannot ask it onan American TV programme, you cannot create that tag on Twitter, Michelle Obama is not going to hump you back.’
A lot of M.I.A.’s frustration comes from the fact that she’s pretty much the only South Asian musician on the world stage. She has been accused of naivety in the past, but when she describes the refugee camps that she recently visited in Tamil Nadu, she is nuanced and knowledgeable. These problems are live for her. The Sri Lankan authorities no longer class her as a terrorist cheerleader but she doesn’t plan on returning any time soon. ‘They keep saying: “It’s all great now, come see for yourself!” But I have a kid, I don’t want to take that chance. The way Sri Lanka operates, you’ll get killed and the government will say: “Ah she went swimming, she was eaten by a shark, what can you do?” ’
She has recorded a new song, ‘Rewear It’, to encourage shoppers to recycle their old clothes at H&M stores during this week’s World Recycle Week, in exchange for shopping vouchers. ‘I’m brown. So the first thing people will say is that brown people make the clothes in the factory — what are you doing repping the other side and not addressing this?’ And what does she say to that? ‘OK, so with a mainstream brand, we know what it represents, we know what it means. It’s click-click-click, buy-buy-buy. We’re the max generation, maxed out, maximising on the, erm, max.’ And with H&M at the pinnacle of ‘fast fashion’, she feels it’s ‘brave’ of them to change their approach. ‘People will say that they’re greenwashing, and so on — but the fact that people can even make those comments and H&M will see those comments is a positive thing. ’
Change has to come from somewhere and it’s encouraging that one of the world’s biggest retailers is taking sustainability seriously. And M.I.A. may lack the obedience of your modern production-line pop star, but isn’t that how we prefer our musicians: unpredictable, contradictory, even a little infuriating? When I ask what scares her she doesn’t pause. ‘Nothing. I feel like I should have died a long time ago. I’m surprised I’m still alive, to be honest. I came from war. When I was growing up I didn’t really think I’d live beyond about 25. I never thought I would be old enough to drive or have a house or raise a child. Having to do it is really difficult.’ But as she says, like any immigrant, she’s used to working ten times as hard.
Follow us on Facebook and Twitter: @EsMagOfficial
ArticleSingle mother, refugee, campaigner and controversialist: meet M.I.AM.I.ARichard Godwin meets Maya Arulpragasam, music’s most intriguing megastar, to talk London, lawsuits and the problem with #blacklivesmatter