Since exploding onto our radars back in 2005 after making almost every music journo’s top-ten list with her amazing debut album Arular and her collaboration with Diplo Piracy Funds Terrorism, M.I.A. has, for the most part, been the unintentional darling of both audiences and critics alike. And while what it is exactly that’s so compelling about the Sri Lankan-born artist remains somewhat intangible, there’s no denying that there is something simultaneously world-weary and naïve in her third-world-oriented lyrics and production, her day-glo fashion and art that makes her one of the most honest, complex and original artists today. Lifelounge caught up for a chat with M.I.A. a month prior to the release of her latest album Kala, for a discussion that steadily flowed from what it’s like to grow up as an immigrant minority in the western world, to war, politics and everything in between.
Hey Maya, how are you doing with the impending launch of the album, are you feeling pretty confident with it all?
I don’t know; it’s kind of crazy. I’m literally down the road from XL, they’re like three streets away, so I can’t quite get away. They’re on my doorstep and it’s just really intense. Every five minutes they’ve got something for me to do and it’s like ‘Aah, run away!’ I guess it’s getting close to the release, so there’s a lot going on.
I can imagine. Well I better get down to it, limited time and all. So how did you actually end up in London after growing up in Sri Lanka?
Basically, I was born in London and my dad was actually working here, but when I was maybe five- or six-months-old, he decided we had to go back to Sri Lanka because the riots broke out and there was so much stuff going on there. That’s when people started organising movements and political rallies and stuff. When I was ten-years-old, somebody tracked down my birth certificate. It took about a year and a half to do, and when they found it we were living in random places, trying not to get killed. As soon as it came through, we came to England and my mum was allowed to come with me, because if you’re under 16 and you were born in England, you were allowed to bring a guardian with you. And we ended up here.
And so how do you identify yourself culturally, do you see yourself as being more of a Londoner or Sri Lankan?
I think now more as a Londoner. I suppose my roots and my genetic make-up is Sri Lankan but I am a Londoner in a bigger sense, and I’ve spent more time here. It’s like my need to survive is learnt from Sri Lanka, but how I apply that is learnt from England, if that makes sense.
Sure.
I went to see my mum the other day and we were talking about where Sri Lankans come from, and it’s proven that we’re 50 per cent Indian people that came down south, and also 50 per cent Aborigine. I just found that out this week, and everyone’s like ‘Yeah, of course, it makes total sense’, and all my uncles are like ‘Everybody always asks me that when I’m at work, ‘Are you Aborigine?’ Because all my family look so Aboriginal, it’s crazy. Then I was thinking my face shape is typically Sri Lankan, but it makes sense that I’m a bit Aboriginal too, especially now that I’ve got short hair and I’ve dyed it blonde, it’s totally like that!
I have a friend who was born in Sri Lanka, and we used to talk about the kind of difficulties that he’s had with living in a western society and growing up with Sri Lankan cultural attitudes and that sort of thing. I was wondering if you ever had those sorts of dramas to deal with growing up in London?
Not really, because I think my experiences of being a Sri Lankan person is so different from an average Sri Lankan. Because I had lived in Sri Lanka for ten years, I was already something really weird because of the fact that my family was attached to my dad [an alleged member of a militant Tamil group], and we had a really different experience growing up. We didn’t have a dad with us, and in my head it really felt that for ten years my mum was the only single woman with children that I came across in my whole entire lifetime spent in Sri Lanka. It was worse if you were a Sri Lankan woman with no man next to you – especially if he was alive and he wasn’t with you, which was the case with my mum and dad. If you were a widow or your husband had left you, or you weren’t with your dude; you were a social outcast. So when I was growing up in Sri Lanka, even though we had loads of political issues and the army used to come around to our house every two weeks, I had worse issues because my Mum was a single parent with three kids and people didn’t like to look after us. I always felt like I was an outsider, you know what I mean? We were always the bratty orphan kids playing outside, the ones without the dad, and people would look after us out of pity, but they never gave us credit for being anything more than that. So I always used to be quite anti-Sri Lankan as a child, because I used to see how hard it was for my mum not having a husband. I think when I came here I never had those kind of cultural issues because I never got to see enough of the goodness for me to miss it. I felt like I never had an identity because I never felt quite comfortable in Sri Lanka anyway, and then when I came to England I was like ‘Yeah, what’s the difference, I’ve already lived through this kind of shit’. So if people were racist or whatever, it was similar to the way it had always been, but a degree different. It’s the same sort of judgements and the same bullshit. People will always judge you, because that’s just how we’re made up, and you can’t let that get to you, because you’re never going to be able to fix people judging you, you know?
So how do you think that growing up with that sort of attitude instilled in you has affected your artistic output and what you produce?
I’m just not scared. I don’t give a shit. And I think that’s what it is, it’s like I’ve got nothing to lose and I’ve got nothing to gain. If I do gain something in the process of making this kind of shit, then that’s a good thing. But hopefully what I achieve is that I’m just so confusing to people that they learn a lesson not to be so judgemental, and that’s probably it. I want my work to be confusing, mashed up with so much stuff that I can puke everything out that I’ve digested over my lifetime and just go ‘This is how confusing and how chaotic it is in my head’. I can’t give you any straight answers about who I am, where I come from, how things should be, what a poor person is, what a rich person is, what a brown person is, or what a white person is. I just don’t have anything defined in my head because it’s just too big. You just can’t live like that.
Well you’re outputting something artistically for a reason. So creatively, did you have any goals when you started producing visual art or music, was there something that you wanted to communicate specifically?
Not really, I just thought the world should be more vibrant, because I started off in films and art. When I was a kid I used art as a sort of escapist thing. It was the cheapest thing you could do, to output work for yourself. In order to make or buy toys and stuff – it costs money, where if you’re making it all yourself it costs nothing. So I always used to draw and make shit. I’d go round to people’s houses and take things. My mum used to make clothes and stuff for people, so I used to collect all the scrap bits and take quilted material and make clothes out of it. It would take me days, but that’s what I used to do when I came home from school. I think I just got used to occupying my time like that. If I felt stuck in any situation, or felt like I could change my environment, then I’d make something. When I came to England, I think it just went hand in hand with English not being my first language, and starting school from scratch. Art is something that you don’t have to compromise, because it’s not about learning how to speak the language or codes in a certain culture, it’s just whatever it is, so I just became better at it.
You said you didn’t really want to communicate anything specifically, but there was some controversy when you released Arular to do with your supposed political ties with Tamil groups, and that sort of thing. So did you have any specific intentions or involvement with those sorts of groups, and was there anything that you were trying to say about those issues in your music?
Yeah, I think I got really misunderstood on that front, and I just want to really state it in points. The first point is that I made Arular in a time when something political had to be made. You switched on the news everyday or you opened up the paper, or magazines, da da da, and everything was political. We were bombarded with finger wagging speeches stating, ‘This is how we should be, this is good and evil, we’re going to kill these people, we’re going to nuke that, we’re investing a billion dollars into fighter jets’. You know what I mean?
And it was such an aggressive pro-war campaign that I felt like I had to speak out, to stand up and say to someone ‘Please, no war’. But you just got ignored. I went to those anti-war demonstrations, the anti-war marches in Hyde Park, and that got totally swept under the carpet. I think something like two million people turned up at the park, and I came home and switched on the news and they said something like ‘Oh yes, six hundred thousand people came to the march’. I was like ‘Wow, everything’s getting so reduced down to make it look like we’re all pro-war’. I realised that it wasn’t a matter of standing up and saying, ‘Please don’t fight, we don’t want a war’, you know, ‘We’re all hippies who want to hug trees’ – that’s not how you get inside it. You’ve got to fight fire with fire. What would happen if you were taking somebody who is a civilian, not a professional politician, not somebody who’s got a PHD in politics, not someone who’s going to end up in politics in the future, but if you took an average civilian and then you asked them to process all the information that they’ve absorbed over the years, and their experiences on war, and then you get them to question politics with their own knowledge and what they’ve been fed. I think Arular is that for me. Arular raises loads of questions and it’s a statement about how confusing politics is to an average civilian. I never said I was good at politics. I talk about it as a civilian who experienced politics. Politics changed my life.
By the time I was ten I’d already seen 40 people dead in front of me, and people getting killed all around me, and nobody can take that away from me, that’s who I am. So I felt, if you don’t have the right to talk about politics because you don’t have a PHD in politics, you certainly have the right to talk about politics if you’ve experienced it. That’s how it really came out. I think on this one, [Kala] I’m less political because the times have changed, and you can see how culture has evolved. We’ve got to the point where we could see Saddam hung on YouTube – and we want to say thanks to everyone for making that happen in our lifetime – I feel so much safer now.
Now, for me, I think it’s about globalisation and mixing cultures. The rest of the world sort of seems like a similar place. If you go to India, Africa, China or Australia there’s some common ideology or pace that’s developing, and I want to learn about that, and I think that’s what this album’s about.
M.I.A.’s Kala is out now through Remote Control.
