M.I.A. publicity photo as it appears on http://www.miauk.com/press-photos/press-photos.html
Call me a philistine or an outdated middle-aged doofus but I don’t quite get M.I.A. I get the angst behind the persona of M.I.A. but beyond that her music leaves me cold. One understands that to some extent her angst flows from the plight of the Sri Lankan Tamil community, of which she is an expatriate member.
She was named Mathangi Arulpragasam when she was born in Britain to Sri Lankan Tamil parents. Her father Arul Pragasam was part of the Tamil separatist movement which has over the past two and a half decades claimed more than 65,000 lives. She maintains that her father was not part of the violent Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE) but was associated with a political movement favoring separation from Sri Lanka. I am willing to take her word for it because he is not the subject of this post.
I have heard both her recent hits ‘O saya’ and ‘Paper Planes’, the former composed by A R Rahman for Slumdog Millionaire and the latter by her. I have struggled to look for some appeal in either song. Normally, compositions by Rahman, who is unquestionably one of the world’s greatest musical talents, do tend to grow on you after a while. ‘O saya’, however, does nothing of the sort. Its Oscar nomination is as baffling as the Grammy nomination for ‘Paper Planes.’ The ‘Paper Planes’ video has 30,713,802 hits on YouTube, which is a testimony to M.I.A.’s truly global appeal. I am willing to be castigated as someone who is clueless about the kind of music that M.I.A. creates but that does not help the fact that I fail to see what the big deal is.
What I am completely at home with the Tamil-Sinhala conflict having reported on it and edited and published a major book about it and a subject on which M.I.A. has chosen to write about on CNN and speak about in other media interviews. One can understand that having been very directly affected by the crisis for the first 10 years of her life in Jaffna and later having carried deep emotional scars in her family’s disruption M.I.A. has a well-formed opinion about it. That comes through in her recent comments.
It is true that under President Mahinda Rajapaksa the Sri Lankan forces have taken the fight to the Tamil Tigers unlike any in the past two decades. There are real possibilities that this time the Tamil Tigers could be essentially wiped out. It is equally true that Tamil civilians are caught in the middle of the bloody fight between the Tigers and Sri Lankan forces. A large number of them are living in harrowing conditions. But to compare the situation to the Nazi concentration camps and genocide, as M.I.A. does, seems like serious exaggeration. Her global profile has given M.I.A. a bully pulpit which she ought to use to help focus attention on the conflict at home. It would help her own cause were she to put it in a broader perspective rather than lacing it with personal biases.
It can be reasonably argued that the Rajapaksa government has so far got a free run from the international community because it is not a conflict that anyone other than Sri Lanka and India are interested in. In terms of the sheer scale of death and brutality it is far worse than the Israeli strikes on Gaza. Yet it has largely gone unnoticed other than a newspaper like The Wall Street Journal holding it up as a great example of how well military solution works against terrorism. By and large it has remained out of sight for the international community. To that extent M.I.A.’s recent comments, however partisan will help raise its profile.