M.I.A. (artist) - Social Causes - Activism

Activism

M.I.A.'s addressing of several conflicts and oppressed people around the world, including the Tamils, Palestinians and African Americans has been both heralded and criticized. The United States has restricted her access into and out of the country during her career since the release of her debut album. M.I.A. notes that the voicelessness she felt as a child dictated her role as a refugee advocate and voice lender to civilians in war during her career.

M.I.A. attributes much of her success to the "homeless, rootlessness" of her early life. A refugee icon, the EMP Museum's 2008 Pop Conference featured paper submissions and discussions on M.I.A. presented on the theme of "Shake, Rattle: Music, Conflict, and Change." She has used networking sites such as Twitter and MySpace to discuss and highlight the human rights abuses and war crimes that Sri Lanka is accused of perpetrating against Tamils, citing news articles, human rights group reports, government reports, her own experiences as a child and on her return to the island in 2001 to support calls for a ceasefire. M.I.A. has spoken of discussions with witnesses during and after the war as reinforcing the need for international intervention to protect and provide justice to Tamil people. As the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests gathered pace, she joined other activists in condemning the actions of the Sri Lankan government against the Tamil populace as a slow "systematic" genocide. Telling TIME that she didn't see anything wrong in sticking up for 300,000 trapped and dying people, M.I.A. stated that international governments were privy to Sri Lanka's use of widespread censorship and propaganda on the rebellion during the island's civil war to aid its impunity in numerous atrocities on civilians, but had no will to end it. Sri Lanka's Foreign Secretary denied that his country perpetrated genocide, responding that he felt M.I.A. was "misinformed" and that "it's best she stays with what she's good at, which is music, not politics." Consequently, she has been accused of being a "terrorist sympathiser" and "LTTE supporter" by the Sri Lankan government. Two weeks before his death, the Tigers' Political Head B. Nadesan told Indian magazine The Week he felt that M.I.A.'s humanitarianism had been a source of strength to Eelam Tamils and fearless, knowingly amidst the "all-powerful Sri Lankan propaganda machinery that demonises any one who speaks for the Tamils." Miranda Sawyer of The Observer highlighted that M.I.A. was emotional and that this could be limiting her, stating that while she was well informed, "you're not meant to get involved when giving information out about war", and that the difficulty for M.I.A. was that the world "doesn't really care."

M.I.A. endorsed candidate Jan Jananayagam at the 2009 European Parliament election, a last minute candidate standing on a platform of anti-genocide, civil liberties, financial transparency, the environment and women's rights, who became one of the most successful independent election candidates ever despite her loss in the general election.

Hate mail, including death threats directed at M.I.A. and her son, has followed her activism, which she also cited as an influence on the songs on her album Maya.

In 2010, she condemned the Chinese Government's role in supporting and supplying arms to the Sri Lankan government during the conflict in an interview with music magazine Mondomix, stating that China's influence within the UN was preventing prosecutions of war crimes committed during the conflict.

The same year, M.I.A. voiced her fears of the influence of video game violence on her son and his generation, saying, "I don't know which is worse. The fact that I saw it in my life has maybe given me lots of issues, but there's a whole generation of American kids seeing violence on their computer screens and then getting shipped off to Afghanistan. They feel like they know the violence when they don't. Not having a proper understanding of violence, especially what it's like on the receiving end of it, just makes you interpret it wrong and makes inflicting violence easier."

In October 2009, she stated that the President of the United States Barack Obama should give back his 2009 Nobel Peace Prize "like John Lennon sent back his MBE." She said in one interview, playing on the famous Lennon phrase "Give Peace a Chance" - "I'm a bit beyond being an artist who says, 'Give peace a chance.' Part of me is like, 'Give war a chance,' just to stir it up, you know what I mean?".

In 2008, M.I.A. filmed from her Bed Stuy apartment window and posted on YouTube an incident involving a black man being apprehended by white police officers, which in light of the Sean Bell shooting incident, elicited commentary debating the force used for the arrest. She has spoken of the combined effects that news corporations and search engine Google have on news and data collection, while stressing the need for alternative news sources that she felt her son's generation would need in order to ascertain truth. She told Nylon magazine that social networking site Facebook and Google's development "by the CIA" was harmful to internet freedom. Some criticized the claim as lacking detail.

Following the 2011 United Kingdom anti-austerity protests and the 2011 London riots, during which her cousin's jewelry shop in Croydon was attacked and looted, M.I.A. criticized the UK Government's response to the rioters as failing to address the root causes of them. She recalled the importance of a council funded youth worker she had in her school years, the use of tax money to incentivise a new business job creation program amongst the working class and imprisonment conditions which encouraged consumerism. She stated that the top forty companies in Britain who banked offshore should be made to pay taxes in the UK and "cut the poor people some slack."

M.I.A. has been an outspoken supporter of WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. In her own book, M.I.A. wrote regarding Wikileaks, "So obviously I love Wikileaks because, after I’d gone through the whole backlash, they were the first news information site to confirm any news on the Sri Lankan war in the truest form; they were the first to release information stating the truth about what had happened to the Tamils as I knew it and to reveal that the United Nations was aware that the Sri Lankan government was lying—war crimes had been committed but their hands were tied because any time anyone tried to impose sanctions, governments would walk out. I support Wikileaks because of that." She composed the theme to Assange's television show The World Tomorrow and later stood by Assange's side as he held a press conference at the Ecuadorian Embassy in London where Assange was successfully granted political asylum by Ecuador in August 2012. "I ask President Obama to do the right thing. The United States must renounce its witch hunt against WikiLeaks," Assange said at the press conference. She posted a photo of Assange from within the embassy, and later tweeted, "hummmm after this day 2things have 2 happen....., either 500 cops turn up outside every rape case reported even if its without charge. or we get raped by the powerz that be and we deal 4eva." The tweets were in reference to an arrest warrant the Swedish Prosecutor's Office issued in August 2010 for Assange on two charges: rape and molestation. Earlier in 2012 Britain's Supreme Court denied an appeal by Assange to avoid extradition to Sweden to face these charges.

Ann Powers, in conversation with Billboard revealed that in trying to handle political issues and creating art, the musician did not want to compromise or keep silent. She notes that this method worked for The Clash, but that this was at a certain time and a certain place, that they benefitted from being a band, and that audiences were more used to seeing men being confrontational. Conversely, Denise Sullivan writing in Keep on Pushing: Black Power Music from Blues to Hip-Hop (2011), noted that in contrast to other rock musicians, M.I.A. furthered the legacy of The Clash, "creating a controversy while doing so". Critic Jon Dolan of Spin noted M.I.A. may be a "confused revolutionary? brilliant provocateur?" and one of the most polarizing yet thrilling figures in pop music today. Sarahanna, writing in Impose magazine cited composer Igor Stravinsky in describing M.I.A.'s role as an artist who challenged the audience into breaking their mind from a conservative cycle of familiarity. Baron writing in the Village Voice felt that although M.I.A.'s bloodline, politics and grievance meant that she was more informed than most and gave her "every right to be a partisan and were reason for caution," he praised her efforts for leading thousands of American writers including himself to know of the situation in Sri Lanka as "brilliant", noting her mainly humanitarian angle in her protesting of civilian casualties that had been vastly and disproportionately inflicted on Sri Lanka's Tamil minority and her courage in "putting her success and fame on the line to use every opportunity and avenue possible to remind Americans and people around the globe of this conflict" is pretty much the most admirable thing going in pop music.