The Atlantic

M.I.A.’s Critique of Wokeness

The pop star’s new documentary shows the difficulty she faced in bringing attention to violence in Sri Lanka, but she hasn’t given up the cause.
Source: Cinereach

M.I.A. wants to talk foreign policy. I called up the 43-year-old pop star Maya Arulpragasam last Friday to talk about Matangi/Maya/M.I.A., Stephen Loveridge’s fascinating documentary about her life. But she immediately brought up the latest news about her birth nation, Sri Lanka, which her family of ethnic Tamils fled amid civil war when she was 10. “I am in New York City, down the road from the UN building, where they just decided that Sri Lanka is giving up on holding anybody accountable for war crimes,” she said when I asked where she was talking to me from. “The [Sri Lankan] president just told everyone to fuck off, really.”

For anyone who’s watched Loveridge’s documentary, Arulpragasam’s interest in the Sri Lankan leader Maithripala Sirisena’s won’t come as a surprise. The film in part spotlights how she tried to leverage her celebrity status in the 2000s to advocate for international intervention on behalf of Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority, whose decades-long rebellion was in 2009. Arulpragasam’s musical career—which she has said —was marked by a series of scandals (remember when she flipped the middle finger at the Super Bowl?). But for all the attention she kicked up, and for all the frenetic brilliance of her songs, most bystanders remain hazy on her animating causes—a fact she partly attributes to the

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