Musicians - M.I.A.

Home > Listing Index > Musicians > M.I.A.

	Musicians - M.I.A.

M.I.A., real name: Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, (born 17 July, 1977 in Hounslow, London, U.K.) is a Sri Lanka-raised rapper, singer and artist. Her style contains elements of grime, hip hop, ragga, dancehall, electronica and baile funk.

Biography

Early life

Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam, the daughter of a Tamil activist-turned-paramilitary-guerrilla, Arul Pragasam, was born in Hounslow, London. When she was six months old, her family moved back to their native Sri Lanka. Motivated by his wish to support the Tamil efforts to win independence from the majority Sinhalese population, her father became politically known as Arular and was a founding member of The Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS), a militant Tamil group. Her alias, "M.I.A." stands for "Missing in Acton". She says her alias references both her London neighborhood and her politically tumultuous youth.

While residing in Sri Lanka, Maya lived with her family on her grandparents' remote farm, a collection of huts without electricity or running water. After a year, as her father's involvement in militant activities increased, Maya, her older sister Kali, and their mother moved to Jaffna in the far north of the country, where Maya's younger brother Sugu was born. Contact with her father was strictly limited, as he was in hiding from the Sri Lankan Army, which is notorious for torturing Tamil males suspected of being rebels. He occasionally visited in secret, slipping through the window at night and being introduced to the children as "an uncle" so that his identity and whereabouts would not be given away to the army when they regularly came to question the family.

Eventually, as the civil war escalated, it became unsafe for the family to stay in Sri Lanka, so they were forced to relocate to Madras, India. They moved into an almost derelict house three and a half miles from the nearest road or neighbor. They survived there for a while, with sporadic visits from Arular, and the girls attended the local school, excelling as students. However, visits from friends and family grew less frequent and money grew very tight. The children became ill; Kali caught Typhoid and the family struggled to survive on a limited amount of food and water. A visiting uncle took concern and moved them back to Sri Lanka, where they settled in Jaffna again.

By now, the violence of the civil war was at its peak, and the family once again tried to flee the country. The army regularly shot Tamils seeking to move across border areas and bombed roads and escape routes. After several failed attempts to leave, Maya’s mother successfully made it out with the three children, arriving first in India before finally returning to Maya's birthplace in London, where they were housed as refugees.

It was in 1986, on a notoriously racist council estate in Mitcham, Surrey, that an eleven-year-old Arulpragasam began to learn the English language. Here she was exposed to Western radio for the first time, hearing broadcasts emanating from her neighbors' flats. Her affinity with hip-hop and rap began from there. The uncompromising attitudes of Public Enemy, Big Daddy Kane, Roxanne Shante and N.W.A. clicked with a frustrated, energetic war-child trying to relate to grey and foreign surroundings. "Those records were rhythmic, so whether you understood the language or not, you could understand the music," she now says.

Art and Film

Maya was a talented and creative student, eventually winning a place at London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, where she studied fine art, film and video. Here, for the first time, she began to piece together some of the different strands of her life experience. In an early incarnation of what was later to become M.I.A., she learned how to play off her different cultural personae against each other; layering rap iconography with the warfare pictures from her youth, Asian Britain with American new-wave film making style and St. Martin's fashion sense with refugee outlooks.

A successful art career beckoned and, for a while, seemed to be Maya's destined path. Her first-ever public exhibition of paintings in 2001 at the Euphoria Shop in Portobello, London, featured candy coloured spray-paint and stencil pictures of the Tamil rebellion movement. Graffitied tigers and palm trees mixed with orange, green and pink camouflage, bombs, guns and freedom fighters on chip board off-cuts and canvases. The show was nominated for the Alternative Turner Prize, every painting sold and a monograph book of the collection was published by Pocko (which was simply entitled 'M.I.A.', an acronym for Missing In Acton).

The Publication's back cover reads: From a long-forgotten region of endemic conflict comes a project to challenge your ethical core. The art of warfare is sprawled across these pages transforming bloodshed into beauty and raising the phoenix of forbidden expression - The real war is in us.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for M.I.A. ]

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article M.I.A.; it is used under the GNU Free Documentation License. You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the GFDL.

Searches on eBay