Survivors
of war, conflict and genocide live on as IDPs and refugees, dispersed
across their homelands and the globe. They embody the violence that has
displaced them into the unknown, into uncertainty and into camps and
council estates. Survivors crossed countless continents, countries and
borders, leaving behind their homes, lives and dead: only to be rendered
invisible, silent and forgotten in exile; only to be told that their
bodies might have travelled but their stories have not. Their narratives
are construed as exchangeable, mutable and nuisance while their bodies
are considered collateral damage. Survivors are treated as a surplus
people whose very presence destabilizes the status quo, whose voices
unsettle the known.
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| photo credit: Viviane Sassen |
As
border-crossers, modern day nomads, governments worldwide have tried to
clamp down on their movements by criminalizing them and locking them up
into camps and into poverty. The demobilization of survivors led to the
creation of new states for the stateless, separate and legally distinct
from the territory they sought asylum in. BORDERLANDS. Borderlands are
places doomed as hopeless, lifeless and futureless, where joy can never
be traced, where dreams cannot be woven, where the everyday is thought
to be absent. They are places where new global orders are created, where
new encounters occur, where new cultures are formed, where new people
are
born: REFUGEES.
British Tamil
artist M.I.A., a survivor of Sri Lanka's decades-old genocide against
Tamils, is one of Borderlands' many people. Surviving a war that has
killed hundreds of thousands of Tamils, she arrived in London in the mid
1980s as part of the first wave of Tamil refugees. Following her
displacement, she was raised in a women-led household in South London's
impoverished peripheries. Life in a council estate exposed her to a
patchwork of marginalized peoples and cultures, which later came to
influence her art practices and created her unique refugee sound.
M.I.A. is driven
by the idea of rendering the nightmare of becoming a refugee into a
dream. Though placed at the margins, M.I.A. learnt to speak against
power and its complex technological arms with the humble tools available
to her. She mastered the art of creating music out of nothing, of
rendering disenfranchisement into a powerful catalyst for resistance.
Album after album, from Arular, Kala, Maya to Matangi,
she returned with power and raised her refugee voice to create a global
sound for those deprived of a voice. She taught others that she is
broader than a border.
With her fifth studio album, AIM,
M.I.A. returns to her own roots as a Londoner of Tamil refugee
heritage. She provides a future template for today's refugees to narrate
their own lives beyond the many deceased and beyond catastrophe. By
centering the living, she forces us to look beyond the sensationalist
news headlines and question what happens when refugees get out of their
tents and become our foreign friends. She encourages us to think about
the struggles in our very backyards, spaces that are kept in order by
overworked and underpaid shadow workforces made up of refugees who ought
to be void of stories.
AIM
gives us the tools to finally move from abstraction into a clear vision
for a world where the refugee is no more an anomaly, but makes up a
powerful majority. It aims to overthrow categories that she, as other
refugees, do not fit into anymore and envision a world where the sky
isn't synonymous for death anymore, where the sea is no more the home of
nameless cemeteries. AIM is not just any ordinary album; it's
the climax of a musical journey which has taken us through a geography
of exile to bring us right back into the backstreets of London, where
survivors meet the living.
M.I.A. "AIM"
iTunes: http://smarturl.it/AIM
Amazon: http://smarturl.it/AIM.amz