M.I.A. has spoken about the “extreme” reaction provoked by “Borders,” the track and music video on which she questions the ongoing migrant crisis. During an interview with Al Jazeera, M.I.A. says that the video has received “a tremendous amount of support from my fans and other people who feel it’s important for artists and musicians to speak about current affairs and things that actually affect our society.” However, she also reveals that “Borders,” which features scenes showing people scrambling over barbed wire fences and M.I.A. captaining a kind of human Noah’s Ark, has prompted “a lot of hate, with neo-Nazi groups and people thinking that it’s causing white genocide, and [thinking] that’s what I’m promoting”.
When she was a child, M.I.A.’s family fled to the safety of west London from war-torn Sri Lanka, and during the interview the rapper — real name Mathangi Arulpragasam — describes herself as a “poster child” for multicultural Britain. “I have to be part of something that helps find a solution where multiculturalism and integration works, rather than it being a problem,” she adds.
Earlier this week, “Borders” earned MI.A.’s record label a strongly-worded letter from French soccer team Paris Saint-Germain (PSG), who claim that images of the rapper wearing a modified version of the team’s jersey in the video has caused the club “harm”. With typical M.I.A defiance, she’s since described the PSG controversy as “irrelevant”, telling Noisey: “I’d much rather spend my time going to Calais and inventing a football team out of the immigrants and getting PSG to pay for it if they really care about it all so much, rather than being in court fighting over a T-shirt.” Referencing a previous legal dispute with the NFL after she “flipped the bird” at the 2012 Super Bowl halftime show, M.I.A. added jokingly: “It’s sports teams that keep coming after me! I don’t know what I’m going to do. Maybe I should marry a footballer!”
Credits
Photography Wolfgang Tillmans
The Declaration Issue, No. 255, 2005