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 Illustration by Lisa Case, Photo by Emily Korn | In 2005, when the infectious tunes of M.I.A’s breakout hit “Galang” from her debut dance album Arular made their way to America, it seemed like a natural progression for any artist from London to make. “M.I.A is making a concerted effort to crack America,” the Guardian declared. At the time, the blossoming Sri Lankan–British hip-hop artist, whose homemade album showed promise by marrying dancehall music with native (Tamil) beats, needed America, the quintessential pop-culture mecca, to launch her career that would eventually result in global fame. The Village Voice singled out the album for its “nursery rhyme tunefulness [that] breathed female principle.” But what’s even more intriguing about the review is that the writer, Robert Christgau, provided a lowdown on the Sri Lankan civil war between the minority Tamils and majority Sinhalese, to put some context into why there were lyrics like “I got the bombs to make you blow” in the song. M.I.A’s backstory — a radical Sri Lankan refugee artist with zero qualms singing about bombs — made her immediately noteworthy. Her political baggage arrived in America right alongside her music. Soon as it did, her troubles began. The video for “Sunshowers,” a single off Arular, was banned by MTV owing to its provocative lyrics ("You wanna go? You wanna winna war? Like PLO, I don’t surrendo,” PLO being the Palestine Liberation Organization) and her refusal to remove them from the video. Not long after, in 2006, she was refused a US work visa. In a way, her relationship with America soured before it even started. Naturally, things grew increasingly fraught: her unfettered outspokenness and politicized lyrics alluding to the civil war in Sri Lanka, an island most Americans are unfamiliar with (much less in 2005), were always in direct conflict with the commercial goals of the music industry. Besides, in the eyes of the industry, M.I.A’s politics were simply unmarketable. They provided no impetus to the success of her albums, a crucial benchmark in the industry; they sold on the power of their inventive rhythms and catchy beats, much more than for their lyrics. But M.I.A, whose full name is Mathangi “Maya” Arulpragasam, wanted to be more than just a chart-topping artist, and she wanted nothing to interfere with her advocacy. She repeatedly steered interviews toward politics in her early career, keen to outplay her standing as a mere entertainer to make a case about the war crimes against civilians in Sri Lanka. She beseeched Oprah on her MySpace blog, after meeting her at the 2009 Time 100 party, to speak about the refugee camps in Sri Lanka for war-displaced Tamils. In all caps, it said: “OPRAH CAN YOU DO SOMETHING BOUT THESE CAMPS PLEEEEEEEEEEASE?” If none of these actions were provocative enough, her decision to further amplify her activism with the video for “Born Free” in 2010 proved to be a pivotal moment. Its fake execution of ginger-haired children, modeled after the real executions of Tamil children in Sri Lanka (the horrific videos of which, she claimed, were freely circulating on the Internet), alluded to ethnic cleansing. Blowback to the video, directed by Romain Gavras, was swift, forcing YouTube to ban it briefly. Again, her message was lost in the din, and the shocking video only brought her more infamy. It’s little surprise, then, that a documentary that provides critical insight into her life is all but needed to unpack her complicated relationship with the world, mainly America. Directed by her longtime friend Steve Loveridge and sifted from taped vignettes (700 hours’ worth) often captured by M.I.A herself, it holds a mirror up to her rocky childhood, shaped by an absent militant father and a family upended by civil war. MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A is a character study that goes into all the previously unscrutinized nooks and crannies of her life. She still seems to have a pressing need to tell the world her side of the story. “You want to see my story? I’m gonna show you my fucking story,” she declared with rightful contempt, looking into the camera at the opening of the documentary. Of all the moments in her life the documentary attempts to unpack, one thing stands out: her immigrant’s sense of rootlessness. Back in 2001, when the war was at its peak, M.I.A as an awkward youngster went back to the conflict zone in the north of Sri Lanka, armed with a video camera to record the lives of her relatives. By then a British citizen living in London, she received only patronizing dismissal from them. “You never had the war-zone experience,” says one of her relatives to her, perhaps refusing to make sense of her urge to connect with her roots. While she viewed the world’s apathy as unbothered complicity, her sense of rootlessness coupled with her need for belonging further fueled her need for activism. (See her refusal to dismiss her sense of identity inherited from her Tamil revolutionary father, who was once associated with training soldiers and building bombs to fight in the war.) When her father makes a rare appearance in the documentary while visiting his family in London, the siblings are conflicted. Dismissing her brother’s less-than-favorable view of her father, Arular, she says: “He’s made us damn interesting. He’s given us a bloody background!” Indeed. It might appear she desperately wanted her father’s wartime baggage to carry her personality forward and perhaps to inform her work as an artist — without which she may have believed and even feared that her life and work would lack the seriousness they needed and be reduced to the work of just another brown immigrant. In another revealing scene from the documentary, she says: “If I shut up and not talk, I’ll become a drug addict.” It's just one of those self-recorded-video moments, of which there are numerous instances in the film, that show a rare glimpse into her personality and her pressing need to articulate her strong notions without being fearful of consequences. Today, the Sri Lankan war that strongly informed her work is effectively over. At the face of it, perhaps the symbiosis that existed between her political activism and her music is over, too. But there are still other wars to be fought. When asked by the London Evening Standard about Black Lives Matter, she replied acerbically: “Is Beyoncé or Kendrick Lamar going to say Muslim Lives Matter? Or Syrian Lives Matter? Or this kid in Pakistan matters? That’s a more interesting question.” The statement was loaded and her way of stressing the need for inclusive activism, but it cost her a headlining act at the Afropunk festival in 2016. The same year, she announced that her politically subdued fifth album, AIM, will be her final one. She has been ambivalent about whether her activism helped initiate better understanding between the Tamil minorities and the Sinhalese in Sri Lanka, admitting that “meaningful reconciliation between Tamils and Sinhalese in Sri Lanka is not happening.” In response to a question about whether she cared to win the Mercury Prize for Arular, way back in 2005, she said: “What happens to an artist if they are relevant, if they do bridge the gap between England and America and the rest of the world, if they do explore new music? What happens to that artist?” She didn’t win the prize. In saying that, she revealed the vision of her music career: to bridge the gap between England and America. More than a decade and several albums later, overtly colored by her politics, that vision may have wavered off course. But doubtlessly, she stayed relevant in speaking out on issues like immigrant rights and open borders. That perhaps is a proof to the extent of her success. To study M.I.A’s life, purged of her political background, is to undermine her firebrand activism. But is it possible for her music career to exist, uncolored by her political activism, at least in some parts of the world? A Polish-German graphic-designer fan who watched her documentary at the Berlinale screening told me: “I had no idea her career was so controversial, much less about the conflict in Sri Lanka. I feel a little embarrassed for not knowing it.” For the rest of us, it’s the knowing that makes M.I.A one of the most important contemporary cultural forces to reckon with. Prathap Nair is a freelance writer based in Stuttgart, Germany. @thesunlitwindow MATANGI / MAYA / M.I.A debuts in theaters September 21 (UK) and September 28 (USA). | | | | |
 Illustration by Qieer Wang | In 2002, when I was a 20-year-old college student, I was hired as a violinist for an orchestral ensemble that had sold millions of albums, appeared on national television, and performed sold-out concerts across the country. I had spent my rural-Appalachian childhood dreaming of the day that I would move to New York City to study music. But soon after arriving in my Manhattan dormitory, I realized that there were dozens of people in my freshman class alone who were more talented at the violin than I would ever be. I dropped my music major after only a few months. A few years later, when I was hired to tour the world as a violinist, no one was more surprised than I was. That is, until I found out that the job was indeed too good to be true: the microphones in front of me were never plugged in, and recordings of better violinists were blasted out to unsuspecting audiences. When I was first hired for this job, I wasn’t particularly concerned with the consequences of musical fakery (I sometimes referred to the ensemble as “Milli Violini”). I already held multiple other jobs, struggling to pay my tuition. I was grateful for the good pay and steady work that the fake violin job provided. After I graduated from college, I continued to work for the ensemble. I planned to use the money I saved from concert touring to pay off student loans and move abroad. But then, in the middle of a 54-city concert tour around America, something bizarre began to happen to me. Onstage one night, I felt I had to pee. But I knew I didn’t have to pee; I had already been to the bathroom several times before the concert began. I went to three doctors, thinking I had developed a urinary-tract infection. But the doctors all came to the same conclusion: everything was normal. It hadn’t yet occurred to me that nothing has to be wrong with one’s body for one’s mind to go haywire. I didn’t know it at the time, but the feeling of having to pee was actually an atypical presentation of a panic attack. The onstage attacks escalated, as panic attacks do: Not only am I going to pee myself in front of a hundred people, I’m going to throw up. My dress is going to fall off; my shoes will break underneath me, crippling me. I am going to faint. I am going to throw up and faint at the same time and then choke on my own vomit. Panic attacks are commonly described as the same flight instinct that tells humans to run from a bear. But I’ve never found that description to be accurate. What I experienced onstage was like the panic I’d feel once the bear already caught me, the panic of someone with no chance of survival, in the last moments of consciousness, when neither fight nor flight would help. The attacks eventually invaded every area of my life until I could not ride airplanes or subways or elevators or cars or be anywhere that didn’t offer immediate access to an unoccupied bathroom. And even immediate access to a bathroom didn’t always count as a safe place. How many times am I allowed to get up during a movie? I wondered. How many times during a friend’s wedding? I parceled my life into 30-minute segments, the maximum amount of time I could convince myself that I wouldn’t pee myself, though I never actually needed to pee. One night, while drinking a few glasses of wine, I had an epiphany: When I drank alcohol, I had to pee less. The disorder was indeed in my head. But I resisted seeking psychiatric help. For one thing, I did not want to talk to anyone, not even a psychiatrist, about having to pee. It was gross, and no one wants to be gross, especially not a young woman. I also had an unrelated intestinal illness; I feared that any psychiatrist who saw me would wrongly diagnose me as having some kind of Freudian obsession with my own bodily excretions. But after six months of increasingly severe attacks, I did seek help: medications, biofeedback, cognitive therapy. Nothing worked. I continued to perform with Milli Violini, and my panic attacks worsened to the point where I sometimes ran offstage in the middle of concerts. I worried that I would be fired for this, but the people I worked with were understanding. Still, I felt guilty for causing a distraction during the performance, even as I knew the performance itself was fake. Once I determined that what I was suffering from was indeed a panic disorder, I spent hours obsessing over how to prevent the attacks and even more hours wondering what had caused them in the first place. I felt that if I could get to the root of the fear — the initial panic — I could make them stop. And so I began to do more research on panic attacks and puzzle together why they were happening to me and why I had first experienced them as a fake violinist. As I read through scientific journals and firsthand accounts online, I discovered that panic attacks disproportionately affect women in their twenties, which makes sense: Our twenties are when many of us realize that the success we achieved in classrooms on progressive college campuses will not necessarily carry over as we enter sexist workplaces. The Milli Violini ensemble hired young, attractive, female musicians and silenced our microphones. All our real talent (even that of musicians who, unlike me, were legitimate pros with Juilliard degrees) was muted; we were being paid for our looks. Eventually, I found out that there is an entire subset of psychiatric disorders that revolve around the fear of losing control of one’s bodily fluids. I feel a powerful kinship with the Atlantic editor Scott Stossel, who wrote about an emetophobia so powerful that he bolted out of an interview with Bill Clinton, convinced that he was moments away from vomiting on the president. After he fled, he realized that he felt perfectly fine. But even with this knowledge about panic attacks, I still felt that there was something intrinsic to my job as a fake violinist that led to my panic disorder. In his New Yorker article “Petrified,” John Lahr wrote that performers who experience stage fright feel exposed, at sudden risk of losing control of the body. Lahr points out that “Break a leg” and “Merde” are good-luck sayings that recognize the risk of making a corporeal mess onstage. “Instead of being protected, as usual, by the character he is playing,” Lahr writes, the performer “suddenly stands helpless before the audience as himself; he loses the illusion of invisibility.” This is what happened to me onstage when I had my first panic attack. I lost the illusion of playing a role — violinist — and suddenly saw what I really was: a fake and a fraud. Someone who was working for an orchestra that tricked people into thinking they were listening to a live concert. Someone who was getting paid more money to be a silent female body than she could hope to make with her college-educated brain. I wish I could say that this realization came quickly, but it took me many years to untangle. I eventually quit the Milli Violini ensemble and went to graduate school to study writing. Now I work as a creative-writing professor, a job that doesn’t give me panic attacks the way fake violin performances did. When I am teaching, I feel relaxed. Perhaps this is because I am focused on other people and what they need from me, or perhaps this is because the work feels real; I see improvements in my students’ writing after they do things I have taught them to do. I can identify only one positive consequence of suffering through years of panic attacks: I am much more adept at recognizing anxiety and panic in other people. When a student tells me that they cannot read aloud in class, or says that they are afraid of the sound of applause, or simply bolts out of the classroom in the middle of a lecture, I accommodate them as much as possible. I am more observant and compassionate toward those whose behavior seems bizarre or rude. Sometimes, my students ask me for career advice, and I tell them this: beware of jobs that seem too good to be true, particularly jobs that seek young women to be seen and not heard. After all, there may be two ways to become a professional violinist, or a professional writer, or a professional anything — the real way and the fake way — but the inability to tell the difference between the two, the inability to tell the difference between the real and the fake, is a classic symptom of mental illness. Jessica Chiccehitto Hindman is the author of Sounds Like Titanic, a forthcoming memoir from W.W. Norton. She teaches creative writing at Northern Kentucky University. | | | | |  Illustration by Michelle Kondrich | In 2008, after Maggie Loredo graduated from high school with top grades, she soon realized that financial aid and scholarships were out of her reach. Though Loredo grew up in Texas and Georgia, she was born in San Luis Potosi, Mexico, coming to the United States with her family at age two. As a still-undocumented immigrant, she felt her dreams of going to college come crashing down. Feeling powerless and fearing the threat of deportation, Loredo returned to Mexico. In 2012, the Obama administration introduced the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals, better known as DACA, which permitted some 800,000 undocumented immigrants who entered the United States as minors to receive work permits and renewal relief from deportation. If Loredo had remained in the United States, she would have been eligible. “When [Obama] announced DACA, it was such a bittersweet moment, knowing that if I had stayed, I would have qualified,” says Loredo. “But then, as the years went by, I knew that DACA wasn’t enough, that it was just a Band-Aid for a larger wound. It made me realize that at the end of the day, it still failed to give us full rights and people are still being criminalized. It was still creating the good versus the bad, the deserving versus the undeserving immigrant.” Now 28, Loredo is the co-founder and co-director of Otros Dreams en Acción (ODA), a local organization founded in late 2015 that supports and works with deported and returning immigrant youth, many of whom, like Loredo, have no memory of living in Mexico. ODA is part of a growing network of immigrants’-rights activist groups in Mexico, but the group stands out because three of its most senior leaders — Claudia Amaro, Jill Anderson, and Maggie Loredo — are women. Last week, the US House of Representatives voted on two immigration bills: a conservative one that will make deeper cuts to legal immigration and will not offer citizenship for the estimated 800,000 DREAMers, and a “compromise” one that will offer a path to citizenship for DACA recipients based on merit, direct billions of dollars to build a southern border wall, and make asylum and legal immigration much harder. However, if any of these bills pass, it will be solely on Republican votes, as Democrats have called these bills “nonstarters.” In 2017, the Trump administration successfully ended the DACA program for any new applicants, but the Supreme Court’s delayed ruling earlier this year means that current DACA recipients can apply for renewal. On Friday, the House rejected the conservative immigration bill, and it is set to vote on the compromise bill later this week. While DACA remains in limbo on Capitol Hill, the Trump administration continues to push hostile immigration policies. In April, Attorney General Jeff Sessions introduced a zero-tolerance policy, ordering prosecutors to pursue charges against people who cross the US-Mexico border illegally. Facing prosecution, parents are now needlessly separated from their children at the border, and these children are shipped to detention centers, viewed as unaccompanied minors by the federal government. According to the Department of Homeland Security, the Trump administration separated more than 2,000 children from their parents at the border between April 19 and last Tuesday. Trump overturned forced family separation last Wednesday with an executive order after international outrage from the media, activists, citizens, and world leaders. It means, for now, families will be kept in detention centers as a unit during prosecuting, though it violates the law of limitations placed on how long children can be detained. Sessions also recently announced that domestic abuse and gang-related violence would no longer be reason to grant people asylum. With America’s new inhumane approach to immigration policy and the uncertainty about the future of DACA, Loredo says “deportations are likely to rise,” and so the work she and the team at ODA are doing is “increasingly vital.” For her, the work is intensely personal. When she returned to San Luis Potosi in 2008, Loredo felt ashamed, isolated, and received little local and governmental support. In fact, it took her five years to validate her high-school diploma in Mexico so she could go to college. She doesn’t want deported and returning youth to have the same experience, so through ODA, she works to find jobs and community for them, to help them reacclimate to Mexican culture, and to assist them in obtaining legal documents. The group also advocates for better policies from the Mexican government, which ODA says is not doing enough. After Trump was elected, Mexican schools and universities began preparing for a wave of deportations by working with politicians to streamline the process of transferring deportees and returnees from American schools and providing resources for financing their educations. But Anderson, Loredo, and other advocates lament that the Mexican government needs better policies to make the process of repatriation easier, especially for those who have a limited education or cannot afford to go back to school. In February 2017, Anderson testified before the Mexican Senate, arguing that even with the changes in the government, the strict requirements still placed an undue burden on students wanting to attend school or college in Mexico. Currently, students must demonstrate that their college degrees carry a 75 percent curricular equivalency to a degree in Mexico, which is impossible in most cases. Seventeen-year-old Sayra Hernandez connected with ODA when she was deported with her mother, leaving her younger sister behind, after their application for asylum was rejected in 2016. Hernandez struggled to validate her US high-school education in Mexico, and her parents were left with no choice but to enroll her in private school, which costs thousands of dollars and took a financial toll on the family. “I felt really bad, like my dreams were crushed. I came back here and I couldn’t talk to anybody. I became depressed. I wouldn’t go out; I wouldn’t eat,” says Hernandez. “Back when I was in Michigan [where she grew up], I had dreams. I wanted to be a marine biologist. I wanted to keep studying. Now it’s like, What do I do?” Where ODA really stands out from other immigrants’-rights groups is with what Anderson refers to as a “transnational approach.” The group is invested in and actively advocates for better policies for immigrants in Mexico and in the United States. Increasingly, ODA advocates for free mobility across the US-Mexico border, as many deportees and returnees still see the United States as home. In 2015, Loredo successfully applied and was given a ten-year tourist visa. She says that being able to visit the United States “helped her receive some closure about her decision to return.” Leni Alvarez, a 24-year-old anthropology student, returned to Mexico from Arcadia, Florida, in 2009, after her father received a driving ticket and the family feared he would be deported. Alvarez tells me that working with ODA has “changed my life and allowed me to believe that there is life after, even after experiencing my worst nightmare.” Like Loredo, Alvarez says that being able to return to the United States one day — to have a binational recognition as being both Mexican and American — will help her gain some closure. “When we returned back to Mexico and we were walking down the streets, my mom would tell us, ‘This is the street I played on when I was a child,’” Alvarez says. “It made me realize that I can’t do that. I can’t take my sister to the park and say, ‘Hey, this is where we played when we were little girls,’ because I’m not allowed entry; I’m not allowed to go to the place I call home; I’m not allowed to roam the streets that I would walk on when I was a child.” While many of ODA’s members and organizers have the shared experiences of deportation or returning, Loredo stresses that it’s important that they’re seen beyond their stories. “We really don’t want to be seen just as testimonies. I think it’s important for us to be seen beyond stories. We are people who are using our experiences in order to make change, to be part of change, either here [in Mexico] or in the States,” she says. As the Trump administration continues to stigmatize immigrants and pursue measures to punish undocumented people, the women at ODA recognize that much more needs to be done in Mexico to ensure that deportees and returnees feel welcome and are given every possibility to thrive. June Eric-Udorie is a journalist and feminist activist whose writing has appeared in Catapult, ESPN, The Guardian, the New Statesman, and more. In 2016, the BBC included her in the top 100 inspirational and influential women for 2016. Can We All Be Feminists?, an anthology of intersectional feminist writing, edited by June Eric-Udorie, will be published by Penguin Books on September 25. She is currently an undergraduate at Duke University. | | | | |  Illustrations by Lucy Engelman | Gia Coppola probably picks out wine the same way you do. “I get really intimidated when it’s like, ‘OK, these are the floral notes.’ I don’t look at wine like that,” she tells me. Instead, she’s seeking something unfussy, something in the right price range, and something that speaks to her generation. That might be surprising, given that she’s the granddaughter of Francis Ford Coppola, who has his own lauded winery. (She’s also worked as a barback at the acclaimed Bouchon Bistro, a job that required her to take wine classes.) “Always being around the winery, I had a new appreciation of the culture of the wine industry and the heritage that comes along with it,” she says. “I wanted to make something that felt youthful. Something that you don’t have to be so precious with and it can still be elegant and tasty.” Gia’s new line of wines are all one-liter bottles sealed with a bottle cap rather than the typical cork or twist top. The labels feature photographs from her own archives, with her close friends and personal memories playing a big role in how she paired them with the different varietals. The vibe is playful and on-the-go, equally suitable for for bringing to BYOB restaurants or playing rosé pong — Gia’s suggestions. She also suggests pairing her wines with some nontraditional snacks: chips, sour straws, chocolate-covered pretzels. “Maybe I’m just stuck being a twelve-year-old for life,” she says, explaining why she loves Smucker’s Uncrustables (“They’re like a peanut-butter-and-jelly dumpling. They’re addictive”). No matter how quirky these snacks sound, she makes a pretty good case for these high-low summer treats: Gia Coppola Red Blend #thirsty with dark-chocolate-covered pretzels I’ve been playing around with this question of: How do we connect with an audience that’s younger? Thirsty obviously has multiple meanings to it on social media and in meme culture. But I thought it was funny, in terms of the wine industry. And this big cat on the label — it’s just so humorous and right. This wine isn’t so full — you can pair it with a dark chocolate and it’s not two heavy things at the same time. You don’t need to have a big fancy filet mignon with red wine. Gia Coppola White Blend #selfish with sour straws I associate a white wine with summertime — making a white-wine spritzer, sitting by the pool. That’s what this pairing reminds me of. My best friend Natalie is in the picture on the label. We took this in a random forest; she was on some photo shoot, and I was just taking behind the scenes pictures. With the name #selfish, I was thinking of allowing yourself to just be on your own terms and do whatever it is you want to do. Gia Coppola Rosé #overit with salt-and-vinegar chips I’m addicted to chips. This pairing just reminds me of being in Napa and going to Giugni’s and getting roast-beef sandwiches and having salt-and-vinegar chips. The rosé is ideal for the daytime and very summery — great for sitting by the pool or getting rowdy with friends at dinner. The picture is one I took on the set of my movie Palo Alto. We were shooting scenes in a retirement home and I was roaming around. I saw that weird phone book, and I was just like, This is so creepy and odd. I really had to push the winery to let me use this image. Gia’s other favorite pairings: —Latúe Tempranillo with pistachios —2015 Elicio Red Blend with Smucker’s Uncrustables peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwiches —2017 Elicio Vermentino with sour straws —Cà Furlan Cuvée Beatrice Prosecco DOC NV with a Nerds Rope Molly Elizalde is Lenny’s editorial and creative director. | | | | | | | | |
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