Since the attacks in Paris, I’ve been sleeping in pants and keeping a coat and my laptop by the bedroom door. I live on a busy downtown Toronto street, in a row of buildings close to a mosque, and I’m scared of retributive violence. Sometimes my cynicism in the wake of Western terrorism makes me feel ashamed because I want to mourn, but since 9/11 I’ve seen how terror crests outward, away from the site of impact into ordinary communities like mine specifically aimed at people who look something like me. What could happen to the mosque next door, and what violence toward it means for me, a non-Muslim, is terrifying. What if I wake up to my smoke alarm blaring in the middle of the night? I’ll need to make a quick escape. Before closing my eyes, I remind myself that if I can feel the heat I’ll have to leave the cat behind.
I’m not just paranoid. Right after the attacks in Paris, Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh people living in and around my city have been affected by xenophobic violence. A maliciously Photoshopped selfie of a Sikh man from Toronto went viral two days after the attacks; he was wrongfully incriminated online and in newspapers around the world. Religious centers throughout Toronto have been arsoned and vandalized, and Muslims (and non-Muslim people of color) have been targeted and physically assaulted in public places. Black and brown Muslim women, particularly those who wear headscarves, hijabs, and niqabs, are disproportionately affected by these hate crimes.
In the past week I’ve heard my Muslim and non-Muslim friends talk of self-defense classes being hosted in homes, of parents checking in on adult children who live in the city, of grown men shaking off hangovers to join their mothers on Sunday morning grocery runs, of "passing" Muslims sitting alert—earbuds in, with no music playing—on public transit in case shit pops off. That Islamophobia festers below the surface in the West should come as no surprise: Canada’s outgoing prime minister recently campaigned on a platform of blatantly anti-Muslim rhetoric.
The past 10 days have seen a rightful surge of empathy for and solidarity with Parisians on social media, but the story in my online and IRL conversations is about racialized Canadians (and Americans, and British) who are scared for friends, family, neighbors, and their own bodies. This is the other side of terrorism in the West. It’s something that M.I.A., a musician whose personal narrative is tainted by civil war, displacement, refugee status, and being brown post-9/11, obviously understands.
For years, her politically-charged music has rubbed critics (and even fans) the wrong way. Some see her as a demagogue, more concerned with the aesthetics of politics or the thrill of being subversive. Most of the criticism of 2010’s Vicki Leekx, which took titular and a sort of metaphysical inspiration from Julian Assange and the Wikileaks controversy, was that the songs weren’t actually that political. And yet, when M.I.A. does present more concrete commentary she’s condemned. Rarely has pop music offered solutions to pressing world matters; it is, for many, an escape, and M.I.A.’s music manages that while acknowledging the tensions of modern humanity. "I just find it a bit upsetting and kind of insulting that I can't have any ideas on my own because I'm a female or that people from undeveloped countries can't have ideas of their own unless it's backed up by someone who's blond-haired and blue-eyed," she told Pitchfork in 2007. She was talking about Diplo getting credit for her work, but the same line of thinking—ridiculing racialized women expressing curiosity or fear or an artistic interest in the world around them—can extend to her politics as well. When your body is political the issues are no longer abstract. Yes, M.I.A.’s politics have long been imperfect, but she keeps trying, like many of us who aren’t simply ideologically committed to justice, but are tethered to the fight because of the color of our skin.
Last week, wearily scrolling through the fear and self-righteousness in my Twitter feed, M.I.A.’s new song "Borders" popped up on my screen. I put on my headphones and clicked play. "Borders, what’s up with that?/ Identities, what’s up with that?/ The new world, what’s up with that?" She continues posing a long list of rhetorical questions ("Being bae, what’s up with that?") over a chirruping sample and a dense bassline. It doesn’t sound too different from what she’s done before; it’s certainly less optimistic than "Bad Girls" or "Paper Planes". What starts out incisive turns existential, but that doesn’t make her stream-of-consciousness less concrete: we live in cities and states and countries and on the Internet, and our borders are closing in on us. Many of us are struggling on multiple fronts. If you hear her words as polemic, it seems crude. But if you’re asking yourself the same questions, it can feel like a lifeline. And just for a minute, I felt heard.