This week, Sri Lankan-born British musician M.I.A. released a video for her new single, Born Free, that was so controversial it got pulled from YouTube. The video depicts a military or police convoy going to an apartment building, violently beating residents, and gathering up a bus-full of people to take into the desert for summary execution. The video's "reveal" comes when they drag a redheaded young man to the paddy wagon, and the camera pans across the terrified, silent faces of rows and rows of redheads. Minutes later, the men and boys are released into a desert minefield, where they sprint slow-motion for their lives while dodging exploding mines and bullets. The video is being taken by some as an analogy to the ethnic cleansing of the Tamils in Sri Lanka. The singer's father is a former Tamil revolutionary, and she has often been accused of supporting the Tamil Tigers, a terrorist group.
But for me, the video raises much more interesting questions than whether MIA supports the Tamil Tigers and whether this video is about them. What does it take to shock us? The images in the video, as Brian Moylan points out, are "no worse that what one can see in most rated-R movies or even on some prime-time television shows." Indeed, watching the video reminded me of the 1998 movie The Siege, where Arab men are rounded up and held in cages during a terrorism scare in New York City. As a young Arab American, I was deeply disturbed by the imagery. And yet, we see frequent representation of discrimination and violence against disfavored minorities in television and film, and we find it unremarkable.
How would the reaction to MIA's video be different if it depicted Arabs, or Tamils, or African Americans? I suspect that the video would be regarded as more overtly political and less gratuitously violent. By choosing to make the target of the fictional discrimination redheads, the point becomes abstract. Instead of commenting on violence committed against specific groups, the video challenges us to interrogate the very nature of group-directed violence and discrimination. Is rounding up Arabs for detention, as was done after 9/11, any less arbitrary than targeting redheads?
Many complaints about the video came from the moment in the video where a young boy is shot point-blank in the head. But even a casual watcher of, for example, Law and Order: Special Victims Unit knows that the show regularly features children being raped, tortured, abducted, and murdered. What is the source of our heightened discomfort in this case? Is it the cognitive dissonance created by the depiction of violence against an arbitrary group that does not face government-sponsored discrimination in real life? Why does that seem more gratuitous than the crimes that are committed against members of dis-empowered groups, like children or racial groups targeted by ethnic cleansing, every day?
--Silvana Naguib
UPDATE: It turns out that YouTube didn't delete the video, it merely buried it in the search results because of the objectionable content, making it difficult for users to find.
