Maya Lameer - Born, Mar. 20, 1985
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Illegal Immigrant
Nature = Abrassive, confident, opinionated
Concept = illegal immigrant/sweat shop worker..aspiring musician.
Residence = Lower Manhattan
Player: VV
Av model: M.I.A.
Born in Sri Lanka to a founding member of EROS (the Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students), a militant Tamil group, Maya's first years in this world were spent in Jaffna, hunted with her family by the Sri Lanka army.
In Sri Lanka, they lived at first on her grandparent’s remote farm, a collection of huts without electricity or running water. After a year, as her fathers involvement in militant activities increased, Maya, her older sister Kali and their mother moved to Jaffna in the far North of the country, where her younger brother Sugu was born. Contact with her father by this time was strictly limited as he was in hiding from the army, he occasionally visited in secret, slipping through the window at night and being introduced to the children as an uncle so that they didn't give him away to the army when they regularly came to question the family.
Eventually, as the civil war escalated, it became unsafe for them to stay in Sri Lanka, so her father sent them to relocate to Madras in India. Maya’s mother moved with the three children into an almost derelict house, 3 miles from the nearest road or neighbour. They scraped by for a while, with sporadic visits from Maya’s father, and the girls attended the local school, excelling as students. After a while, visits from friends and family grew less frequent and money grew very tight. The children became ill, Maya’s sister caught Typhoid and they struggled to eat enough. A visiting uncle took concern and moved them back to Sri Lanka again, where they settled back in Jaffna.
By then, the violence of the civil war was at its peak and the family repeatedly tried to flee the country. The army regularly shot Tamils seeking to move across border areas and bombed roads and escape routes. After several failed attempts to leave, Maya’s mother successfully made it out with the three children, on to India and then finally to London, where they were housed as refugees.
It was in the notoriously racist council estate in Mitcham, Surrey, that Maya began to learn English. Aged just eleven and in a new country, she was exposed to western radio for the first time by the noise resonating from her neighbours houses. Her affinity for the western culture grew from the music heard which clicked with a frustrated, energetic war-child trying to relate to grey and foreign surroundings. Maya was a talented and creative student, eventually winning a place at London's Central Saint Martins Art School, where she studied fine art, film and video. Here, for the first time, she began to piece together some of the different strands of her life experience. She learnt how to play off her different cultural personae against each other; layering rap iconography with the warfare pictures from her youth, Asian Britain with American new-wave film making style and St. Martin's fashion sense with refugee outlooks.
A successful art career beckoned and, for a while, seemed to be Maya's destined path. Her first-ever public exhibition of paintings featured candy coloured spray-paint and stencil pictures of the Tamil freedom movement. The show was a minor success but quickly forgotten as her brand of art and namely, her family backround, had no place in the harsh reality of a world after September 11. Facing surmounting criticism from all levels of Enlish society Maya and her family were forced to leave as, freedom fighter...and the Tamil cause...were now branded with the ugly mark of "Terrorism".
Leaving behind the controversy in England Maya and her family, again on the run and short of funds, fled to the most unlikely place. With family in New York, the heart of the machine waging against Terrorism, Maya's family came to live in Manhattan as illegal immigrants working in the lower east side and Garment District. Her aspirations of an art career on hold Maya manages to scrape by with her mother and siblings, while immersing herself in another art form. With New York's hip hop scene still alive and flourishing, both commerically and in the underground, Maya attempts to get a foothold in the underworld music scene. Being a female though puts her at a severe disadvantage among her peers who can't quite simply grasp her brand of music...
"What's a "brown girl" singing about bombs and gernades doing in New York anyways?"-they ask.
