On a crisp, sunny day in mid-April in London, Maya and her publicist, Jennie Boddy, were in a car being driven to the home of a Sri Lankan wedding photographer. Instead of doing standard publicity photos to promote her still nameless album, Maya had the idea of using a photographer she found in the phone book who worked, as many Sri Lankan photographers do, in an almost Bollywood style, by inserting a simple picture, in this case of Maya, into dozens of fantastic, almost surrealistic tableaus. A few days ago, Maya hatched this plan, which like most Maya plans was inventive, artistic and, in an unsettling way, combined the high with the low. “I’ve had my eye on some jewelry from Givenchy forever,” Maya told me, as we inched our way in bumper-to-bumper traffic. “It is millions of dollars’ worth of gold jewelry. To wear it for these pictures, Givenchy had to send a bodyguard. I liked the idea of a photographer shooting me in his council flat in all this gold, knowing that the jewelry requires a bodyguard.” She paused. She was wearing opaque brown stockings, very small, tan leather shorts that laced up the front, high-heeled ankle boots and a fluorescent yellow bra that periodically flashed through a loose, open-knit Phat Farm sweater topped by an oversize dark brown jacket. Maya’s nearly black hair was pulled into a bun on top of her head, her nails were colored in an elaborate checkerboard pattern and she had applied a dark indigo powder to her eyebrows. It was an exotic mix: her body was downtown and her face was uptown. “All of what I’m wearing is American,” Maya said. “If I was a terrorist, I wouldn’t be wearing American clothing.” She paused. This may have been a joke, but Maya rarely laughs. She speaks carefully, slowly, with a kind of deadpan delivery. Like a trained politician, she stays on message. It’s hard to know if she believes everything she says or if she knows that a loud noise will always attract a crowd.

Maya had flown to London nearly a month before and was living with Ikhyd at her mother’s apartment an hour outside the city. Initially, she came to see her mom and work on the album art and the first video, for the song “Born Free,” which is, strangely, not the first single. But she needed to renew her U.S. visa, and until her immigration lawyer could resolve the matter, Maya was stuck in London. “I want to be back in New York by May 3,” she said, staring out the window. “I’m invited to the Met Ball, and all my girlfriends say: ‘Oh, the Met Ball! I want to go to the Met Ball!’ ” The annual Met Ball for the Costume Institute is a yearly black-tie gala held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It is co-hosted by Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. “I’m going with Alexander Wang” — the fashion designer — “and I wanted to wear a dress made out of a torn-up American flag,” Maya added. Wang made a hand-crocheted, gold-metallic dress over a black leather bodice instead.

Maya has a complicated relationship with America. When she was recording “Kala,” in 2007, her second album (named after her mother), her request for an artist’s visa was initially denied. (Maya maintains it was because of her song lyrics; the State Department is not obliged to give applicants a reason for denying them entry.) She had wanted to make a more classic hip-hop record in Baltimore, where Blaqstarr then lived, or with Timbaland in L.A. but instead, recorded it all over the world. She traveled to Liberia, India, Angola, Trinidad and Jamaica (“where they have the cutest boys”). “Kala” is layered with sounds like tribal beats, dance hall and the lush musical productions of Bollywood. One track, “Bird Flu,” combines 30 of India’s top drummers in a crazy rush of rhythm. Maya was finally granted a visa and recorded “Paper Planes” in New York, but came back to England so that two sets of twins from Brixton could sing the backing vocals. She felt this inclusion made a kind of political statement at a time when England was spending millions of pounds on weapons and war. However incoherent the reason, the chorus of “Paper Planes” is contagious. “I never thought the song was political,” Diplo told me. “Mostly, Maya was making fun of American rapper culture. ‘Paper Planes’ was making fun of being what American kids are into, of being ‘gangsta.’ ”

She also recorded a song, “O Saya,” with A. R. Rahman, a composer and perhaps the most powerful producer in India, that ended up on the “Slumdog Millionaire” soundtrack. “O Saya” was nominated for an Academy Award, and in 2009, she was to perform on the awards show. “It was after Ikhyd was born,” Maya recalled, “and they told me they’d wheel in a bed and let me perform the song in bed.” She paused. She declined their offer when she found out that the televised song would be edited down to a minute. “It was too little time.”

Image M.I.A. with the rapper African Boy while shooting the “Paper Planes” video in 2008. Credit... Aliya Naumoff

Maya rolled down her window and pointed. “That church saved my life,” she said, as we drove past a church in East London. “Christ Church! That’s the last time I got to be a high-school dropout: I should have been in school, and a youth worker at the church, who had been in prison, grabbed me and slammed me against the wall one day and said: ‘What is the matter with you? If you stay around here, you’ll end up living in one of these apartments with six babies before you’re 20.’ I used to be hanging about, getting into trouble. He changed my life.”

After leaving Sri Lanka in 1983, her mother moved Maya and her brother and sister to Phipps Bridge Estate, a housing project, or council flat, in South London. It was rough. “We lived in a notoriously racist area called Mitcham,” Maya said. “It’s where all the skinheads lived. I was shot at for being a Tamil in Sri Lanka, and then, everyone was calling me a Paki in London, and I’m not even Pakistani. My mom sat me down and said, ‘When they call you that, tell them to sod off.’ ”