Tag Archives: Maori

Kia Mau Ki Tō Ūkaipō – Don’t forget your roots, my friend…

Posted on by daber111
Reply

Calling all Kiwis and music lovers! And no, I am not talking about the fruit, but rather about Aoteoroa/ New Zealand, since this blog entry focuses on the music of this country’s biggest reggae rock fusion band Six60. 

The single “Don’t Forget Your Roots“ of the five-member band from Dunedin was released in 2011 and reached number 2 on the New Zealand Singles Charts. In the past decade, this song has become somewhat of a ‘Kiwi anthem’.

The 2011 release, however, is not where the evolution and importance of the song ends. In September 2019, Six60 released a new Māori version: “Kia Mau Ki Tō Ūkaipō / Don’t Forget Your Roots“ in the collection Waiata / Anthems of re-recorded New Zealand pop songs to promote Te Wiki o te Reo Māori (Māori Language Week).

In the chorus of this song, Six60 reminds the listener of how important it is to remember our own roots, since they include our family and friends, but also our inner self – what we truly are: “the ones who made us – brought us here”. It deals with the idea of Indigenous heritage and identity and why you should be thankful and proud of it. Neglecting these roots easily leads to them being lost.

To further highlight the importance of what is said in the chorus, Six60 introduces a man (Johnny) and a woman (Jesse), who both are detached from their roots in Aotearoa after leaving their home which “armed them with power”. This results in them being lost in two ways: 1. They lack Māori values and morals and 2. the connection to their roots and their whānau (family), who are the only people that truly matter, becomes tenuous. Overall, both experience a disconnection from their origin. They are displaced and have lost their sense of belonging by leaving their homeland. The concept of loss applies to the man and woman as individuals, but also to their community – “He/She lost the faith of all those who mattered so…” Additionally, Six60 conveys a combination of nostalgia and homesickness with the simple words: “Don’t forget your roots…”

But only if no return is intended.

Representing Māori culture through music and language

Even though the band members all have Māori roots, they did not grow up with the language or culture, yet feel deeply connected to it. Their intention of releasing the song in Māori was to learn more about their culture and understand their origin – their roots. They wanted to provide a song of familiar lyrics that communicates their culture using Te Reo.

But why is music so important to remember your roots?

Well, wherever you are, in New Zealand or overseas, the distinctive sounds used in songs such as “Kia Mau Ki Tō Ūkaipō“ can conjure up images of home. Translating popular songs from English to Māori can deepen empathy and provides a solution for the absence of communication between Māori and non-Māori by encouraging discourse. Embracing Māori culture, the waka, the whānau – community and music can convey heritage and is a start to help non-Māori engage with the language and culture. At the same time, it is dangerous to base one’s understanding of a foreign culture solely on one song, since Maori offer a diverse culture with many traditions and also contradictions.

My personal connection to the song goes back almost to its initial release. I first visited a Six60 concert in 2012 in German. When the band sang “Don’t Forget Your Roots”, those who were Māori in the audience, all far away from home, started a haka. It first got me thinking about the connection between music and culture. Whenever I listen to the song now, it also reminds me of my time spent abroad and the people I met. 

And as the Covid-19 pandemic continues, friends and family remain apart from one another as we understand the importance of connecting, which includes doing it through Te Reo Māori.

At a concert in 2020, Six60 further combined the song’s new version with a performance of the haka, making the concert uniquely New Zealand by giving the crowd a taste of the country’s distinct Indigenous culture. Now they do it at every single concert worldwide on tour to reconnect with their homeland. Additionally, singing the song is a reminder for them that even if they are on the other side of the world, when they return to Aoteoroa the following quote:

 i haere Māori atu, i hoki Māori mai

I left as a Māori, and I have returned as a Māori

applies to them.

To me this performance combined with the haka is filled with a celebration of the Māori culture since the Māori performers get the opportunity to proudly present their traditions and language on a big stage – it cuts through that fear of not being able to express and give Māori back their sovereignty by pushing the unspoken tension between Māori and non-Māori to the side and saying: here is a place for all to gather, unite and sing. Including Te Reo Māori and the haka, therefore, can enrich New Zealand’s music scene and empower national athletes, but some songs also engage worldwide audiences. Embracing the language should be as simple as not forgetting one’s roots … or family.

In an interview, the front singer of Six60 Matiu Walters stated that he noticed more understanding of the culture and an acceptance of songs in Māori especially in New Zealand, which has been a good thing to see. He further suggests that it is something the band helped push by redoing their song in Māori. The translation followed the dream to make Māori music in future not only usable for a political purpose or for social currency but also for the daily and ordinary life.

This is exactly what the band is doing with their new song “Pepeha“, which deals with their personal experience of learning about their actual pepeha – the way of introducing yourself in Māori. It tells people who you are by sharing your connections with the people and places that are important to you. By writing the song, the band was able to acknowledge and further explore their heritage. It helped them connect to their whakapapa and whenua. A pepeha shows their connection to the physical and spiritual place they call home. This anthemic waiata links significant things – prestige, love, and family – with their environment and to their ancestors.

Matiu Walters said they wanted to try to write a pepeha for all New Zealanders, whether you were born there, or you moved there and decided to make Aotearoa your home.

He further stated that the goal of their music is to always transcend any categories and have it all “feeling-based” since it’s what they like about music: It makes you feel a certain way and you can succumb to that feeling and forget about everything else, all the small things in life and just go along with the song.

However, there are a couple of critical voices on the band’s use of music and Te Reo as a way of public reconnection arguing that songs such as “Pepeha“ disregard the sanctity of cultural practices and do not consider the right translation nor provide the listener with the deep meaning Māori terms can carry.

Would you agree with the critics? Let me know in the comments!

A Response to “In the Shadow Of Monte Cassino” by Lauren Keenan

Posted on by lindabue104
Reply

It’s not easy to act according your parents’ will, especially when you do not know what secrets they live with.

In the short story “In the Shadow of Monte Cassino”, published in 2017 in Huia Short Stories 12 by Māori author Laruen Keenan, the journey of Eruera, a Māori man who reflects on his lifelong attempt to fulfil his father’s expectations, is described. Instead of focusing on himself, Eruera continues to base his life on his father’s judgements.

The only active part of the story is Eruera. He visits the battlefield in Italy where his father supposedly fought as soldier in the Second World War. As he walks towards Monte Cassino, his thoughts revolve around his late father and what the latter might say to him in this situation. When Eruera passes a cemetery, he coincidentally finds the grave of his uncle, at whom his late father was always angry. Now Eruera realises that his father never took part in WWII and just made it all up.

“Stupid, cheap map. He should have bought one from someone who spoke English while he was in Rome.”

(p. 71)

The story is told from Eruera’s point of view, but in the third person. Right from the beginning, I had a strange feeling that the main character has a really negative mindset in that sentence. As the story continued and Eruera made his way to Monte Cassino, I had the impression that the closer he got to the hill, the crazier his mind went. He is always looking for excuses not to climb up Monte Cassino. All these twists and turns are really well done by the author. When I read the story, I had an odd and intense feeling because he seemed stressed. At first I thought that he was looking forward to the trip, but when I looked at him more closely, I realised that his self-esteem decreased a bit every time he thought about his father (e.g. “Man up, boy, you wouldn’t lasted a day at Monte Cassino with that attitude.” p. 72). It seemed as though Eruera believed that no one respects him. Especially his own father was never proud of him, regardless of what he achieved.

In my opinion, the short story unrolls a lot of emotions from WWII. When we meet Eruera, he thinks he is the son of a Māori soldier who took part in the war to gain respect for his tribe, to be treated equally and to receive the full privilege of citizenship for his family. So Eruera has to respect his father and believes everything he says. Yet his father used to denigrate him by comparing him with his Uncle Gerry, who supposedly “died of shame after all these heroes came home. You’re just like your Uncle Gerry, both of you couldn’t have climbed Monte Cassino if you’d tried.” (p. 72) I strongly believe that is a reason why Eruera has such low self-esteem. Always being compared is hard, but being compared to someone who cannot climb up a hill is even worse. I suppose that the relationship between Eruera and his father was really toxic. As a result, he just remembers negative comments and bad comparisons. Even in the narrative present, when Eruera’s father is long dead, he feels the disappointment in every step he takes.

“Dad was long gone but Eruera still let him down.”

(p. 73)

After all the emotional ups and downs, this passage reveals that Eruera thinks he is failing and disappointing his father once again. It seems to me that he has the urge to show his father that he is capable of doing something right, like climbing Monte Cassino.

“Eruera should have paid better attention. He should have found out more about the war before dad dies.” (p. 72). On the one hand, Eruera remembers his father’s aggressive behaviour, on the other hand he misses him and regrets the time when he did not listen to his stories. I’m honestly surprised that Eruera’s feelings and his development could touch me so strongly. This turn of events throws a pitiful shadow on Eruera and makes him even smaller than he is. From time to time, his mind clears and he notices his surroundings. However, I guess Eruera is just looking for excuses not to climb the mountain.

In my opinion, the author is highly successful in creating a great tension. When I finally thought Eruera would climb up and feel relieved and happy, he entered the cemetery. Even though this moment was really dark, it also fascinated me. When Eruera recognized the name on the gravestone and found out what Uncle Gerry had done, it felt for me like Eruera’s world was falling apart because he finally understood why his grandparents had no contact to his father and why others gave him ugly nicknames.

I think Eruera must have been shocked at the first moment, but right after he likely felt relieved because he had uncovered the secret of his heroic father and lightened the big shadow hanging over him. To come back to my first impression of the short story, and having reread it, I feel like there is much to read between the lines. At first I thought that Eruera was a pitiful and sad man who has no goal, and only thinks about everything that has already happened, even imitating his father’s comments. From a more aware point of view I am certain that Eruera always had the strength to be himself, but was too afraid to be that person. So he hid behind the role of his father, but after discovering the big lie he grew up with, he finally understands that he is better than his father because at least he is honest.

“He looked at me like a cold and thirsty sailor might look at a long hot mug of coffee spiked with whiskey”: Gaze and desire in Tina Makereti’s The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke

Posted on by cetil100
Reply

Tina Makereti’s 2018 novel The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke tells the story of a young Māori boy who travels to London to become part of an exhibition that displays Māori culture to an audience of Victorian England. It’s a book about identity, about belonging and unbelonging, about violence and humanity, and – what I want to focus on here – about gaze and desire.

The gaze is a motif that runs through the novel in a multitude of ways. The protagonist Hemi is confronted with being an outsider and Other throughout his childhood long before he even reaches London. His formative years are influenced by his experience of what it means to be looked at, to be studied closely, and to look at and actively perceive those around him in turn.

After arriving in London, Hemi soon becomes part of an exhibition arranged by his benefactor. He is the main spectacle, but he also always makes sure to watch and observe his audience. In London, he practises being both spectacle and spectator at zoos, in theatres and at shows (both high- and lowbrow), and in the streets. The centre of the Empire becomes the recipient of his gaze. The gaze can be understood as a form of colonial power, of violence and othering, and through Hemi we see a subversion of the power structure by altering the direction of looking.

It is only later when he meets his friend Billy, whom he regards as non-normative and – due to the relationship with his cross-dressing, perhaps trans-coded girlfriend Henry – as somewhat queer, that the gaze becomes loaded with desire and potential for Hemi. After he realises that Billy must have felt attracted to Henry when he still thought she was a boy, Hemi begins to question what he knows (and feels) about attraction and desire:

“It had been there from the start, I knew, but Henry’s story changed everything. Not everything I knew, but everything it was possible to feel. She had opened up a world in which Billy could look at a man and feel love, and act on it. A world in which I could do the same.”

(p. 157)

What we see here is Hemi’s sexual awakening happening in two directions. It is the real, almost tangible prospect of queerness that is revealed to him through Billy and Henry’s complex relationship with heteronormativity – despite what he knows about the taboo nature of homosexuality in Christianity. This is the first time that this kind of desire becomes a real option in Hemi’s mind.

The other, much more present realisation is one specifically related to Billy as a person: Hemi wants to share at least part of the intimacy Billy has with Henry, wants to be desired in the same way he slowly comes to understand he himself desires Billy:

“I was still curious about one thing. I had seen Billy gazing on her with as much devotion as I think one person could ever bestow on anybody, and I had a sudden desire to be the recipient of that gaze. What was the thing that made her irresistible to him, even dressed as she was?”

(154)

Perhaps for the first time, Hemi actively wants to be looked at, be perceived, because he wishes his desire to be reciprocated. Desire and gaze are related here, immediately, by Makereti’s word choice: Hemi thinks about Billy gazing at Henry, or alternatively looking at a man, and concludes that he wants to experience this as well, both actively and passively. Desire and gaze are intertwined for Hemi, to desire and want something means to see it, to experience it wholly through sight, through looking and examining it.

What starts as potential between Billy and Hemi and is ultimately left unrealised, is then further explored in Hemi’s relationship to sailor and former slave Ethan. The first time Hemi mentions Ethan, he says, “He saw me perhaps even before I saw myself. He knew me.” (p. 220), implicitly characterising their relationship as one filled with desire and longing because we have already encountered how Hemi expresses and understands (queer) desire through the gaze.  

We are further made to understand that to Hemi, desire is still something (perhaps inherently) ineffable, something that is explored through sensual experience rather than words and reason: “I told him my own small story of adventure and woe. All but my feelings for Billy, which were something I had not the language to reveal.” (p. 225)

This also separates Hemi’s past experiences with his unfulfilled desire for Billy from the new reality aboard the ship. Although he followed Billy there, he doesn’t bring their history into the newly developing relationship with Ethan.

This relationship unfolds in a series of moments of direct looking, watching, observing, and most importantly, secretly longing for each other:

“I remember that deep voice. The sureness of it. The deep swell of it. I began seeking him out.
‘And what of women, Ethan? Have you a wife?’
‘I’ve had women, but not a wife. I don’t know there is one for me, to tell the truth of it.’ He looked at me then, too long. Just a moment too long.”

(p. 226)

It is of course no accident that Ethan looks at Hemi and Hemi recognises this look immediately after Ethan admits to being a bachelor, possibly uninterested in women. The gaze doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it is employed as a deliberate tool of communication, an encoded expression of desire.

When Hemi starts to look back at Ethan, he tells the reader explicitly what he sees, inviting us to witness his perception of Ethan, taking us with him on the road to desire:

“Ethan […] began climbing the rigging, his muscles working under a sheen of sweat, the evening light glancing off just so.
I became his disciple, watching my new friend far too often and at too much length. And when I saw him look back I didn’t trust it for a long time – I thought it might be my own feelings clouding my perception. A look that lingers too long is not enough to mean anything, and yet I wanted it to.”

(p. 226)

Hemi still hesitates because although he knows how to read a gaze as a deliberate expression of desire, he has no way of knowing if it was intended this way. The uncertainty and anxiety over his own feelings and whether they may be reciprocated mirrors his past with Billy, but this time they culminate in a scene charged with anticipation and, for the first time, certainty of mutuality:

“As was my custom, I stole glances, reminding myself not to stare too long. We talked to the other men at the table, laughed a bit, chewed and drank, and looked.  I watched his lips as he chewed, the way his throat flexed to swallow. And that was when I saw it: his eyes ran slowly down the length of my face, lingered at my neck, and rose to meet my own again. It was a caress, the way that look played over me. And I knew. What had seemed an impossibility slowly became imaginable, probable even, if only I could cross that space between us.”

(p. 227)

Again, Hemi lets us take part in what he sees, his desire becomes palpable for the reader – and finally he realises with certainty that his feelings are returned. It is still only through recognition of the gaze (rather than an explicit exchange of words or more obvious signs) that he understands what he hoped for has become reality. He is the recipient of Ethan’s gaze.

This becomes even more tangible in the next line: “I came to know my own desire in my recognition of his. Ethan looked at me like a cold and thirsty sailor might look at a long hot mug of coffee spiked with whiskey.” (p. 227) The state of being both active and passive in the act of gazing makes Hemi fully understand his own desire, the reflection of the gaze makes the act of gazing an unquestionable reality. The way that Ethan looks at him tells him all he needs to know; he is desired, he is wanted.

This sentiment is mirrored once the two of them actually have sex and Hemi thinks: “I felt his need as if it were my own, but then it was my own.” (p. 228) Reciprocation and reflection is what characterises their relationship more than anything else, starting with the gaze and ending in a fulfilled physical relationship.

Eventually though, Hemi and Ethan are found out because someone saw them having sex. Their punishment is harsh and violent. What brought them together in one way – beeing seen – is ultimately also what tears their brief relationship apart. We are reminded that the act of seeing, observing and watching is still also a tool of power, both colonial and heteronormative. To be hidden from the gaze is a privilege the two of them are not afforded.

This is made even clearer after Hemi survives the shipwreck and eventually goes to inspect the dead bodies of those who didn’t:

“On the final day I went down to greet my brothers out of some sense of duty. I shouldn’t have. Ethan was grey and blue and bloated, only half of his face and one of his arms intact, but I knew it was him.”

(p. 241)

To see, to know, to experience is not always preferable to being in the dark about something. On the contrary, it can be traumatic and horrifying. Seeing, experiencing and knowing are all in themselves ambivalent and not just expressions of desire as they were for Hemi and Ethan before, they can also be acts of violence, both implicit and explicit.

In sum, Tina Makereti constructs desire almost exclusively through the act of gazing, exploring the relationship between the two and where they intersect in the characters to whom Hemi is closest. The gaze is a tool of colonial power, of othering and of violence, but it also serves as a unique encoded love language that develops alongside Hemi’s coming-of-age.

Reference

Makereti, Tina. The Imaginary Lives of James Pōneke. Hertfordshire, Lightning Books Ltd, 2019.