Lorde’s Te Reo Maori Songs Which is an Effort To Revive The Polynesian Language is Commendable
In an effort to revive the te reo Maori language, the pop star, Lorde has released a mini-album of five of her songs translated to the language spoken by the indigenous people of her home country, New Zealand. Though Lorde is not Maori, yet she has stated that most of her value system stems from traditional Maori principles.
“Many things revealed themselves slowly to me while I was making this album, but the main realization by far was that much of my value system around caring for and listening to the natural world comes from traditional Māori principles. There’s a word for it in te reo: ‘kaitiakitanga’, meaning ‘guardianship or caregiving for the sky, sea and land’. I’m not Māori, but all New Zealanders grow up with elements of this worldview,” Lorde, 24, wrote in a Sept. 9 email announcing the record.
“I know I’m someone who represents New Zealand globally in a way, and in making an album about where I’m from, it was important to me to be able to say: this makes us who we are down here.”
In the song “Oceanic Feeling” from her new album, “Solar Power,” singer Lorde alludes to a jump into a lake at Bulli Point, a beloved swimming spot in her homeland of New Zealand: “When I hit that water/When it holds me/I think about my father/Doin’ the same thing/When he was a boy …”
Lorde, whose real name is Ella Yelich-O’Connor wanted to do it right so, she sought help from a team that was well informed about the Māori language and culture. They did a great job in translating five songs from “Solar Power,” the third album by Lorde. She released the set of Māori songs as “Te Ao Mārama,” or “World of Light.”
While her decision has garnered a lot of attention, Maori artists stand by the fact that the power of music is one part of a much larger movement to revitalize the language. That movement gained momentum when singer/ producer Dame Hinewehi Mohi, sent shock waves at the 1999 Rugby World Cup with her rendition of New Zealand’s national anthem in Maori. Back then, she had just released her debut album ‘Oceania’ in te reo Maori — her native language — and when she was asked to sing at the Rugby World Cup, she decided it made sense for her to do the same.
“I wasn’t actually sure of the English words,” she said over Zoom,” so I decided I would represent Aotearoa the best way I could, by singing it in Maori. And there were a lot of people who couldn’t sing along, and really took offense.”
Bringing the language to the spotlight to an international audience was a huge deal and a far cry from the lived experience of Mohi’s family and that of other Māori, a population that was stripped of its culture, language and identity due to colonization.
“I didn’t learn Māori growing up until I was 10,” Mohi said in a statement to NBC Asian America. “My grandparents were disciplined and were not allowed to speak Māori at school … They would get strapped, caned; they would have their mouths washed out with soap.”
Mohi stated that her intention of delivering the anthem in Maori was her way of celebrating her culture but it set off something much greater: a national discourse regarding how New Zealand’s history of colonization is still a persistent threat to the present Indigenous inhabitants and their language. It has also brought to light the ongoing Maori Language Revival, which was hell-bent on teaching te reo Maori in schools and increase fluency across the country.
Mohi collaborated with Lorde to translate five songs off of her latest album. Hēmi Kelly, a lecturer in Māori language at Auckland University of Technology, who worked with Lorde on reimagining her music, said the translations were particularly challenging from both a technical and a creative perspective. The songs are not exact translations, but an attempt to capture the meaning behind each line while maintaining the cadence. A line like, “I’m kind of like a prettier Jesus,” becomes, “Taku rite, ko Hinemoana,” meaning, “I’m like Hinemoana, the Ocean Maiden.”
“Obviously Jesus didn’t factor in the translation,” says Mohi. “It’s sort of interpreting who we idolize and look up to, and I think that was more the interpretation of Hinemoana being the maiden of the ocean, and all the sort of metaphorical thinking that comes from that. …And so that is a Maori perspective on what supports our ideologies and things we prioritize and see as an important part of our lives.”
“In Lorde’s song ‘Solar Power,’ [she] has a line there where she says, ‘And I throw my cellular device in the water…’ if I were to translate that literally into Māori, it would just sound silly,” he said. The Māori line ultimately came out more akin to “I throw all my worries away” — different phrasing, but evoking the sense of what Lorde wanted to convey.
Lorde’s Maori recordings left some unhappy, with some criticizing them as appropriation or “tokenism.” But Hana Mereraiha, who translated several Lorde songs for the project — proceeds of which will benefit two charities, Forest and Bird and the Te Hua Kawariki Charitable Trust — disagrees with the critics. Lorde “followed the right process. She’s got indigenous artists, indigenous activists, and practitioners of the language… We’re all in this working together,” Mereraiha said.
The Māori language movement is ultimately about “ensuring that our language is normalized, floods the music industry, spoken by our babies, the medium of instruction in our education system — because that is the key to our healing of that intergenerational trauma, and it’s the key to the success of the indigenous people of Aotearoa for the future generations to come,” she said.
—Silviya Yohannan
