‘To be Maori is to be political’: Marlon Williams returns to his ancestral tongue

To international audiences, Marlon Williams’ songs are the highway stop after Roy Orbison’s Texas and Chris Isaak’s California. But the Maori musician, one of Aotearoa’s most successful musical exports, traverses more than geography. He lays out his transience unaccompanied, in his famously rich timbre, at the opening of Te Whare Tiwekaweka, his first album written in Te Reo Maori (the Maori language), his ancestral tongue.

E mawehe ana au ki nga ao e rua (I am split between two worlds)
E noho nei, e tiro ana (sitting here, looking there)
Ki ao ke, ki ao ke (another world, another world)
Whakawhanuitia te ango (the chasm grows wider)

“There’s been a few times in my life where I felt neither here nor there, stuck in a liminal space between different worlds. The most obvious one is [between] Te Ao Maori and Te Ao Pakeha (the Maori and settler worlds),” says Williams of the song, E Mawehe Ana Au.

Williams, pictured performing in Melbourne last year. The singer returns to Sydney and Melbourne in May and June.Credit: ©Martin Philbey

Williams is a generational songwriting talent, but in 2019, writing in English, the language he grew up speaking, felt burdensome and cliched. So, for his fourth solo album, he turned to Te Reo Maori, spoken irregularly in his family for three generations.

“Emotions are self-justifying, but language is where things fall apart,” says Williams, who belongs to Kai Tahu and Ngai Tai iwi (tribal groups). “It’s like finding the right fitting for the hose. The water quality is always 100 per cent pure, but you just gotta make sure you’re using the right attachment so you don’t have splashback.”

Assisted by his Kai Tahu and Te Ati Awa collaborator, Kommi, Williams unlocked new songs and fresh conceptions of his whakapapa – the genealogical layering of family, history, animals, spirituality, objects and place.

“Maori have many words for different types of water rippling or different intensities of rain. You’re able to get directly in touch with what your people’s concerns have been over time, what’s made up their world. More metaphysically, the structure and grammar of language inform how people think,” he says, pointing to a line in Pokarekare ana, a classic waiata (Maori song) he covers live.

“Ka mate ahau i te aroha e / I’m dying in the love. The nounification comes to life, love as this physical place that you go into. Maori have a very specific, spooky relationship with geography and place, it comes [out in] the language.”

Williams is of the kohanga reo generation: Maori who’ve resurrected te reo over the last 50 years. Following the 1854 signing of New Zealand’s founding document, Te Tiriti o Waitangi (The Treaty of Waitangi), the language was systematically oppressed. The Native Schools Act of 1867 legislated that only English be used in classrooms, and by 1953, just 26 per cent of Maori schoolchildren spoke Te Reo Maori.

Williams’ great-grandfather was a minister who chose to speak only Te Reo Maori. His grandmother followed the day’s attitudes and chose English. His dad absorbed little reo, and his mum had similar proficiency despite being the editor of Te Karaka, her tribal group’s magazine (she’s a political painter, too, responsible for the album’s cover). The Williams family’s most consistent reo use was through singing waiata. In conversation, just the odd phrase dropped into English.

The album’s cover art was painted by Williams’ mother, visual artist Jenny Rendall.

“That’s where it stopped,” says Williams. He briefly attended kohanga reo (a preschool language immersion program) and made another attempt in high school until mainstream schooling forced him to choose between learning Te Reo Maori or music (“which was insane”) in the equivalent of year 10. He chose music. Williams jokingly describes his present reo proficiency as “humbly at the bottom of the ladder, but with definite public intentions now”.

On his third album, 2022’s My Boy, Williams included the odd reo lyric and distinct three-to-four chord “Maori strum” famously heard on Crowded House’s Don’t Dream It’s Over. This was different. Most second language learners use their own culture to understand a foreign one. For people whose indigenous language fluency was stripped by colonisation, it’s the opposite.

“It’s so overlaid with historical grief, with intergenerational trauma. It’s a real slap in the face of a feeling to have your birthright taken away from you and then be punished again when you try and relearn it,” says Williams. “One can only do it by themselves, and often you have to fight tooth and nail to get the space, time and resources to do it, too.”

‘I’m going to use Te Reo Maori by right of whakapapa, and I’m going to use it however the hell I want to.’

Who can access Te Reo Maori, and how, are contentious issues in Aotearoa-New Zealand. When Williams’ pakeha friend and collaborator Ella Yelich-O’Connor, the pop musician Lorde, released Te Reo Maori versions of her songs in 2021, some Maori were outraged, feeling the language wasn’t hers to use while systemic colonialism still excluded many Maori from accessing it themselves. Partly in support, Williams wrote the track Kahore He Manu E with her voice in mind.

“It was at the heart of her going into that world. To be a space for that conversation to happen. Who does this language belong to? Should it only belong to them? Is there ever some point at which it can go out into the world more broadly? There’s so much value in forcing those questions up, in and of itself,” says Williams, who staunchly defends his own right to use te reo, including with his band of non-Maori musicians, The Yarra Benders.

“I’m going to use Te Reo Maori by right of whakapapa, and I’m going to use it however the hell I want to,” says Williams. “I reserve the right to blunder around as an artist and as a human.” In May, Williams will release a documentary of that process, Nga Ao E Rua – Two Worlds, filmed over the four years he made Te Whare Tiwekaweka.

The album’s translated title is The Messy House, and it arrives at a tense moment for Aotearoa politics. The Treaty Principles Bill introduced to parliament last year (essentially a right-wing publicity stunt) attempted to redefine established readings of Te Tiriti and was met with mass protests. The first-term, right-wing National government is rolling back Maori health programs, sending Māori youth into “boot camps”, and stripped $30 million dollars from a Te Reo Maori teacher training program in September. Te Whare Tiwekaweka was never intended to be a political record, but art has a habit of disobeying its creator.

In high school, Williams was forced to choose between learning Te Reo Maori or music.Credit: Ian Laidlaw

“The use of Te Reo Maori is not in and of itself a political act [but] there’s a saying that to be Maori is to be political. It’s a marginalised culture that needs to fight tooth and nail to have space,” says Williams. “If you’re having to do the work of preservation, you can’t devote your time to innovation. And that’s the catch-22. I think it’s a lamentable thing, and it means you’ve got to do work that’s not at the heart of existence.”

Williams’ existence is inseparable from music, and Te Whare Tiwekaweka took him deep into Maori traditions: microtonal Moteatea chanted poetry, 19th-century colonial “art songs” set to violin, World War II Maori Battalion standards, and ’70s reggae. The first song he wrote for the album, Aua Atu Ra, exemplifies his syncretic fascination. It intentionally reclaims Pacific musical traditions from mid-century cultural exotica recordings.

“I’m fascinated by exotica culture. You can feel the colonial gaze in it, and yet, it was taken up, deftly handled, and really beautiful things were made through it,” says Williams, thinking about the iconic Maori musician Sir Howard Morrison’s mid-20th-century show tunes.

“Musically, it’s a nice thing to celebrate, an act of reclamation, of humble open-palmedness. To use these tools to make beautiful things, I think, is a very powerful act.”

Marlon Williams’ Te Whare Tiwekaweka is out on Friday. He will perform at the Sydney Opera House as part of Vivid Live on May 29 and at Melbourne Town Hall as part of Rising Festival on June 4 and 5.

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