Ngā Tangi o te Wahangū

Sounds of Belonging

“I am starting to think I am a composition of all those songs that raised me,” wrote Pluto Cotter in a coming-of-age essay Country Crossroads shared during a Melbourne Uni Parkville Campus tutorial (Cotter, 2024).

A line that resonated among fourteen students that had gathered on a Tuesday evening, to gently dissect Cotter’s essay line by line.

“A banger line,” we all decreed! Before it—(the line)—did a 3-point turn and parked up in my brain, absolutely refusing to leave.

Later, on the two-hour journey home, as the train rattled out of the city, I sank deep into thought and seat. And I began to pull apart Cotter’s one-liner, trying to understand why it clung so.

Eventually, I took liberty, by adding the word “sound” into the composition, before falling into a dribbled doze.

Later that week, I recalled the line, with its new addition, finding myself still puzzled. The idea of sound as part of one’s identity felt simultaneously powerful and yet elusive.

Could it be that the erasure of my culture's language—its absence from my ears and tongue—left not just a yearning, but a deep hurt in my siblings and me? That the loss of Te Reo in our home had done more than numb or stifle our potential? Instead, it fractured our understanding of both the past and present, creating a silence that went beyond words. Without Te Reo, I grew into a muted version of myself, my identity discordant, like a song sung out of key or missing its melody. Reclaiming that identity has meant ongoing rehabilitation and relearning—processes that bring, of course, their own kind of pain.

Following on from this thought, with my hands in the kitchen sink, I began to listen to an old YouTube episode of Ōpaki a Te Reo Māori language course.

In the episode, a guest on the show is struggling to find the Māori word for glass. I struggle alongside them. Despairing as, despite my ongoing efforts, the Māori kupu lies dotted on spliced-up A4 sheets spread across the surfaces of the apartment. The word karaihe is beyond recall.

I wonder, “Has it always been easier for me to maintain a deep, out-of-pocket silence, instead of reclaiming the language I barely heard growing up?”

I noticed recently that I’ve resigned myself to the two-steps-forward, one-step-back process of language learning. Making peace with the courses I’ve struggled to finish has helped me develop an understanding: that I will power on until I relocate at least a third of the Englishness within me that I became, by force.

Stepping up to the Mic

Those of us in the know are aware of New Zealand’s colonial history, and its foundational genocidal ideologies.

We understand, implicitly, the impact of those—policies.

The extreme intent to remove from the tongues of māua ngā pepi; their language before they’ve ever had the chance, to be hushed by karakia.
Or shushed by Ki toi te kupu, toi te mana, toi te aroha, ki toi te reo Māori.

Enabled with surgical precision and perhaps psychopathic intent.
Those unconscionable policies cut out the language of their world before their world even started.

“Scalpel, please.”

Powerful. The pen, the tongue, the word, sounds that can cut as deeply as any blade.
A well-delivered whaikōrero can open up space as if a ravine.
Revealing to everyone depths that had been, until the utterances, hidden and unseen.

Those colonial policies made from the same matter almost wiped our kitchen tables clean of the waking and sleeping sounds of Te Reo Māori. Almost leaving the soundscape of NZ’s terra firma, which had once been so vibrant with Māori voices, a dull bleached out. Monochrome.

Sound is fundamental to our lives, influencing our moods, thoughts, and behaviours. Language users convert sounds into meanings and meanings into sounds. Absorption, reflection, transmission, and diffusion are key principles not only in acoustics but also in how language is processed. We store these principles in our long-term memory, allowing us to use language to navigate the world.

As a Polynesian-born Māori, a state housing kid, I shared beds with my ngā tuahine until I was 13, and we, koutou, learnt to cycle on a shared bike, passing it to each other in between the punches the laughter the howls.

The very sounds that could’ve and should’ve coloured our world were muted.
Instead of providing us with a vibrant palette in which to speak back to the world, our language
became a limited-edition colour chart of one.

A version of ourselves constrained by what was allowed, rather than what was possible.

And so, I return to Cotter’s line, reimagined, “I am, I think, more than the composition of all those sounds that raised me: I am also other; faint but insistent, sounds waiting at the back of my throat for the day whence I can turn the volume up on a language that completes.”

A language whose branches slither from the long black tongue of Te Pō, and into the bright realm of my everyday.

I expected Te Reo to be harboured in the dark recesses of my identity.
I did not expect to have to rehabilitate my identity.
Nor reprogram my tongue.
Or surrender to the preciousness of each word.
Reclaimed.