Western influences can at times corrupt and dilute traditional Pacific indigenous music, but one Melbourne-based, Solomon Islands musician is reversing this trend.
Charles Maimarosia headlined the Wantok Music Festival in Honiara in January this year, and is inspiring a new generation of Solomon Islanders with his sound.
Raised in Pipisu village, Malaita, Maimarosia is known as a singer of important custom knowledge, drawing equally on traditional and contemporary musical styles. His single Haiamasina, is a love poem that illustrates Are Are customs and traditions.
“The show, [the Wantok Music Festival] was not just for me but for the youths and for the young people in the Solomon Islands to rediscover their language and their traditions and to connect with their forefathers,” says Maimarosia. “Most of them cried because they feel something that is there all these years. They are learning signs, they are learning all sorts of things from around the world. And there is something that they missed and that is their language.”
Maimarosia notes that most of Solomon Islands’ 78 different ethnic groups have their own languages.
“We have languages that are about the trees, the mountains and the birds, the oceans and everything in the oceans and on the land that has names.
“Nowadays people learn languages like Chinese, English or other languages and they mix those up. I don’t think that I have a solution for that. It changes from generation to generation.
“[But] we started to lose our songs that were in our languages, like our lullabies and songs that talk about events in the past; wars, about love, about families, about coming together,” says Maimarosia. “Why it’s important is that if you have a story from a culture, that story can be used for the future generations.”
He believes while the destination for many Solomon Islanders is unknown, people need to look back “to discover ourselves, to know who we really are.”
Beginnings
Maimarosia recalls being taken to church every morning and evening by his mother. “One morning I asked her, ‘Mum, why do you sing louder than everyone else in the church?’ She didn’t say anything, she just started laughing.
“I then asked her another question, ‘Mum, do you think God is deaf?’ She just kept laughing. But that was when my interest in music started.”
Maimarosia also developed a profound interest in Are Are music at a young age after inheriting his first handmade coconut shell ukulele from his father. He later began performing in his community, communicating ancient songs of his ancestors with hand-made panpipes.
“Growing up, every child is a fruit of their parents’ love,” says Maimarosia. “They are the beauty of their relationship. And as for me, growing up there’s a lot of sounds around me. I used to listen to panpipes.”
Maimarosia plays the panpipes and then the guitar for me, showing how the notes are the same on both instruments, before talking about another traditional instrument.
“We used to have these huge drums that we called garamut in Papua New Guinea and parani o’o, in my language, Are Are. In the Solomons, there are plenty of names for the drums, depending on where you come from. There are many cultures in the Solomons that beat drums and I come from one of them. Parani o’o have certain beats and rhythms that were composed by people in the past, our forefathers.”
His motivation to make music is clear: “I do it because it’s a fact that one day, these songs and the music like the bamboo and the drums and the language itself will disappear in the future. It is a fact.”
The song Haiamasina talks of a ritual that is also disappearing.
“All the young girls and boys used to date during moonlight, they used to paddle to the island. They would carry with them a long 6-metre bamboo on their shoulder. On the first dating night, they would put the bamboo on their shoulders (from the shoulder of the girl to the boy). They then tell stories about themselves, about where they are from. After every dating they used to cut the bamboo. So every time they go dating they cut the bamboos until their bodies come together and they no longer need the bamboos. And that’s how they started their relationship. These days people don’t use bamboos any more, they use Skype.”
Maimarosia hopes to have a new album out on the Wantok Musik label this year.
