“I am not emerging until I have written a song,” I tell myself. It's day one of my Arts Tasmania supported artist residency and I'm on a mission to write songs for a Dutch/English EP release and finish the music for my one woman show.
Artistic non-negotiables tend to work well for me, I know from my music studies at the UTAS Conservatorium of Music, so I get behind the piano and do not wait for perfection of circumstance or sentiment. Here we go:
I start playing a random chord progressions in G minor. Then a lyric comes, “Ze zeggen opgestaan plaatsje vergaan - wat doe jij nog hier?”, which is a colloquial and casual way of saying, “They say, you've lost your spot, so what are you still doing here?”.
I have no idea what this is or where it's going, but I make the radical decision to write the next line in English. “Still I know where I belong”…
Code-switching. I remember discussing this with Mia Palencia, my (also multi-lingual) songwriting lecturer/tutor at UTAS. I had heard it of course, in Mandopop and in J-Pop, even in the combo of Dutch and French performed by Dutch-African artist Claude, which I really liked.
She had recommended then that I explore bilingual songwriting, but I didn't really try it until last year, when I attempted a French/English pop anthem and a Mandarin/English ballad, titled “让我告诉你”, both of them left unfinished…
Anyway, here I am, boldly trying this again, but now on very familiar linguistic territory, Dutch and English, in which I am thankfully fully fluent 😅
The first lines become my chorus and then the first verse starts, “Rangitoto, talk to me” - Rangitoto is of course the volcanic island off the coast of Auckland, where I spent part of my childhood. You could see Rangitoto Island from my childhood home. “Blote voeten op het asfalt,” a vivid memory of ditching our shoes on the very first day as migrants in New Zealand, symbolic too, of the leap into this new culture.
From there the song writes itself, a personal expression of belonging as a child-migrant to a country, land and culture that I was later forced to leave behind, when my parents returned to the Netherlands, my birth country.
I end up incorporating Maori language in the song, since that was such a big part of my introduction into New Zealand culture and an inseparable part of my sense of belonging there: “met poi in mijn handen was ik Pākehā met alle Anglos in this town.”
I toss up between “Nearly Kiwi” and “Almost Kiwi”, recording a demo version of both and deciding on the latter
… and there it is, my first tri-lingual song, Dutch/English/Maori, on this first day of my residency.
“Almost Kiwi”
Renaté
June 11th, 2025
