ABC News
[ Source: ABC ]
Five years in the making, Marlon Williams’s fourth solo album was guided by the Māori whakatauki (proverb), “Ko te reo Māori, he matapihi ki te ao Māori”. It translates to “The Māori language is a window to the Māori world”.
“You learn everything from the way language is wielded,” Williams tells Double J Arvos host Dylan Lewis. “In the same way Inuits have [many] words for snow, in Māori culture, we have the same amount of words for the way water ripples.”
“You learn about what your ancestors were really in touch with, what was relevant and important to them, through the language.”
Widely considered one of Aotearoa/New Zealand’s finest voices, the singer-songwriter is of Ngāi Tahu and Ngāi Tai descent, with his mother’s iwi (tribe) from the South Island and his father’s from the North Island.
Translating as ‘The Messy House’, the album’s title Te Whare Tīwekaweka is a cheeky nod to Williams’s imperfect grasp of te reo Māori (the Māori language) — while he learned to speak it at a language-immersion preschool, he lost it as he grew up.
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