An Ornament for the Most Sacred Part of the Body
From a seemingly simple comb, the award-winning novelist and playwright Whiti Hereaka creates a mirror work of reverence and beauty. It is a text in nine sections, "a part for each tooth, and a part for each space between them". The parts tell stories of love, loss, longing, including tales of whales from whose bones objects were made, of a carver creating a comb, of Maori gods and the power of women, of colonial whalers fishing their prey almost to extinction in the South Pacific, of a writer who cuts her hair and moves across worlds weaving connections.
In her text Whiti Hereaka unfurls a stunning cosmology around the heru, combing with it through time and space to make "stories of ocean blue, blood red, bone white", thus shattering the silence left by the museum description "Zugang ungeklärt" (access unclear).
Whiti Hereaka Whiti Hereaka ist Romanautorin und Dramatikerin mit Maori- und Pakeha-Abstammung. Ihre
iwi-Zugehörigkeiten sind Ngati Tuwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngati Whakaue, Tuhourangi, Ngati Tumatawera, Tainui. Sie lebt in Wellington, Aotearoa Neuseeland, und ist Autorin von vier Romanen:
The Graphologist's Apprentice, Bugs, Legacy und
Kurangaituku. Zusammen mit Witi Ihimaera gab Hereaka 2019 eine Anthologie von Maori-Mythen -
Purakau - heraus. Ihr jüngstes Werk,
You Are Here, entstand in Zusammenarbeit mit der Künstlerin Peata Larkin und ist 2025 bei Massey University Press als Teil der K rero-Reihe erschienen.
