Whiti Hereaka: He Heru. A Comb
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| 10 € |
| Coming soon to the Humboldt Forum shop and online |
| English, German |
| Part of: Objects talk back |
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 Māori 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.
Herausgegeben von der Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss
64 pages, Paperback, Diaphanes Verlag, ISBN 978-3-0358-0865-0
The heru is a traditional Māori ornamental comb that reached Berlin in the nineteenth century. Such combs were not used for hair care but served as a sign of high rank. The object entered the collections of the Berlin Völkerkundemuseum (today the Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) via the Royal Prussian Art Collection. The circumstances under which the object was acquired in New Zealand are not documented.
Whiti Hereaka is a novelist and playwright of Māori and Pākehā descent. Her iwi affiliations are Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Tūhourangi, Ngāti Tumatawera, and Tainui. She lives in Wellington, Aotearoa / New Zealand, and is the author of four novels: The Graphologist’s Apprentice, Bugs, Legacy, and Kurangaituku. She is also co-editor, with Witi Ihimaera, of an anthology of Māori myths, Pūrākau, published in 2019. Her latest work, You Are Here, a collaboration with artist Peata Larkin, was published by Massey University Press in 2025 as part of their Kōrero series.