Q1: What was your reaction when series editor Lloyd Jones approached you to see whether you were keen to create the sixth book in the kōrero series?
WH: Lloyd first approached me about the project after a panel we were on at the Auckland Writers Festival — we talked about it in between signing books! I had seen The Lobster’s Tale and thought that book was beautiful, so it seemed like a cool kaupapa to be involved with. I suggested Peata as an artist because I love her work (beyond being a proud cousin!) and because I wanted to work with her.
PL: Whiti rang me to ask if I wanted to be involved and of course I was over the moon that Lloyd was happy for us to work together on this project.
Q2: There’s a discipline to each of these books: all done and dusted in exactly 96 pages. Were you up for that challenge?
PL: Absolutely! I’d rather describe it as the ‘framework’ to follow. Having these types of restrictions allow clarity.
WH: We got quite excited and perhaps ambitious in thinking about what we might create together so the restriction of the page count helped to focus the project. It also helped to shape it — we talked about how we would fill the pages and really make the text and the images enhance each other. I wanted the reader to have a full experience in a relatively short book.
Q3: All the writer and artist partnerships in this series have been fertile and rewarding. But yours is special: you are cousins. It must have been lovely to contemplate working together?
WH: We’ve been talking about collaborating on work for a long time! We have talked about our various projects over the years — not just what we’re doing but also about our process in creating — but we’re both very busy, so it was great to have a project with a timeline attached so we would have to schedule the time to work together.
Being cousins and sharing a lot of our whakapapa also worked well with the prompt that we chose, which was about going home — we already had a shared sense of what that could be. Because we already had a relationship and already knew about our respective journeys in learning te reo Māori, I think we could be franker and more vulnerable with each other.
PL: Whiti and I always talked about joining forces and this was a great opportunity to do so. Working on this project has been very special to me (and I’m pretty sure for Whiti too), particularly all the conversations we had about the book, our lives and our mahi and ultimately where it took us. Being cut from the same cloth enables the threads of the fabric to shine through and hopefully we achieved that. Many of the drawings I created during the year didn’t make the cut as our discussions evolved but, particularly when I read Whiti’s final version, it moved many things in my head and on paper. Every decision I made, I felt it necessary to ensure Whiti was happy with them too.
Q4: Whiti you ended up writing according to the Fibonacci sequence. Talk about setting yourself a challenge! How did you arrive at that idea?
WH: I was struggling a bit with how to shape my thoughts on home, whakapapa and learning languages. I think my thoughts around the project were spiralling themselves — almost like stopper in whitewater, I wasn’t getting anywhere! Perhaps in that frustration a few ideas came together. Firstly, some of Peata’s work draws on DNA and I loved that idea of representing yourself as a sequence — it also seemed apt for a piece that was about our shared whakapapa. Peata has also drawn inspiration from tāniko, tukutuku and whakairoiro so I thought about those patterns too. I thought it would be exciting to try to echo Peata’s work in my writing, so it was a true collaboration between text and image. I also wanted to represent in the structure of the piece how I felt about learning te reo Māori; that my acquisition of knowledge wasn’t (and isn’t) linear; that some days I feel like I’ve mastered something but the next day I’m struggling with the same concept. So, I think it was the idea that I am constantly circling around language and identity. The idea of a spiral, then, was pretty strong — I just didn’t know how to use it! When I was a teenager, I went through a phase of writing sad, emotional ‘poems’ in literal spirals but I wanted to be a bit more subtle than 15-year-old me. Using the Fibonacci sequence to determine the number of words in each part meant that I could spiral the words without literally spiralling them.
Q5: And how difficult was it?
WH: Some of the aspects were difficult, yes — but it was the kind of restriction on my writing that is strangely freeing! Because of the restriction of how many words I could use in each part I had to think about the order of my thoughts: would this idea contract or expand into the space? The challenge in it too was to ensure that the text still read naturally — so the reader is almost unaware of the structure. Sometimes that meant rewriting sentences so I could ‘save’ a word for another part of the section.
I’m perhaps a bit strange in that I liked the difficulty. It made me think about how the meaning of the piece comes not only from the content but also the structure. I had prepared myself for editing, in case I had to give up the idea of the sequence but Jane Parkin was onboard to try to keep it. I think she had as much fun with the restriction as I did.
Q6: Peata, you set yourself an equally difficult task with the many hand drawings you made: that’s hours and hours of fine work. Exhausting or exhilarating?
PL: Drawing is an integral part of my practice and my being. I draw to make sense of the world, to solve problems in my head, for therapeutic reasons, to sometimes escape reality if I need to at any point in time. I draw to learn and to connect to others and for the dopamine fix it gives me. It’s never exhausting, always exhilarating!
My drawing process is time consuming as I either fill in one square at a time with an ink pen or I use a ruler to draw. For this project I chose to create my grid drawings. Even the simplest of my drawings may take hours to create and my eyes tend to tire, though mind usually beats matter and time flies out the window when I pick up a pen or paintbrush.
Q7: What did the kaupapa of Whiti’s writing set you free to do?
PL: Whiti and I resonated with the idea of ‘going home’, which was the theme given to us by Lloyd and it was the initial conversations with Whiti and Lloyd that ignited our journey of describing what going home really meant but also how subjective those two words were. Whiti and I were two fantails that Lloyd picked up and released out the window.
It was a beautiful thing working with my cousin, I can’t describe the aroha I feel for her. She is an intelligent vivacious wahine so when I read her final version, it was pretty emotional . . . and exciting and then I was like ‘how the hell did she do that?!’ (Haha! I actually said that out loud). My original thoughts were to keep creating drawings but some of my earlier drawings in this process didn’t seem right to include — and then I realised how some paintings I’d created from two decades ago up until now were part of this kaupapa. Whiti’s writing has a timeless quality and we weren’t just talking about the present or just our past selves, it was so much more than that. So while the drawings in the book (except one) were a direct interpretation of Whiti’s words, particular past paintings spoke louder to me than drawing in that present moment. It became this ‘to and fro’ process between what ‘now’ proposed and what the past presented . . . if that makes sense?
I suppose Whiti’s writing set me free to explore my own journey as a Māori descendant, a human being, a mother, an artist and how my mahi is conveyed and received . . . but also how we are always connected to our tūpuna subconsciously, emotionally and physically; and that our individual stories are never just about us, they are all seeds that feed a bigger picture; that my creative path has never been and never will be just about myself. (I’m possibly being contradictory but I don’t know how to explain it in any other way . . . wait, let me draw you something haha!).
Whiti’s writing allowed me to feel and to acknowledge the emotions and trauma that still swirl inside, but to also acknowledge her pain and the trauma of our whānau. It was an invitation to reach for that confused and frustrated part Pākehā/part Māori little girl back for a visit in order to comfort her and to tell her that she’ll find her path — a very twisted, upside down, round and round path, but a path nonetheless — that would slowly but surely extinguish the mamae within. I needed to tell her that we weren’t there yet but it was becoming easier because now I could see the many that had carried us to this point, especially in the times when anger and doubt came to sabotage our journey home.
Q8: Whiti, how has the compressed writing into these 96 pages fed into your writing practice?
WH: I’m interested in how the form and structure of writing informs the content of the story — how a story is influenced by how it is put together. In a shorter piece, it is easier to see that in action. You Are Here is also the first piece I’ve written in a sustained second person voice, because I wanted to open the story wider than just the experience of me and Peata.
Q9: And of course the entire book — words and images — is a deep immersion in what it is to be Māori. What were the currents flowing in being that as you each wrote and painted?
WH: This is a very difficult question to answer — partly because I don’t know what it is to exist outside of being Māori, so everything that I do flows with the current of that whakapapa. I think this book, this project, only exists as it is because of the connection Peata and I have, which stretches beyond this project and beyond our lifetimes. One book can only ever contain a fraction of that.
I’m hoping that this book will resonate with people on their own journeys, whether to reclaim te reo Māori or just to reclaim their own identity. Writing it has spurred me to begin my reo journey again — and I think that is particularly important in the current political environment. I’m giving up being ashamed of not being able to speak my own language, that is not my shame to carry — instead that shame should be heaped on the structures that stripped it away and continue to perpetrate that violence on us.
PL: It is very difficult to describe my feelings about working on this book. It was hard because there was a deadline and I feel I only scratched the surface in one sense. In another way I feel like someone reached inside my heart and wrenched it out, then my mum’s, then our nan’s, because it is painful thinking how much we have lost as Māori and how our lives could have been different if colonisation had never existed — but ironically how Whiti and I wouldn’t exist as one of our parents are or were Pākehā. It’s a deep pain that I have managed and explored through creating, it has helped me make sense of it or at the very least it has healed some pretty nasty wounds. My whakamā runs deep. I am ashamed I still cannot speak te reo properly or fluently and I am ashamed to know how difficult I have found it to retain this knowledge, but in the same breath I feel blessed that I am able to express how proud I am to whakapapa. No one can take that from me or Whiti, or him or her or them, no matter what they say or do. A problem shared is a problem halved so when that problem can be turned into positive solutions and outcomes, and when you can connect to more than just your inner thoughts and feelings, geez that’s powerful. Art is powerful, words are powerful, writing is powerful, being cousins is powerful, being Māori is powerful!
Q10: Pleased with it?
WH: Of course! The book itself is a beautiful object and I think we’ve achieved our goal of the images and words feeding into each other. And it is so nice to share the ‘space’ of the book together!
PL: Beyond pleased! It is really awesome to think about how this object that you can hold and manipulate in your hands, that you can read with your mind and relish with your eyes, reveals really personal yet universal stories. I hope people understand that every square filled, every brush stroke made and every letter, then word, connected to the next, creates a story that lives beyond the creators and that the reader/viewer becomes a part of that kaupapa no matter what shoes they walk in. Lastly I want to thank the formidable Lloyd Jones. These wonderful little books would not exist without you.
