Paula Green reviews You Are Here by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin for Poetry Shelf:
‘Massey University Press’s kōrero project invites collaborations “between two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic”. You Are Here , by author Whiti Hereaka and artist Peata Larkin, is the sixth volume in the terrific series.
In her endnote, Whiti talks abut their shared topic, the Fibonacci sequence – how the book adopts a spiral structure, and how she has been drawn to the spiral as a way of creating stories. She muses upon the influence of DNA and the double helix on Peata’s earlier work, and lingers over patterns in both tāniko and whakairo. She embraces te takarangi the double spiral’s shape, and the unfurling connections between knowledge and wairua.
And here we are as reader, here, at a resonant starting point, in this beautifully designed book, ready to enter a spiralness of reading, with a fecundity of movement, exposures, insight. I think of here as a pivot and then find myself likening it to home, to home as a fulcrum: a physical location, state of mind, an intellectual axis. Think of the way tendrils reach out from here, drawing upon past present future, feeding upon epiphany and challenge.
I am entering the infectious spiral of Whiti’s writing and it is to enter an opening of self, with room for anxiety, doubt, with fragility alongside recognition, navigation and strength. There is so much to draw close to in this unfurling spiral: the way the bone of telling is fleshed out with experience, contemplation, questioning. How we might depart from here, but how here may never leave us. And how an opening of self might be personal but it might also be political. How, for example, the children punished in an education system that privileged one language, one knowledge, one limiting set of customs, are speaking here. How you can be both a stranger and estranged with feet in your own soil, upon your own land.
What draws me deep into the heart, and yes this writing is heart fuelled, is a primacy of connections, recognitions, feelings, expansions, mappings. Begin with the bloodline connections between Whiti and Peata, the two cousins, the writer and the artist.
Breath. A recurring motif. We will breathe in. We will breathe out. We will pause and find multiple ways to absorb and travel through the book. Breath a fundamental ingredient as we read and write.’
Read the rest of the review here.
