Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
You Are Here
Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin
Massey University Press
RRP $45.00
Reviewed by John Daly-Peoples
Most stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. Most stories have a central idea, a kernel from which the tale expands like a sinuous river which follows a plot or a life. Other books can have a very different structure as with the new book “You Are Here”.
“You Are Here” which is the sixth book in the “kōrero series”, edited by Lloyd Jones, features Jann Medlicott Acorn Fiction Prize winner Whiti Hereaka and artist Peata Larkin, cousins who share the same whakapapa. in a collaboration. Unlike the previous stories in the collection Larkin’s images are not merely illustrations of the text but rather complementary representations of similar ideas.
Here the story line is cyclical, expanding and contracting. Like James Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” the work begins and ends at the same point but with an elaborate structure in between
The poem starts with the line “You are here” and ends with the line – “Return to where you belong”, seemingly following the mathematical notions of the Fibonacci number sequence.
In tracing out the narrative the narrator recalls their youth and their experiences of life. Threaded through this personal journey are images of water and the stones of a lake as well as images of birds and journeys. like the symbolic use of the Piwakawaka by Colin McCahon.
Language, memories and landscape are seen as linked in the development of the narrator, their memories of school and the shaping of the person through language and experiences. the physical and the metaphorically linked in this journey.
Parallel to Hereaka’s storyline are Peata Larkin’s multi-layered visual images in which ideas inherent in the structure of the story are the linked to her exploration of the DNA structure as well as images of Māori design. Drawings of tāniko and whakairo on gridded shapes are linked to European notions of embroidery and mathematical structures.
Peata Larkin says of the work “Working on this project has been very special to me …Being cut from the same cloth enables the threads of the fabric to shine through and hopefully we achieved that.
Hereaka says. ‘It is my hope that by the time you have walked that path that you are now a different reader and will read those words in a new way,’
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