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 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.

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).

Series Objects talk back published by Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss.

Whiti Hereaka is a novelist and playwright of Māori and Pākehā descent. Her iwi affiliations are Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa, Ngāti Whakaue, Tuhourangi, 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. Together with Witi Ihimaera, Hereaka edited an anthology of Māori myths—Pūrākau—in 2019. Her most recent work, You Are Here, was created in collaboration with artist Peata Larkin and was published in 2025 by Massey University Press as part of the Kōrero series.