You – are – here.
On a location map in a park or reserve, these three simple words can be mystifying; reliant, it seems, on at least some instinctive directional knowledge.
In the book of this title, by writer and barrister Whiti Hereaka (Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Te Arawa) and artist Peata Larkin (Ngāti Whakaue, Ngāti Tūwharetoa, Ngāti Tuhourangi), these words are an equally ambiguous portal to an intimate conversation about place, whakapapa, language; an affirmation of belonging that is both forceful and compassionate.
Working backwards through the title, the “here” is an identifiable place of childhood, whānau and whakapapa; a compilation of early memories, place names, photographs, the very contours of the land now viewed from a position of distance and anxious return: “You left this place a while ago, but it has never really left you … These mountains knew you for generations before you arrived.”
The reassuring “are” validates that sense of being in – and belonging to – that place. Even if you have moved away, “Your bones are here, and here is in your bones.”
Then that tricky second-person “you”. While first- and third-person narration maintain a polite distance between reader and narrator, the second-person voice, as used in this book, comes in close, pulling the reader into a shared experience with an insistent empathy: “You feel a bit uncomfortable, because in some ways you are a stranger here: you have been away for a very long time.”
As Larkin wrote in the publicity material for You Are Here, Hereaka’s writing 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.”
This is the sixth book in Massey University Press’s Kōrero series of “conversations” between a writer and artist, each framed within the 96-page book format, the elegant design of Gary Stewart and the match-making skills of editor Lloyd Jones.
As he wrote in the first of these, High Wire, a 2020 collaboration between Jones and artist Euan Macleod, the project invites “two different kinds of artistic intelligence to work away at a shared topic”.
Since then, Paula Morris and Haru Sameshima have tracked the fading footsteps of Robyn Hyde in Shining Land; Lynley Edmeades and Saskia Leek have celebrated the small wonders of colour and form viewed through the window of domesticity in Bordering on Miraculous; Chris Price and Bruce Foster have interwoven facts, fallacies and natural history in The Lobster’s Tale; and Nic Low and Phil Dadson have devised small repositories – waka huia, time capsules – of knowledge for a post-apocalyptic future in Little Doomsdays.
The success of each book depends on the reciprocity between text and image, the leaning into each other but also the veering away and chance encounters between the different artforms.
Here, Hereaka and Larkin (they are cousins) use their different skills to compose a rhythmic patterning of word and image, voice and silence.
Hereaka structures each page of text according to the Fibonacci sequence, in which each number is the sum of the two preceding numbers (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …). While readers are unlikely to do a word count, the sequence gives a tide-like momentum as the text slowly builds to dominate the page before ebbing back to the same – same but differently placed – three words.
This momentum culminates in four pages of straight text, evoking the anxiety around going “home”, around entering a marae you haven’t entered as an adult, around having to learn a new/old language: “Sometimes it overwhelms you and you get lost in the rage of it – what more could you do in life if you didn’t need to spend this time fighting for something that just should have been yours?”
As the text wanes, the voice softens, reassuring and validating: “You are not alone on this journey.”
The growing silence on the page suggests the quiet waiting of the land, the ever-patient and open-armed past. The images swarm back.
Larkin uses the gridded geometry of woven tāniko patterns, used in the borders of cloaks, in pari (bodices), tīpare (headbands) and tātua (belts), to give form to the steady presence of “home”.
Some of these images appear as framed works in an otherwise empty gallery, a hushed interior in which the intimate narration unfolds like a whisper in your ear. Interspersed or set against more organic painted works, these finely inked drawings thread the reader/narrator back into this shared ancestral place.
The sensitive design, the meticulous crafting, the cadenced patterning of word and image driving the story back to that initial three-word statement build a compelling and haunting experience of finding a way back home.
You Are Here, by Whiti Hereaka and Peata Larkin (Massey University Press, $45), is out now.
