He Heru. A Comb: An Ornament for the Most Sacred Part of the Body

In Whiti Hereaka’s new fiction collection, a single comb becomes a universe of stories.

Drawing inspiration from a seemingly simple comb, or heru, this new text by Whiti Heraka comes in nine sections, “a part for each tooth, and a part for each space between them.” The parts tell stories of love, loss, and longing: tales of whales whose bones were used to make objects, of a carver creating a comb, of Maori 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. 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.”