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.