A review by nicolaanaru
Baby No-Eyes by Patricia Grace

 

Based on the blurb and the author’s note for this book, I thought that Baby No-Eyes was likely to be an expose of the theft of body-parts carried out by Aotearoa hospitals during the ‘90s for research purposes, or eugenics and forced sterilizations of Māori. But, it was not. In Baby No-Eyes, Patricia Grace once again reprises her themes of incest, family secrets, and land rights/disputes, to tell the story of Te Paania, and her children Baby and Tawera.

If you are a fan of non-linear fiction, sprawling narratives, multiple narrators, and not having everything resolved neatly, you may well enjoy this complex narrative. This book has much sadness in it, but there is also a lot of love - particularly between Tawera and his sister Baby.

Or sometimes there is a story that has no words at all, a story that has been lived by a whole generation but that has never been worded. You see it sitting in the old ones, you see it in how they walk and move and breathe, you see it chiselled into their faces, you see it in their eyes. You see it gathering in them sometimes, see the beginning of it on their lips, then you see it swallowed and it’s gone.