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- Опубліковано 5 вер 2024
- Racist slurs and a tin of corned beef - how award-winning poet and performer Tusiata Avia came to be the voice of New Zealand Pasifika.
There’s a moment in Tusiata Avia’s hugely successful and darkly funny performance Wild Dogs Under My Skirt when a Samoan woman saws open a can of corned beef with a machete. “The reason corned beef is so popular on the islands,” she says, “is because it so closely resembles the taste of human flesh.”
There’s an intake of breath, then laughter.
The line refers to travel writer Paul Theroux’s 1992 book The Happy Isles of Oceania, in which he argues that the reason why the “former cannibals of Oceania” feasted on Spam (or, later, corned beef) was because it came nearest to the “porky taste of human flesh.”
It was an outrageous comment by anyone’s measure but for award winning poet and performer Avia, it was “the beginning”.
“I was writing about race and justice - and why wouldn’t I be?” says Avia, sitting in her childhood home in east Christchurch where she lives with her teenage daughter and elderly mother.
“It is part of me, and it’s part of my experience.”
Avia was born in 1966, the daughter of a Pālagi mother and Samoan father. The 1970s and ‘80s were a time of dawn raids, immigration checks, racist slurs and discriminatory job and housing practices.
As a child, says Avia, “It leaked right through my skin.”
She remembers standing before the bathroom mirror, patting her face with talcum powder to see what she would look like with white skin.
“There was nothing cool about being brown, particularly in my teenage years it was something that I tried to deny, which was nonsense because” - she passes an elegantly tattooed hand across her face - “I look like this.”
Avia began writing when she was just ten. In Year 8 she was awarded the school literary prize, but by 15 she had put writing aside. “I’d lived long enough by then to realise brown girls like me do not go on to become writers. It was a decision - I remember writing my final poem.”
She studied at the University of Canterbury, began teaching, then left on an extended overseas trip. Returning to New Zealand in 1999, she found “this big flowering of Pacific and Māori arts that I had completely missed out on. I suddenly thought, these are people like me, maybe I can do this too.”
She studied creative writing at Whitireia Polytechnic then at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt was premiered at the 2002 Dunedin Fringe Festival. Since then it has been performed nationally and internationally, first by Avia then by an ensemble of actors.
Her poetry and performance work since then has earned her a New Zealand Order of Merit, an Arts Foundation laureateship and the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
In 2021, her collection The Savage Coloniser Book won the poetry prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In accepting the prize she read that poem: “250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand”.
It was funny, it was tough (“I’ve got my father’s / pig-hunting knife / in my fist”) and it was provocative.
As she wrote on a Substack blog, “Strong injustice demands strong words. Why should I play nice? What was I afraid of? Who was I going to offend? And what kind of people would be offended by such a poem?”
Several kinds, it seems, including ACT leader David Seymour, broadcaster Sean Plunket and a rabid pack of anonymous persecutors. There was hate mail; there was a death threat.
“It was scary. It left me feeling particularly vulnerable because I’m the mother of a 16-year-old girl and I look after my 90-year-old Mum.”
Her third book, Big Fat Brown Bitch, includes a response to the abuse: “Oh, that’s right: / this is real life and someone really does want me gone / an actual man, with an actual name, in my actual city // has threatened me and would prefer me to be silent or hurt or maybe even dead.”
Now, as her daughter Sepela performs the graceful moves of a traditional Samoan dance, she recognises a self-confidence foreign to her at that age.
“She has a different relationship with being Samoan than I did,” says Avia. “Also, the climate in this country for young brown kids - there’s some definite pride there, when there was really none that I can remember in 1981.”
She turns to her daughter. “You’re proud, eh?”
By Sally Blundell for Frank Film
Credits:
Producer/Director/Cameraman/Interviewer: Gerard Smyth
Writer/Researcher: Sally Blundell
Editor: Oliver Dawe
Researcher/Second Camera: Ellie Adams
Line Producer: Erina Ellis
Sound Design/Mix: Chris Sinclair
Production Manager: Jo Ffitch
Attributions:
'Wild dogs under my skirt' Auckland Arts Festival footage - courtesy of Benjamin Brooking, Popular.nz / Te Ahurei Toi o Tāmaki Auckland Arts Festival.
Ockham New Zealand Book Awards photos by Marcel Tromp
Ockham New Zealand Awards night footage - courtesy of Ockham New Zealand Book Awards
Brilliant Poet!!!!!!! Thank you Frank Films!!!
Great work, Frank Films.
Funny as and so talented!
Tusiata Forever
This is a horrid person, RE James Cook poem please read and post,
she’s an amazing and talented person! james cook is a coloniser/rapist/murderer.
It's a brilliant poem!!! James Cook and his men raped, pillaged and oppressed many indigenous communities!
This Woman is deranged..
Needs cancelling..
the only deranged person is you! she’s spreading the truth and you can’t handle it 😂
Attacking someone personally isn’t productive. If you disagree, try addressing the issues respectfully instead of resorting to hate, grow up 😅
She's brilliant! We need more people like her in the world bringing more awareness to racism, injustice and oppression especially of indigenous peoples