Tusiata Avia MNZM has published five books of poetry and created several successful stage shows, including Wild Dogs Under My Skirt. It had a two-week run off-Broadway, at Soho Playhouse in New York in 2020, winning the Fringe Encore Series prize for outstanding production. Her most recent poetry collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch, has just been published.
Your poem, The Savage Coloniser, caused a furore. What happened?
That poem was published a few years ago in The Savage Coloniser Book, the collection that won the 2021 Ockham Award for poetry. In February this year, I did an interview with Stuff about its adaptation as a play for the Auckland Arts Festival. The poem was printed with the article, which is how it came to the attention of [online radio channel The Platform’s] Sean Plunket and Act leader David Seymour ‒ the sorts of people who clearly don’t realise that a poem does many things and can contain symbols, metaphors and layering. Maybe some people only read the words on the page and don’t think further?
What was the reaction?
I was called a hate-fuelled racist who wanted to kill white men. Sean Plunket composed a poem to me, all in rhyming doggerel. He also encouraged his followers to complain to the Race Relations Commissioner and the Media Council. Some of the 300 complaints likened the poem to the Christchurch massacre and Act used it to do some race-baiting in the run-up to the election. A flood of hate mail followed, then a threat to my life.
How did you respond?
I worried for my 16-year-old daughter and 90-year-old mum because one threat came from a white supremacist here in Christchurch. The Auckland Arts Festival gave me two bodyguards who followed me around. My eventual reply was written in the language I speak best, which is poetry, and the whole first section of my new book, Big Fat Brown Bitch, is my response.
What did you anticipate when you wrote the poem?
Stylistically, I was experimenting with letting go – freeing myself from some of the more poet-y stuff and stripping things back. It was also a response to my being infuriated that Captain Cook is celebrated. During the 250th anniversary of Cook’s first voyage to the Pacific, I didn’t feel there was anything to celebrate, so I wrote a poem about what he did, how he died and how he brought that upon himself.
Rage is not always associated with eloquence, yet yours finds its outlet in poetry. How did your rage originate?
I was born in 1966 in Christchurch. If a racist massacre was going to happen anywhere in New Zealand, it’s no surprise to me it happened here. I grew up during the Dawn Raids and the Springbok tour. I’m a Samoan woman of the 60s, so of course I have rage but it’s directed all over the place. In my first book, my rage was directed at Samoan culture itself and the things about it that are not okay. My rage is not reserved for white people. I’ve also travelled extensively, to places like Israel and Palestine, and spent 10 years living overseas in Africa and the Middle East. That broadened my world view beyond Samoa and New Zealand, brown and white, black and white. (Story continues after poem from Big, Fat, Brown Bitch.)
How did your OE take such an exotic turn?
I was a huge reader, obsessed with Greek myths and folk tales from other cultures, and I’d wanted to travel since I was 7. Walking to school, I’d tell my best friend all the countries I’d visit when I was 17, which seemed really old to my 7-year-old self, and the Middle East and Africa were always top of my list.
How did you navigate in those regions?
I just found things. Or I’d land in places and sometimes stay for longish periods. I worked for a year at a dive school in Dahab, Egypt, very close to the Israeli border. When I wasn’t handing out dive gear, I was gazing across the Red Sea to the mountains of Saudi Arabia as camels and Bedouins walked back and forth across the desert.
How does your daughter’s experience, growing up brown in Christchurch today, compare with yours?
What’s fantastic for my daughter is that we lived in South Auckland when I was teaching at MIT [Manukau Institute of Technology], so she went to primary school there. That really helped build her sense of pride as a Pacific girl. It’s also cooler today to be a brown girl in Christchurch than it was in 1979, but it’s still not easy for her.
Loads of creative people are riddled with self-doubt, yet you seem rather robust. How have you pulled that off?
I look more grounded than I am. Therapy helps but there’s definitely a dichotomy and some days are better than others. When I’m writing, I write for myself, because if you care what others will say or think, the authenticity is ripped from your writing. I am my own audience and I don’t care what people think. I had to teach myself to do that and, after 20 or so years, I’m pretty good at it.
When did you feel you could call yourself a writer?
I’d always loved writing and it was what I wanted to do but by the time I turned 15, I’d lived long enough to realise that brown girls like me didn’t become writers, so I put that dream away. It wasn’t until my 30s that I felt I’d done enough to call myself a writer. But it was still a conscious decision and I had to teach myself to do that, too.
What reignited your ambition to write?
I returned to New Zealand in 1999 and discovered there’d been a huge explosion of Māori and Pacific writing and arts. I met all these playwrights, film directors, actors and musicians and I was like, “Oh my god, that’s what I want to do,” so I did some courses. Before I travelled, I’d done a BA in English at Canterbury and when I got back I did the creative writing course at Whitireia, then the MA at Victoria University of Wellington with Bill Manhire. That’s where I wrote a draft of Wild Dogs Under My Skirt.
Is there productivity in pain?
Confessional writing is often not seen as real writing but we are always our own best banks of inspiration, which means everyone is writing about themselves, even when they’re describing a landscape.
Being creative for a living can be brutal. Do you ever dream of a more stable path?
If I had a normal nine-to-five life, I’d be really depressed. When I think about my deathbed, I hope I look back and feel mine has been a good life. That I won’t care about not having had a mortgage or a house because none of that matters. I know I’m doing the right thing when I go to high schools and kids say, “I really hated poetry, but your poetry is exactly how I feel.” Sometimes, there are tears running down their faces. Or when people come to me after shows and tell me I told their story. That’s when I get that big feeling that I’m doing what I’m here to do. Those are my guiding-star moments.
