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. Video / Frank Film
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, darkly funny and utterly uncompromising performance Wild Dogs Under My Skirtwhen a Samoanwoman saws open a can of corned beef with a machete. “The reason corned beef is so popular on the islands,” she tells the audience, “is because it so closely resembles the taste of human flesh.”
There’s an intake of breath, then laughter.
The line was taken from 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 on the sofa of 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.”
Born in 1966, Avia grew up in the 1970s and ‘80s, the daughter of a Pālagi mother and Samoan father. This was the time of dawn raids, immigration checks, racist slurs and discriminatory job and housing practices.
Tusiata Avia with her mother Sylvia and her daughter Sepela. Photo / Eleanor Adams, Frank Film
As a young child, says Avia, “It leaked right through my skin.”
She remembers as a 7-year-old, 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” – circling an elegantly tattooed hand around her face like a portrait frame – “I look like this.”
Avia began writing when she was 10. 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 and that was it.”
She studied at the University of Canterbury then took on a teaching role at Hillary College (now Sir Edmund Hillary Collegiate) in Auckland – a 1990 photo shows her in embroidered shirt, shell necklace, ankh earrings, her signature straight-ahead, unflinching gaze.
After a decade of overseas travel, she returned to New Zealand in 1999 to find “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 undertook a creative writing course at Whitireia Polytechnic, then the Creative Writing Programme at Te Herenga Waka Victoria University.
Tusiata Avia. Photo / Eleanor Adams, Frank Film
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt 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 work since then has won accolades, earning 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 (Te Herenga Waka University Press) won the poetry prize at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. In accepting the prize she read one of the poems, that poem: 250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand, a response to the 2019 commemorations marking the anniversary of Cook’s arrival.
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 intimidators. There was hate mail; there was a death threat.
Tusiata Avia's daughter Sepela. Photo / Eleanor Adams, Frank Film
“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 (Te Herenga Waka University Press) 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.”
It is terrifying, and poignant, but now, as her daughter Sepela performs the graceful moves of a traditional Samoan dance before her mother and grandmother, Avia recognises a strong sense of cultural identity.
“She has a different relationship with being Samoan than I did at her age. 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.”
