Big Fat Brown Bitch, Tusiata Avia,
Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023

My niece and I are lost travellers

We have to find our way,
we have to search our symbols

and pray to the marrow in our bones
for our stories,

for our whakapapa.
This is what I tell my niece.

from ‘Tualima’

Tusiata Avia’s new poetry collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch, steps off from a bonfire blaze of racism, hatred, ignorance, intolerance, the inability to cross and build bridges, to understand what it is like to be colonised, to be judged by the colour of your skin, the sound of your name.

The book begins with a news clipping outlining the ACT Party’s outrageous response to Tusiata’s play and poetry collection, The Savage Coloniser. The ensuing furore played out on social media, the radio, in print media, and generated a whiplash of toxicity, including death threats towards her, and importantly, a significant groundswell of loving support from our writing and reading communities.

Tusiata stands up in her poems, she stands up and speaks, speaking out from the scars and the wounds and the rage and her brown skin. Speaking out. Echoing out. Writing out of skin, blood, bones and heart of anger, hurt, resolve.

This is poetry of now. This is poetry so essentially, imperatively and heartbreakingly for NOW, at a time when the ACT Party and its picklehead leader are stoking racism, division, inequity, injustice, ignorance, intolerance through its abominable choices, goals and speeches – in collaboration with its Government coalition partners.

This is poetry for NOW.

Tusiata is a “sharp like an arrow” poet. She is a beloved poet, much lauded, multi-medalled, award-winning “Arts Laureate ,Distinguished Alumni” who “got a Fulbright, got off-Broadway, got that Ockham”. Take that Peters. Take that David. Take this write/right/rite of reply. Read this book and reSEE what freedom means. A word I can barely hold on my tongue it has become so stained with ignorance, so hijacked.

This is poetry searing in its music and its heat. Its heart and its strength. Its complexity, intricate layers, ranging subject matter, overlaps and undercurrents. This is NOW.

I am the Pākehā woman holding my pen and ink rendered mute in despairing at the Government and its resistance to the wellbeing of our planet, land and people, grieving at the insane inhumane catastrophic tragedy in Gaza. This is emptiness.

But Tusiata’s sublime poems are reminding me that poetry is both balm and resistance, both threaded needle and sharpened sword, both anchor and open fight/flight. It is personal and it is political. It is necessary for both reader and writer.

Here, hold my hand, bae, it’s OK
cos poems:
sometimes they like to make us feel

sometimes they like to flip the script
and make us wonder:
What would it be like if things were different?
And some poems, they can make us ask:
Why?

from ‘Hey, David’

The poems draw upon family whether grandmother, father, mother, daughter, sister, niece. It challenges colonialist dogma with wit and barb and necessity. The poems face, let’s say eyeball, the tough challenges of ongoing illness – headaches, epilepsy, osteoarthritis, crutches, wheelchair – and again, yes, this is NOW. This is the tilted health system, the inequity of yardsticks measurements treatment.

Here, too, is poetry that grieves and honours. A poem visits Al Noor, the poet-speaker, ‘part coloniser, part colonised’, enters with respect:

I went to Al Noor to remember.
To say sorry with lilies, the flowers of death,
white for peace, pink for the hearts stopped beating.

from ‘Diary of a death threat,
15 March 2023 (Anniversary)’

This is poetry that digs deep into self, self awareness, into the complicated constellations of self existence, wound, history, experience, that is knowable, unreachable, reachable, werewolf, heart-rattling, alive. Oh so alive. That is savage and soothing.

Throw me like a colour against a canvas or the footpath
or an made bed or the eyes of a classroom
or a New Zealand literary festival or a lunchtime crowd
in a Wellington bookshop,
throw me like a colour and see what happens.

from ‘Big Fat Brown Bitch 87: She feels most Samoan
in a room full of white people’

Tusiata holds out her poetry as an offering and the poems are whispering and hollering, wailing and insisting: see me, name me, call me, feel me. And yes, this is poetry as big extraordinary embrace, as big warm fierce embrace from you Tusiata, from you, gorgeous woman, gorgeous big brown woman, whose pen is aroha, who is pen is resistance, whose pen is offering. This is poetry for NOW. I am breathing it in, listening to the storm outside, feeling the breath and tang and edge of words, feeling revived. And this matters. For many of us this matters. Thank you.

Tusiata Avia’s previous poetry collections are Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004; also staged as a theatre show), Bloodclot (2009), the Ockham-shortlisted Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016), and the Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book (2020). Tusiata has held the Fulbright Pacific Writer’s Fellowship at the University of Hawai‘i in 2005 and the Ursula Bethell Writer in Residence at University of Canterbury in 2010. She was the 2013 recipient of the Janet Frame Literary Trust Award, and in 2020 was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts. In 2023 she was honoured with a Distinguished Alumni Award at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington.

Cover artwork: Tui Emma Gillies, tapa cloth with Woman on the Cross 2022AD. Website, Instagram

Te Herenga Waka University Press page