Tusiata Avia at the 2024 Arts Foundation Laureates Awards

Dear Tusiata

I hold your poetry to my heart.

When I am at Auckland Hospital for my regular checkups, I am stalled by your magnificent awe-rich body-hugging poem, ‘Prayer’. I realise in my prolonged contemplation, what gratitude I feel for your words, for your poems, your plays, your poetry collections, your presence.

I am standing by you, for you, with you.

Prayer

I pray to you Shoulder blades
my twelve-year-old daughters’ shining like wings
like frigate birds that can fly out past the sea where my father lives
and back in again.

I pray to you Water,
you tell me which way to go
even though it is so often through the howling.

I pray to you Static –
no, that is the sea.

I pray to you Headache,
you are always here, like a blessing from a heavy-handed priest.

I pray to you Seizure,
you shut my eyes and open them again.

I pray to you Mirror,
I know you are the evil one.

I pray to you Aunties who are cruel.
You are better than university and therapy
you teach me to write poetry
how to hurt and hurt and forgive,
(eventually to forgive,
one day to forgive,
right before death to forgive).

I pray to you Aunties who are kind.
All of you live in the sky now,
you are better than letters and telephones.
I pray to you Belt,
yours are marks of Easter.

I pray to you Great Rock in my throat,
every now and then I am better than I feel I am now.

I pray to you Easter Sunday.
Nothing is resurrecting but the water from my eyes
it will die and rise up again
the rock is rolled away and no one appears
no shining man with blonde hair and blue eyes.

I pray to you Covid
I will keep my mask on, and the loved ones around me.

I pray to you Child
for forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.
I will probably wreck you as badly as I have been wrecked
leave the ship of your childhood, with you
handcuffed to the rigging,
me peering in at you through the portholes
both of us weeping for different reasons.

I pray to you Air
you are where all the things that look like you live
all the things I cannot see.

I pray to you Reader,
I pray to you.

Tusiata Avia
from The Savage Coloniser Book, Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2020

‘Prayer’ by Tusiata Avia, Auckland Hospital

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

In 2023 I reviewed your most recent collection, Big Fat Brown Bitch, in support of your poetry and your incredible contribution to readers and writers in Aotearoa. What I wrote feels so very apt as you continue to suffer an unacceptable backlash from a despicable politician who resides in the highest realm of ignorance and racism. You deserve to be honoured. You utterly deserve golden globes of every hue. Here is what I wrote . . . and how my words still resonate so deeply.

with love, admiration
and respect
Paula

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.

Tusiata Avia, 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.