Tusiata Avia’s latest collection a masterpiece of radical self-acceptance

What is there to say when the crippling statistics against Pacific women say it all?

Pacific women earn 75 cents on the dollar compared to Palagi men, 68 per cent of Pacific women and girls have experienced violence, Pacific women are more likely than all other women in New Zealand to be diagnosed with diabetes, breast cancer, and cervical cancer – and they die younger than the national average.

Enter Samoan poet Tusiata Avia, navigator and sage to the sacred land that is the body of a brown woman.

Her answer? Big Fat Brown Bitch, a book of poetry as angry as it is beautiful, a study on hate as much as it is a circling of the wound with sea-salt kisses (think diving into the wreck a la Adrienne Rich, but very brown).

The cover art is a brown woman crucified (well, tied) on the cross by Tongan artist Tui Emma Gillies, while the back of the book forgoes the standard blurb with enlarged white text over te kore black: “Admire my big fat brown body, bitches! Admire it!”

Avia’s journey from her howling Wild Dogs Under My Skirt debut in 2004 to Big Fat Brown Bitch almost twenty years later is a study in resilience and metamorphosis – reflecting on becoming a mother, and highlighting her daughter, who has appeared through current collections, often triggering Avia’s most tender fears. 

So much has changed in Avia’s voice through two decades and this new book is testament to that. She is no longer staring down the tufuga tatau meditating on her would-be malu, instead the entire closing chapter is all about receiving her malu and seems to ascend the page with notes of spiritual cleansing.

The first section Werewolf is heavily winged with Avia’s experience of her work becoming a political football when the ACT Party put out a press release this year calling her book and stage play The Savage Coloniser “hate-fueled” and “racist". They went on to criticise Creative New Zealand for funding what they called: “works that incite racially motivated violence.”

As the entry point to Big Fat Brown Bitch, you feel under attack, as though you have walked into a room mid-argument but you cannot back away. I believe this is an intentional focus of the book, taking you into Avia’s world that isn’t polite and linear. We get a small taste of what life has really been like for the Nafanua of New Zealand poetry – a glimpse into the battle scars still oozing.

Avia has executed what many brown women would love to experience – the power to rewrite history, to turn back to those who have wronged you with thrilling fury. However, don’t let that fury fool you, this poet is in expert control. It’s a raw and hard-won wisdom between the lines, a sense of looking back over her battles and her treasures: a masterpiece of radical self-acceptance.

I don’t think these are poems as in, I think she has taken her work somewhere completely her own – beyond the relativity of what a poem can do. Instead these are more like callings across tā and vā to all brown women, they are food for the spirits like cut fruit and coins – they are probably what happens when a poem just isn’t big enough anymore to be the silver lining of a big fat brown bitch!

Part of the magic of the written word is the fierce deliverance of one voice, with no space for response – or restraint – and with so few brown writers published annually (just 3 per cent of publications feature Māori and Pacific writerse) – here’s hoping Big Fat Brown Bitch inspires more brown readers to pick up the pen.

Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia

Pre-order Big Fat Brown Bitch (teherengawakapress.co.nz)

Publication date November 9, 2023, paperback, $30.00.