Donna tusiata avia biography

  • Donna Tusiata Avia MNZM is a New Zealand poet and children's author.
  • Donna Tusiata Avia MNZM (born ) is a New Zealand poet and children's author.
  • Avia is of Samoan descent, and her name, Tusiata, means both painter and artist.

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    A significant category prize in the national Book Awards was granted to a Pacific woman for the first time on Wednesday.

    Prominent New Zealand journalist John Campbell said it&#;s outrageous there haven&#;t been more Pacifica women in the awards line-up in the past. He also said it&#;s staggering that nobody has painted James Cook in Avia&#;s light before.

    Tusiata Avia won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry with her fourth poetry collection &#;The Savage Coloniser Book&#;. 

    On the publisher&#;s website, Avia&#;s colleague Selina Tusitala Marsh (NZ Poet Laureate &#;19) says: &#;Savage is as savage does. And we&#;re all implicated. Avia breaks the colonial lens wide open. We peer through its poetic shards and see a savage world — outside, inside. With characteristic savage and stylish wit, Avia holds the word-blade to our necks and presses with a relentless grace. At the end, you&#;ll feel your pulse anew.&#;

    &#;Avia addresses James Cook in fury&#;, says her publisher, th

  • donna tusiata avia biography

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    Wild Dogs Under My Skirt () is a collection of poetry that was developed into a stage play that tours internationally with an ensemble cast of Polynesian women. In the title poem, Tusiata Avia explores elements of desire and female empowerment relating to the living cultural practice of tātatau, the art of customary tattooing practiced by Samoan master artists or tufuga. Wrapping the body in images, either by inscribing images into the skin or by wrapping it in barkcloth, is a way Pacific Islanders acknowledge the body’s sacred agency. Malu is a traditional tattoo reserved for women that extends from the upper thigh to the just under the knee. Tusiata shares the meaning of this ancient art form, alongside her own reasons behind a decision to acquire one for herself.

    — Maia Nuku

    “Wild Dogs Under My Skirt” by Tusiata Avia

    I want to tattoo my legs.
    Not blue or green
    but black.

    I want to sit opposite the tufuga
    and know he means me pain.
    I want him to bring out his chisel

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    Tusiata Avia began her teaching career in Otara 25 years ago. In the years since, she’s travelled the world, performing her one-woman poetry show Wild Dogs beneath My Skirt in the most far-flung of places — and establishing herself as a leading Pacific poet, performer and writer, with two books of poetry, children’s books, and a number of writers’ fellowships and awards to her name. She’s now back in South Auckland, teaching creative writing at the Manukau Institute of Technology, just down the road from where she started. Here, she talks to Dale about the (sometimes painful) path she’s taken from an uncomfortable childhood in Christchurch to South Auckland.

     

    Talofa lava, Tusiata. You’ve got a lovely name, Tusiata Avia. Can you tell us any more about it?

    I was named after my great-aunt Tusiata. The word in Samoan means artist so it’s a very fortunate name.

    Growing up in Christchurch in the ‘70s and ‘80s, it was not a name that inom wanted to use because, for a teenager an