Arts
Goddess of poetry
by Siobhan Harvey
Performer and poet Tusiata Avia is breaking down taboos.
Tusiata: in Samoan, it means word painter and performer. Not only do such definitions perfectly sum up New Zealand-Samoan writer and actress Tusiata Avia, but the fact there’s more than one meaning to her name seems apt for a woman who’s built a career as a poet and performance artist out of donning multiple disguises. In her solo show, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, for instance, Avia transformed into sexually aggressive Dog Woman, naive village-girl Alofa and numerous Samoan aunties. It was a performance that the New Zealand Herald, when reviewing the show as part of the Auckland Festival in 2007, acclaimed as one of the year’s theatrical highlights.
Since publishing a collection of poems also entitled Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (VUP, 2004), Avia, 42, has transferred her dramatic personas to the poetry world and, in the process, has toured literary festivals at home and abroad. Ask her about performing, though, and her actorly guile disappears.
“Performing snuck up on me,” she confides. “When I launched the Wild Dogs show at the 2002 Dunedin Fringe Festival, I hadn’t acted before. Looking back, it seems foolish to stand up on stage without any previous experience. But at the time, I didn’t know what I was doing and stumbled along.”
Naive Avia might have been, but since then she’s turned that inexperience into great success. Over the past seven years, she has performed Wild Dogs Under My Skirt on stages in Auckland, Brisbane, Honolulu, Hamburg, Moscow and Vienna. Meanwhile, the poetry collection has proven such a hit, its author was awarded the 2005 Fulbright-Creative New Zealand Pacific Writer’s Residency at the University of Hawaii and was shortlisted for the prestigious Prize in Modern Letters in 2006.
Now this woman christened Donna and raised in Aranui, one of Christchurch’s poorest suburbs, is about to launch her second book of verse, Bloodclot. And she sees it as a return to what she does best. “For me, everything starts on the page. I’m not a professionally trained actress, so I’m not someone who improvises their work. I write first then consider which poems I can perform and which I can’t.”
Nonetheless, the performance side of Avia’s personality seems to have influenced Bloodclot. The book has been described as an allegorical reworking of her life through the creation of Samoan goddess of war Nafanua as a half-caste Christchurch girl. Everywhere in the book, there’s a sense of Nafanua – like Avia in her stage show – donning different personas. The result is a work containing 50 poems with titles such as Nafanua is a girl from Aranui and Nafanua becomes a surgeon for the day.
“These Nafanua poems came out in a great rush in early 2005,” Avia explains when asked about being inspired by the Samoan goddess. “By the time I’d finished my residency in Hawaii that year, I’d completed the manuscript.
“What interested me about Nafanua is the sense that she’s taboo. She was an important Samoan deity until the mid-1800s when the country embraced Christianity. She was the goddess of war, she founded the Samoan political system and foretold the coming of a new religion, which would spell her demise. Ever since then, though, she’s become regarded as part of a heathen cult that isn’t talked about. But Nafanua was a strong woman leader who was well ahead of her time.”
The more Avia wrote, the deeper her affinity with the roles Nafanua played in Samoan society went. “I became particularly taken with Nafanua’s status as goddess of war. Fighting is usually a man’s domain, but looking at combat from the point of view of a woman like Nafanua inspired me to write poems in which I take her to politically volatile situations such as the Middle East. At the same time, I was able to use Nafanua to explore more intimate, yet equally volatile, territory such as unstable relationships.”
If Avia found freedom in writing about Nafanua, she also found danger. “Writing Bloodclot felt at times like I was playing with fire. The thing with writing about Samoan deities such as Nafanua is that because she really existed, she has a line of descendants who, I realised, might be upset about me writing about her in the ways I do. In fact, I received gentle words of warning from a few people in the Samoan establishment when they heard I was writing Bloodclot. That intimidated me. It’s one of the reasons why it’s taken me four years to decide that I can do what the hell I like and publish the book.”
So, Bloodclot: The Show will be gracing stages soon? “Originally, I thought the collection might work as a performance piece. I thought I could pick parts out of it, and build something for the stage. But now I’m not sure. Wild Dogs was almost always written in first-person perspective, so it lent itself readily to the stage. But much of Bloodclot is in the third person. Knowing whether I can make a show out of it, or just use a few poems for performance, will take a while to decide.”
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