At home in two worlds
After a performance of Tusiata Avia’s poetry show Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, it is not uncommon for audience members to have an intense reaction – in tears, they come to wildly shake her hand.
Her one-woman show was first performed in 2002, and Avia says that over the years it has been cathartic for a lot of people. “I have had young people tell their stories and old people tell their stories. I think it is because it’s about universal stuff – it is about love, heartbreak, it’s about families and it’s about violence.”
Although it’s not often performed in New Zealand, Avia says the work has travelled all over the world and produced the same reaction, sometimes where people can’t even understand the language – for example, in Moscow in an underground place. “People can feel it.”
Now, under the direction of Anapela Polataivao, a revised version is part of the New Zealand Festival. The six female characters originally played by Avia are being played by six actresses.
“There is a young girl, there is a really mean aunty, there is a gossipy aunty, there’s the village slut – there’s a whole array of women.”
The words are the same, but the work has expanded. “Anapela is an incredibly gifted director and she has let it fly in a much fuller way – it’s quite extraordinary.”
Avia says that some of the material is particular to Samoan culture, but it also universal. “It is not special to us – it is human. While it talks about sexual and child abuse, it also talks about love and sex, relationships and gossip. “There is a lot of humour in there – albeit a little dark.”
“One of the things I really love about this play is that Samoans laugh at it. That is something we do, we laugh at our pain.”
Reconciling both her Samoan and palagi heritage has been a major struggle in her life. “I always thought of it as a curse when I was growing up – I grew up in the 70s and 80s in a very white, very conservative Christchurch. I was obviously this big brown girl, so I never fitted in. Everyone made that very clear to me: every teacher, every parent and just about every friend made that extremely clear to me. But in the end, it was to my advantage as an artist.”
In her twenties, she lived in Samoa and made the painful discovery that she was not accepted as a Samoan. Acceptance came in her thirties when she realised that she had “one foot in both worlds, but was outside both. As an artist, that gives you a great perspective, because you know both worlds, but you are outside both, so you can write with real authority.
“Negotiating the tension and movement between those two worlds speaks to everyone of mixed race – actually, not just mixed race but mixed identity of whatever kind. It is across the human spectrum – I don’t think there are many of us who are so sure of our identity.”
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, by Tusiata Avia, directed by Anapela Polataivao, New Zealand Festival, Hannah Playhouse, Wellington, March 7-11.