What I’m Reading Tusiata Avia
My absolute favourite book of recent years is Hurricane Season ,a novel by Fernanda Melchor. I’ve read it twice so far and need to read it again, probably several more times. It’s furious and monstrous and brilliant. I keep trying to figure out how she’s done what she’s done; it seems to me she has created a new form.
I’m a scrooge when it comes to buying books. I did, however, run out to lay down some cash for Aue¯by Becky Manawatu, I’m reading this one again too. Aue¯ does what I want a book to do: grab me by the neck (or some part of my body) and not let me go until the last page.
Trust Exercise by Susan Choi gripped me similarly, but in a completely different, razor sharp way.
The last few days I’ve been reading Samoa Ne’i Galo ,a compilation of oral legends – each story has several different versions as told by orators in different areas in Samoa. It guts me how there is the ever-present threat of our old stories disappearing.
Alongside this, I treasure the essay collection, Whispers and Vanities: Samoan Indigenous Knowledge and Religion. The title essay by Tui Atua Tupua Tamasese Ta’isi Efi is a gift from one of the few keepers of pre-colonial Samoan sacred knowledge.
I have to add There Are More Beautiful Things Than Beyonce by Morgan Parker to every list I write. In my opinion, no reader of poetry should miss this. If it doesn’t grab you by the shoulders, the heart, the brain, the belly – you might be dead. From the epigraph: ‘‘The president is black / she black’’ (Kendrick Lamar). Morgan Parker is president.
Samoan New Zealander Tusiata Avia recently became the first Pasifika woman to win the Peter and Mary Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards for her collection The Savage Coloniser Book. Born and raised in Christchurch, she teaches creative writing at the Manukau Insititute of Technology.