Powerhouse Pasifika poets
Talks to Tusiata Avia and Karlo Mila
Two of our most prominent Pasifika poets — Christchurch writer Tusiata Avia and Aucklandbased Karlo Mila — have new collections that demand to be read, discussed and perhaps disputed. The writers wouldn’t want it any other way.
In The Savage Coloniser Book, Avia’s fourth collection, poems address the James Cook anniversary, the 2019 mosque terrorist attack, Covid-19, the death of George Floyd and Jacindamania (“Jacinda has become my Krishna”). The poems “move from the body politic to the body personal,” Selina Tusitala Marsh writes in her review of “this stunner of a collection” for the Academy of New Zealand Literature site. “We know each other, this collection reminds us. We’re a small island, and poetry atolls are all connected beneath the surface, even if the water keeps rising.”
Avia didn’t intend to write a “savage” book. “I thought I was writing a book about the death of my father,” she says.
Her publisher, VUP, felt the book “wasn’t resolved”, prompting Avia to write new work and investigate other poems she’d set aside. The result is “the book I feel best about, so far”.
Avia has had epilepsy “half my life” but four years ago she started having serious seizures.
“I’m walking along a knife edge a fair amount of the time,” she says, noting she “might fall and smash my head in at any time” and life is a lot more limited. “I can’t drive, swim, go outside for days at a time and I can’t fly alone. I’ve spent most of the last four years railing against all of this. I’ve begun to get tired of the railing and the feeling sorry for myself and am slowly finding ways to get my head around the life I have now.”
Several poems explore this. “It starts with losing my footing — the way a person does/in an earthquake, when the floor becomes the sea.” Avia’s sardonic humour doesn’t desert her here, as the title of the poem Every seizure a dating opportunity suggests.
The word “savage” in the title (and the cover image of Pati Solomona Tyrell) are arresting and uncompromising. Is Avia summoning the power of poetry to startle readers out of complacency?
“My business is writing and my language is poetry. I write what I write for myself,” Avia says. “I’ve had a lot of feedback over the years that it empowers people — it expresses things they have experienced. That is an honour for me and lets me know I am doing something good in the world.”
Still, her work has the power to confront and unsettle. After watching the theatrical version of Avia’s landmark debut, Wild Dogs Under My Skirt, a friend said her “white-girl feelings” were hurt. “She was honest,” says Avia, and that reaction was “her business.”
Tusitala Marsh notes that The Savage Coloniser Book “documents our wounds, and by doing this provides poetic catharsis. Avia goes through the wound — colonisation, slavery, genocide and racism — and back through it several times. It’s an uncomfortable read in many places. Some might avert their eyes, refuse to lift off their own bandages to see, but it’s a wound that belongs to all of us and one shared by people of colour the world over.”
For Karlo Mila, the personal is always political — and poetry is a vehicle for political protest and commentary: writing is “black blade/on white page”. Mila believes “there has been disdain for political poetry in Aotearoa”.
Whose “interests does it serve” she asks, “for poetry to be merely decorative, ornamental or an exercise in demonstrating mastery over command of the English language?”
“I have always written about the politics of relationships because essentially they’re the most important aspect of being human and alive.”
Goddess Muscle, Mila says, “returns and returns to what it is to be a woman trying hard to do her best in our times — and sometimes failing.”
Like Avia, Mila positions much of her work in contemporary-world headlines — Jacinda, Ihumatao, the 2014 murder in the United States of Tamir Rice — and includes poems written for others, from Albert Wendt to her grandmother.
The book, Lana Lopesi writes in her ANZL review, is “a collection about empowerment” that offers “moments of introspection and pain, hope and healing”. It “takes readers on a turbulent ride, weaving through many different experiences and modes of thinking — something to be expected in a collection spanning over a decade’s worth of writing.”
Goddess Muscle is also a visual treat. “Every page uses flat planes of colour backgrounds with varied colour text,” Lopesi notes. “Shades of blues plunge us into the ocean for tributes to Pacific scholars and writers, while blacks pull us into te pa, the darkness.”
Mila’s publisher, Huia, “wanted to do something special for this book because it’s the first one I’ve written in 10 years,” says Mila. “When I hold it in my hands and move through the pages, the colours and design and paintings shift it beyond simply the words themselves” and “simply black text on white paper.”
Paula Morris (Ngati Wai) is a fiction writer and essayist, and the founder of the Academy of New Zealand Literature: anzliterature.com.