Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004), Tusiata Avia's first collection of poetry, draws on two different cultures and charts the sometimes painful points of their intersection. These poems are both confrontational and entertaining, raw and lyrical, they occupy legend and history - yet break through into an urban landscape that is just as arresting and richly patterned. Avia's poetry is alive with the energy and rhythm of performance poetry and an oral tradition, but it also stakes out a unique physical life on the page, reshaping our language and our understanding of New Zealand culture.~~'Tusiata's poetry is quite revolutionary in the sense that, not only does it define the face of Pacific literature in New Zealand, but it redefines the face of New Zealand literature itself.' - Sia Figiel~--Book Cover.
The voices of Tusiata Avia are infinite. She ranges from vulnerable to forbidding to celebratory with forms including pantoums, prayers and invocations. And in this electrifying new work, she gathers all the power of her voice to speak directly into histories of violence.Avia addresses James Cook in fury. She unravels the 2019 Christchurch massacre, walking us back to the beginning. She describes the contortions we make to avoid blame. And she locates the many voices that offer hope. The Savage Coloniser Book is a personal and political reckoning. As it holds history accountable, it rises in power.
In this anthology of contemporary eco-literature, the editors have gathered an ensemble of a hundred emerging, mid-career, and established Indigenous writers from Polynesia, Melanesia, Micronesia, and the global Pacific diaspora. This book itself is an ecological form with rhizomatic roots and blossoming branches. Within these pages, the reader will encounter a wild garden of genres, including poetry, chant, short fiction, novel excerpts, creative nonfiction, visual texts, and even a dramatic play—all written in multilingual offerings of English, Pacific languages, pidgin, and translation. Seven main themes emerge: “Creation Stories and Genealogies,” “Ocean and Waterscapes,” “Land and Islands,” “Flowers, Plants, and Trees,” “Animals and More-than-Human Species,” “Climate Change,” and “Environmental Justice.” This aesthetic diversity embodies the beautiful bio-diversity of the Pacific itself. The urgent voices in this book call us to attention—to action!—at a time of great need. Pacific ecologies and the lives of Pacific Islanders are currently under existential threat due to the legacy of environmental imperialism and the ongoing impacts of climate change. While Pacific writers celebrate the beauty and cultural symbolism of the ocean, islands, trees, and flowers, they also bravely address the frightening realities of rising sea levels, animal extinction, nuclear radiation, military contamination, and pandemics. Indigenous Pacific Islander Eco-Literatures reminds us that we are not alone; we are always in relation and always ecological. Humans, other species, and nature are interrelated; land and water are central concepts of identity and genealogy; and Earth is the sacred source of all life, and thus should be treated with love and care. With this book as a trusted companion, we are inspired and empowered to reconnect with the world as we navigate towards a precarious yet hopeful future.
This little book with big ideas features eight diverse, well-known and emerging women writers. They are: Tusiata Avia, Steff Green, Helen Vivienne Fletcher, Charlotte Simmonds, Michele Leggott, Trish Harris, Te Awhina Arahanga, and Robin Hyde (the only non-living writer). These Kiwi women are novelists, poets, essayists, playwrights, memoirists, and bloggers. The important thing they have in common is that they all share the lived experience of disability. In Here we are, read us, they talk frankly about the intersection of disability and writing, sharing the insights and experience that enrich their work.
Conceptualised and developed by contemporary artist Cushla Donaldson with publishers Te Reo Kē and The Physics Room, Through That Which Separates Us is a collection of writing, artworks, and interviews which form a genealogy of deportation in Australasia and the Pacific. Taking as its point of departure Cushla Donaldson's artwork 501s, first staged at the Melbourne Art Fair in 2018, this book seeks both to make transparent the mechanisms of separation and to foster forms of planetary solidarity that might abolish their conditions. Deportation is an organising principle that has begun to impress itself across all areas of social life. Yet discussions of deportation rarely interrogate the origins of the practice as a settler colonial technique, nor the complex relations between migration and indigeneity that these origins bring to light. The collection understands the experiences of the so-called 501s, held in Australian detention centres and often deported on the basis of a 'character test', as a paradigmatic case illustrating the intersection of xenophobia and settler colonial violence. Through That Which Separates Us is a significant new collection that interrogates the epistemological, affective, and aesthetic dimensions of life in a world structured by separation. As Trans-Tasman and Pacific tensions rise, the book serves as urgent reading."--The Physics Room website (accessed 5/07/2021).
Mele watches Grandma as she performs her traditional massage on her Mum's foot, and Mrs Rata's arm using the coconut oil. Grandma has sore feet walking Mele home from school. Mele pulls out the coconut oil and gives Grandma a nice soothing massage. Suggested level: junior, primary.
Wild Dogs Under My Skirt (2004), Tusiata Avia's first collection of poetry, draws on two different cultures and charts the sometimes painful points of their intersection. These poems are both confrontational and entertaining, raw and lyrical, they occupy legend and history - yet break through into an urban landscape that is just as arresting and richly patterned. Avia's poetry is alive with the energy and rhythm of performance poetry and an oral tradition, but it also stakes out a unique physical life on the page, reshaping our language and our understanding of New Zealand culture.~~'Tusiata's poetry is quite revolutionary in the sense that, not only does it define the face of Pacific literature in New Zealand, but it redefines the face of New Zealand literature itself.' - Sia Figiel~--Book Cover.
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