Four Poems by Tusiata Avia
Big Fat Brown Bitch #23: She receives an election year visit from Christopher Luxon
If you are sitting in a garage in South Auckland with your two brothers, tell your sisters to stand outside on the street, flag down flash cars and check for gang members or members of parliament.
If you are sitting in a garage in South Auckland with your two brothers, hide your BA, MA, PhD, MNZM for services to the arts, the sciences, sports, healthcare and technology. Think instead how you might get into a gang and a life of crime.
If you are sitting in South Auckland with your two brothers—writing an opera for Sole Mio or Isabella Moore or Pene Pati, the new Pavarotti—stop what you are doing and flag down a gang member and buy some meth. Make a real brown living for God’s sake!
If you are sitting in South Auckland with your two brothers discussing the majestic architecture of atoms, the rhythm of the tides and the luminescence of the galaxies—shut that down immediately and consider the gang life and what it has to offer you.
If you are sitting in a garage in South Auckland with your two brothers and gang members or members of parliament, you’re on the right career path, whichever gang you join.
If you are sitting in a garage in South Auckland with a certain member of parliament, keep him distracted with stories of your gang affiliations, while your two brothers pick the lock and rifle through his BMW 7 Series for keys to any of his other luxury cars or houses or account numbers to any of his off or on-shore accounts.
If you are sitting in South Auckland with the member of parliament and your daughter brings in cups of tea and coconut buns and bends to whisper in your ear: He’s worth 30 million dollars, Mum—keep Luxon busy with conversation about putting criminals aged 10 to 17 years old in bootcamps and tell your daughter to hide your kids in the wardrobe, under the bed and in the chest freezer.
If you are sitting in South Auckland with the 2023 Prime-Minister-hopeful after he’s put his racist foot in his mouth again, pop him into a high-vis vest and whip him off to hammer in a few nails with your two brown brothers smiling in the background.
Whip him off to Christchurch to flip burgers at McDonald’s drive-through.
Hi guys, I am here at McDonald’s Merivale and it’s a very special place. I have a huge appreciation for the people, the Golden Arches, the Air NZ baggage handlers, the call centres, the apprentices. #Luxononthejob!
Diary of the death threat, 20 April 2023
I dreamt I had a stalker, not an I-love-you stalker but an I-hate-you stalker
an I-want-you-dead stalker
and it was during the Olympics
then I woke and remembered:
Oh, that’s right, this is real life, it’s not the Olympics
not the real Olympics with people running and jumping and swimming
but here in real life there are people carrying torches
not the Olympic torch
and not people dressed in white pointy hoods, but people dressed as good Kiwis
horrified, righteous, furious Kiwis
carrying their torches across the country
to the steps of the Race Relations Commission and the New Zealand Media Council
and over the airwaves and online—
so many online
because
I am a racist
I am a terrorist
I am a brown skinned woman and
I am an incitement to violence
because
If a white man tried that, he would be dismembered
but me, well, look at me: stalking through this life untouched.
then I remember, Oh, that’s right:
this is real life and someone really does want me gone
an actual man, with an actual name, in my actual city
has threatened me and would prefer me to be silent or hurt or maybe even dead
I’m too nervous to open it and read it
so I let my family read it and tell me what they think they should
when I explain this to the police they say:
there’s not much we can do
because if this man says: That wasn’t me
I didn’t send that threat
Someone else used my name.
If he says that, then there’s nothing we can do.
I never hear from the police again.
<>
I wonder what would happen if my I-want-you-gone stalker
stood by his letter and said: Yes, it was me, I used my own name.
admitted: That is me. Yes, I want her to be gone.
I wonder what would happen then?
would we go to court?
be together in a place I could see him clearly and he could see me
as if we were on a date with matchmakers
together but separated by people speaking for us
because everything is a relationship
everything that happens, happens inside a relationship.
<>
I wonder what would happen if I looked at that letter
that I-want-you-to-be-gone letter
I wonder which words would be there
would they be short words in short sentences, staccato
like a fast one-two jab, like seeing stars and reeling and falling down
or like a machine gun piercing every part of my body at once
or would the words be long and sinuous, wrapping
themselves around and around, squeezing breath out of my chest
squeezing hot pain into my stomach
would they rear up and look at me, hypnotise me
in an instant, bite me between the eyebrows
shoot poison straight up into my brain
would the words be dancing words
reeling round and round
spinning and spinning so fast, so fast
the whole world would want to throw up.
Don’t punish the wealthy
Oh, Nicola, I really don’t have time for this today, I’m wiping the walls down for god’s sake, I’m feeding my babies instant noodles for god’s sake, and you’re telling us: don’t punish the wealthy, so I just have to sit down for a minute and write a poem.
Because what else am I gonna do? When you and Chris and David say shit that makes us angry and powerless and stupefied, what else am I gonna do?
Compare you to Captain Cook? Call you bitch? Or David a bitch or Chris a bitch or Winston? What else am I gonna do?
Come for me, babe, what else have I got to lose?
Don’t punish the wealthy
Eat the poor
We are big and fat these days, Nicola, the poor aren’t skinny like you guys, we are fat from all the 2 minute noodles (you’d be surprised at the fat content in those suckers) and the $1 loaves of bread here in South Auckland and Porirua and Aranui. Can’t get Vogel’s in our dairy, babe, and who’s got money for that anyway or petrol to get to the supermarket?
Yep, don’t punish the wealthy—whoever they are. I haven’t actually met any of them, they don’t come here to our dairies or our garages or even know our brown brothers who live in them, who y’all talk about like you’ve even met us (you know the reference I’m making here, ay, babe?).
Eat the poor instead, Nicky, we are fat and juicy and our kids are full of phlegm, it’s all the carbs and the cold. Yeah, even here in subtropical South Auckland, Nic, the walls are weeping and the bedrooms are cold.
Kids and their coughing are the ones you should punish, they’re running this economy into the ground with their free doctors’ visits, but don’t worry, Nicky, eat us. You know we have a cannibal past and you are vying for queen, and royalty always gets the choicest cuts—the back of the neck is the best bit—so let’s get the bbq going, the hangi going, the umu going.
Lie us down and wrap us in the NZ flag, lie our mucus-filled babies down and wrap them in blue which is also the Crips’ colour.
You guys have lots in common—the Crips and the National party—both of you train the hard way. The Crips train from babyhood, on the streets like boot camps. And National trains our babies in their boot camps. The profits, the rackets, the gang pride, the blue versus the red.
Don’t punish the wealthy
Eat the poor
Like I say, babe, we are fat and full of calories. We will keep you going all day, the choice backs of our necks will power you through these hard times, this recession coming, the hard fight at the ballot box coming. We will keep you so warm, you’ll have to open your windows at night and breathe in the fragrant air of Epsom and Khandallah and Merivale.
Take a big bite of us, babe
Don’t punish the wealthy
Eat the poor.
Free speech poem (the redacted version of ‘250th anniversary of James Cook’s arrival in New Zealand’)
███ James,
█████████
██ the white, ███
in ████ big Endeavour
sailing the blue, blue water.
███████████████████
████████████████
James,
███████████████
██████████████
████████
████ the ███████████
████ white ████
██████████████████
██████████████████
██████ big █████████████
██████ white. ███
███████████████████
███████████████████████
███ James,
it’s us.
██████████
███████████████████
███████
██████████████
██ white men like you
██████████
████████████████████
██████████
█████████████
████████████
███████████████ your descendants
█████████ your incarnations
█████████████
█████████
We██████████████████████
████████ James,
███████
██████████████
█████████ full of ███████████
███████████
█████████████
██████ Justice █████████
████████████████████████
█████████████
███████████████ father’s
█████████████████
██████████
███████████████████████████
sailing █████
in ████ Resolution
████ Friendship
████ Discovery.
██████████████████████████
████████████████ James,
████████████████████
███████████
███████████
████████
███████████
████████████
████████ god
and █████
██████ king █████████████
████████
██████
████
███████████
█████
████
███
████
█████
██████
Tusiata Avia’s most recent book, The Savage Coloniser Book, won best book of poetry at the 2021 Ockham New Zealand Book Awards. Her new book, Big Fat Brown Bitch, is out on 9 November 2023.