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born 1966 New Zealand
Donna Tusiata Avia MNZM (born 1966) is a New Zealand poet and children's author. She has been recognised for her work through receiving a 2020 Queen's Birthday Honour and in 2021 her collection The Savage Coloniser won the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards.
Random Tusiata Avia quote
15 quotes
In the space of a few generations, my poem has traumatised the people who originally owned this land and their language almost disappears.
There is truly nothing more to think about.
My poem kidnaps children, puts them in state welfare institutions, abuses them and stops them speaking their own language.
The neighbours hear me writing a poem about colonisation and they yell: Stop that “race-baiting”, our kids are trying to sleep.
Now, I’m howling and ripping off my clothes and writing a poem which is “inciting violence” right through the walls of my house.
Sorry guys, the thing is, when I write a poem I become a werewolf.
Oh no! Here I go again, with my pen and my exercise book, inciting “hate speech” and “dehumanising” people.
My poem is no accident. My poem does all these things on purpose. My poem has a plan to take over everyone and everything.
When I am under a full moon, I start writing a poem about colonisation, which is exactly the same as “inciting murder”. Writing a poem is the same as a “manifesto” justifying terrorism and massacre.
My poem steals my neighbour’s land, and everybody’s land. My poem steals 94 percent of all the land in New Zealand. It steals millions upon millions of acres of land.
That’s honestly how simple it is.
My views become exactly the same as “those expressed in Germany”. What I mean is, I’m the whole of Nazism and the entire Second World War.
When I write a poem it turns into a “hate crime” right then and there. It springs up off the page, and marches out into the street like an army of ten thousand colonial soldiers armed with guns.
No colonisation. No genocide. No intergenerational trauma. No two centuries of white privilege.
When I write a poem “sexual and racial violence” burst out of me like wolf-fur through the rents in my smooth brown skin. I start howling at the moon and “inciting racial violence” all over the place.
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