Source: Radio New Zealand
Giving Birth to My Father, Tusiata Avia’s latest book of poems is the most challenging book she’s written, she says.
In it she shares her grief over the death of her father, Namu-lau’ulu Mikaio Avia and the difficult situations she faced with her extended family in Samoa.
The book has spent, “most of the last eight years hidden away,” she tells RNZ’s Culture 101.
New Zealand writer and poet Tusiata Avia
The Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi
“I started it very soon after my dad died, nine years ago, and I’ve been sitting on it and adding to it for the last nine years and finding it a really hard thing to put out into public.
“And even though a lot of my previous books, there’s a lot of personal stuff in there, this is the most personal.”
In 2023 Avia won the Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement, was appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit in 2020, and recently named the 2026 International Institute of Modern Letters Writer in Residence.
Her father returned to Samoa to end his days there after living in New Zealand for 50 years, she says.
“It was something that I really never expected. He was in New Zealand for more than 50 years, and one of the very first Samoan immigrants to Christchurch, I think there were seven Samoans here when he arrived, so he really helped build the Samoan community here.
Culture 101
“And I never thought he would go back, but him and his wife decided, in that last 10 years, that they would go back and spend their last years in Samoa”, she says.
She visited many times in his last years, and it helped her reconnect with her culture, but after his death elements of that culture angered her, she says.
“I think one of the most difficult things for me is this kind of critique of Samoan funeral culture. And where I feel, and many people feel, that it’s kind of gone off the rails. And what was originally meant to be something that was supportive to the family who has just lost their loved one, can really become something that is incredibly taxing, and can become in the hands of certain members of certain families, one of them being mine, just become all about money.”
It felt, she says, like a “very angry book”.
“Which is nothing new for me, really. But because it’s that critique of Samoan funeral culture, that’s quite a hard thing to be angry about publicly.
“Just about every Samoan I know jokes about the difficulty of what is expected of us financially, particularly around funerals.”
The first section of the book is called ‘How It Was Supposed to Go’ and the second is called ‘How it Went’. She wrote the beginning last after gaining a deeper understanding of Samoan cultural funeral ceremony.
“The way that I felt I could bring some balance to this book was, write the first section of the book, the way that if we were keeping to the real intention of Samoan funerals, and the gift-giving that goes along with it, the true intention of it, then it would have been a really different thing.
“And I was lucky at the time to be taught actually by someone who really taught me some of the deep meanings behind our ceremonies that come with funerals and other things like weddings, and which I never really understood.”
– Published by EveningReport.nz and AsiaPacificReport.nz, see: MIL OSI in partnership with Radio New Zealand