Siobhan Harvey
Talia by Isla Huia (Dead Bird Books, 2023), 87pp, $30; Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press, 2023), 112pp, $30; Transposium by Dani Yourukova (Auckland University Press, 2023), 97pp, $30
‘I’m here now, speaking to all creatives,’ author Tusiata Avia has written, ‘but in particular, to my sister practitioners—to exhort you to trust what you know … We need each other … Decorate the sacred space between us; beautify the sacred space we share.’
Sister; sista; sis; best friend: however it is defined, women frequently experience their bonds with amicable others as akin to the filial. So that to be part of a sisterhood is to be deeply connected to women who aren’t necessarily siblings. Instead, to be or have a sister and/or to belong to a sisterhood is about a connection to those who share experience, aspiration, perception, emotion, creativity and anything else that is a bond beyond blood. In three recent collections by New Zealand sistas, Talia by Isla Huia, Big Fat Brown Bitch by Avia, and Dani Yourukova’s Transposium, sisterhood, connection to female friends and the inspiration and creativity found in sistership are evident and richly explored.
In today’s world, where culture can be freely downloaded from the internet, arts funding is forever squeezed, and literature is often at the back of the queue for newsmakers, it isn’t easy being an independent publisher. So, I salute publishers Dominic Hoey and Sam Walsh and their Dead Bird Books imprint for their diverse, cutting-edge, and always excellent catalogue. The elegiac Talia by Isla Huia (Te Āri Haunui a-Pāpārangi, Uenuku) continues their impressive record of high-quality publications. It’s a book about loss, namely, the passing of the poet’s friend, Talia.
the sun will still rise
heating the earth
heating the skies
heating everything
until it calms
and stops
and waits
oh friend
there will be yet another world
the sun will set on you
and rise to someone else.
But, like other recent elegiac collections such as Rushi Vyas’ Ockham NZ Book Awards long-listed When I Reach for Your Pulse (Otago University Press, 2023), Talia is about so much more. It’s also about, for instance, the bonds additional to those closest to us, such as our relationship to whenua:
in this city, it costs more to live
by the airport than by the sea
so we get stoned in the car at the
end of the runway waiting for the
emirates A380, laughing as the richest
boys in town chant
my dad is your dad’s boss
when they score a try.
what I’m saying is, try harder …
The city in question, navigated lyrically as if geographically by Huia, is Ōtautahi. And as this opening excerpt illustrates, the author’s role as our guide through the environment permits her to examine, as if through a microscope, the subtextual elements that frequently accompany inner-city life, such as social and economic status and cultural and sporting affiliations. In early poems, for example, ‘tiaora’ and ‘motuoapa’, Huia leads us into the hinterland of cultural dispossession and financial marginalisation:
our house is white, or at least
i have fetishized it to be
the kids have the run of the basement
but the mamas and papas
are on the linoleum up there,
a balcony for the maintenance
of one eye
on the tamarikis.
In this poet’s illustration of hardship and divestment, belonging remains sovereign, given perpetual life force by penwomanship that also heralds and acknowledges its ties to authors who have influenced it, such as storytelling whānau, the fika collective, Keri Hulme in the poem, ‘where are your bones?’, and audre lorde in the poem ‘kotahitanga’—which concludes with the plaintive lines:
and the buildings had to learnt how
to sing the song of my dancing legs
the gospel of my sticky spine.
speak riches and bless me
with what is earth
you saved my life.
[Here, the line that appears (tense wise) incorrect: ‘and the buildings had to learnt how’ is correct as published in the book.]
Recently, Tusiata Avia has been the subject of criticism and censure by prominent politicians who, while campaigning stridently for free speech in all quarters, strangely determine that her right to voice her opinion is something they find so detestable that it needs to be shut down. Say no more!
Given this, I’m naturally drawn to anything Avia produces. And I should perhaps also explain that in the past—in the case of the haunting, emotive Fale Aitu | Spirit House (2016)—I was honoured to be asked by the author to offer manuscript development feedback. So, as a reviewer, my partiality is questionable, no doubt. However, in an era when powerful men believe they can rampantly attack authors, I believe this is no time for impartiality. So, as Avia’s sister and ally, I offer the following assessment of her latest book. Undoubtedly, like Huia’s Talia, Big Fat Brown Bitch is a powerful book. Unapologetic from the off, it is prefaced by a page devoted to the nuance and restraints relative to the political intrigues that have dragged Avia’s work into their orbit. What follows are the introductory verses, the erasure poem, ‘Free speech poem’ and ‘New Zealand Media Council Complaints Case 3392’, which all set a challenge to their audience and for the remainder of the collection:
When I write a poem about colonisation, 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 …
So, to challenge, in this book, is to be challenging; that is, defiant, questing, daring and disobedient. As a woman, I know only too acutely that frequently women aren’t permitted the right to own words such as these. That, in effect, society regards such words as unwomanly. Repossessing such language, Avia empowers the title’s big, fat, brown bitch and, thus, all women. This is most prevalent in the titular numbered poems, like ‘Big Fat Brown Bitch 1: She is on the cross’, in which, for instance:
The Big Fat Brown Bitch
Isn’t nailed, she is strapped
It could be kink
Or kindness
Either way she is safe
Safe as a loving father
Sexy as a threesome
Enduring as heaven, earth and all creation …
But even so, the intricacies of examining sistership and womanhood are far from comfortable. Issues of sexuality, sexualisation, colonisation and social constraint parallel and compete with issues of strength, emancipation, multiculturalism and independence, as Avia tells us:
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 and your 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 …
With poems such as these and others like ‘Dawn Raids Apology 2022’ and ‘Hate-fuelled racist’, this book will be disparaged by some as too political, as if that’s a bad thing. Of course it’s political; lots of books are. And when the reader engages with poems like ‘Diary of a death threat’ and consequently contemplates the personal impact of what the author’s unwittingly been through, how can Big Fat Brown Bitch be anything but political; and so personal it brings one to tears:
I am not afraid.
But eventually I leave.
I lie down. I weep into my own ears.
I am not afraid.
I am just
really
really
really
fucking tired.
Wellington author Dani Yourukova’s first collection, Transposium, reprises classic Greek drama through a queer and youthful lens. The book opens with a section that philosophically examines and deconstructs gender, personality and traditional social constructs. Consequently, poems like ‘You are … PHAEDRUS’ circumvent the existent text, Plato’s only dialogue, into a homoerotic revivification of ancient Greek sexual conventions:
Gods are more amazed
and impressed
by the love that a Bottom has for a Top.
Tops are all possessed by Eros,
Bottoms have to act alone.
That is why they honoured Achilles more
by letting him go.
Poems that philosophically dismantle and rewrite other classical literary cornerstones, such as works by the writers Aristophanes and Socrates follow.
Yourukova’s poetically metaphysical investigation of gender, eros and individuality hits its stride in later, richly creative poems such as ‘Gender, no. Woman, hot: A Dialectic Executed to Reveal the Nonbinary Lesbian’, ‘Gender of the Day’, ‘Ekphrasis (I am transforming into a sexy anthropomorphic mouse and no one can stop me)’ and ‘Love poem asking you to come to bed with me (as a friend though haha)’. In the latter, the scrutiny upon contemporary post-ironic approaches to love, lovemaking and identity is perfectly on point:
because I’m half in love with you
(just kidding)
I want to kiss the space above your collarbone
but like, platonically, I guess
I want to talk about our hypothetical future
the chickens that will scratch in our hypothetical garden …
Reading Transposium, I’m reminded, as the parent of a queer child, that the hypothetical is never just that: it always has real-world application. Cleverly, Yourukova voices that awareness of things as they are and does so from a much-needed young and informed perspective. The sistership here is queer, unapologetic, questing and proud, and optimistically inherits a dire world not of their making. For, as the author writes in the final offering, ‘Love poem for a future’:
In this future we
control our own narratives, and in the future I
am smug and full, like a parental fridge and
together, we will cross the threshold
and pledge a lifelong commitment to
the inherent lesbian eroticism of choosing furniture together
and Sunday mornings
and I, against all odds, am radiant.
At the end of every term, I tell my classes of amazing young students that, in them, the future of our planet is safe. On the strength of Yourukova’s collection, so too is the future of our literature.
SIOBHAN HARVEY is the author of eight books, including her most recent poetry collection, Ghosts (Otago University Press, 2021). Her work has appeared in A Kind of Shelter: Whakaruru-taha: An anthology of new writing for a changed world (Massey University Press, 2023), Out Here: An anthology of LGBTQIA+ writers from Aotearoa (Auckland University Press, 2021) and Best New Zealand Poems 2022. She teaches creative writing in Tāmaki Makaurau.
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