New Zealand’s governing ACT Party has criticised a decision by Creative NZ to award a poet a NZ$60,000 literary prize for a poem that imagines a violent attack on early explorer Captain James Cook.
The Christchurch-based Tusiata Avia published the poem in 2020 to mark the 250th anniversary of Cook’s arrival in New Zealand.
Creative NZ recently announced Ms. Avia to be the winner of the poetry section of the 2023 Prime Minister’s Awards for Literary Achievement.
The poem imagines a group of brown-skinned women taking revenge on the seafarer, or white men like him, “who might be thieves or rapists or kidnappers or murderers.”
You’ve got another woman in a headlock
And I’ve got my father’s pig-hunting knife in my fist
And we’re coming to get you ... watch your ribs, James …
Not A New Work
It was part of her Auckland Arts Festival show, “The Savage Coloniser,” which was also funded by the taxpayer and based on her poetry book of the same name published in 2020.
The work went virtually unnoticed until a media outlet reported the show, and featured a video of Ms. Avia reading her poem.
It then went on to win what is deemed to be New Zealand poetry’s highest honour, the Mary and Peter Biggs Award for Poetry, at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards in 2021.
Once the video appeared in 2023, there was an outcry about its content from ACT Leader David Seymour and NZ First’s Winston Peters, now part of a tri-party coalition government with the National Party.
The ACT urged the government to cancel the $107,280 funding given to the arts festival show, while the NZ Free Speech Union also called the poem racist.
“Tusiata Avia’s so-called poems are hateful diatribes, and while ACT recognises there may be a therapeutic value in allowing her to publish her nastiest thoughts, we don’t think taxpayers should be made complicit in sowing racial division,” said ACT Arts, Culture, and Heritage spokesman Todd Stephenson, in a statement.
Death Threats
Ms. Avia wrote in North and South magazine that she had received death threats before the opening of her show, following the publication of the video.“I practise my art and my free speech in my writing. Poetry has always been my strongest, most eloquent voice, and over the 20 years I’ve been doing this, I’ve discovered it has also spoken for many people like me: Pasifika people, people of colour, people living with the long-term effects of colonisation, people who feel this deep in their puku [stomach]. And in their empty kitchen cupboard,” she wrote.
She also wrote a poem in response to the hate mail she had received, which in part read, “When I write a poem about colonisation 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.”
Ms. Avia is the fourth person and first woman of Pasifika heritage to receive a Prime Minister’s Award for Literary Achievement.
