Tusiata Avia's Big Fat Brown Bitch: 'I was bloody rarked up' - a podcast by RNZ

Earlier this year, Samoan-NZ writer Tusiata Avia became the target of harassment and death threats after her poem 250th anniversary of James Cook's arrival in New Zealand was labelled 'racist' by the ACT party. "I'm not hard to find and I live with my 16-year-old daughter and my 90-year-old mother, you know, so yeah it was scary," she tells Susie Ferguson. Avia's new poetry collection Big Fat Brown Bitch was partly written in response to that shocking backlash, which included the "deeply cynical and heartless and cruel” comparison of her work to the 2019 Christchurch mosque attacks. "I was bloody rarked up over what had happened and frustrated because I didn't get a right of reply, so all I had was poetry.

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