Born to a Samoan father and a Pākehā mother, Tusiata was named after her great-aunt, and the name means artist in Samoan.
“Growing up in the 70s and 80s, it was not a name that I wanted to use, because for a teenager and a kid as I was then, to be a brown person was not cool at all.
“So I used my other name, Donna.”
Described now as the ‘most blatantly racist attack on Pacific peoples by the New Zealand government in New Zealand’s history,’ the infamous ‘dawn raids’ overlapped with Tusiata’s childhood which, amongst other things, taught her what felt like a very clear message at the time—there was something fundamentally wrong with being brown.
“It wasn’t until my early 20s that I was able to disabuse myself of that notion.”
Expressing herself creatively was, from a young age, a way for Tusiata to wrestle with the awareness that she didn’t like where she lived.
“I think I just kind of felt through my skin that Christchurch was a violent place to be. It was the Muldoon era, dawn raids era, Springbok tour era—all so deeply racist. Despite this yearning, and an awareness that she could write, Tusiata shut down the urge to write for many years.
“At 15, I thought, ‘girls like me don’t get to be writers. And for probably the next 15 years, I hardly wrote at all.”
It took a visit home while living abroad in ’99 when, inspired by her playwright cousin Victor Rodgers she realised that maybe there was a place for her too.
“Being away from New Zealand for so long meant I missed the Pacific and Māori arts movement of the ‘90s.
“I didn’t even know that had happened. I got here and was just amazed.
“Suddenly I was seeing that there were people like me. And if they could do it, maybe I could too.”
Deciding to fully commit to her writing aspirations, Tusiata returned to New Zealand and enrolled in a writing course at Whitireia, followed by the Master in Creative Arts writing programme at Te Herenga Waka—Victoria University of Wellington in 2002.
“I decided that I had to have a plan. I couldn’t just come back and sit in my bedroom and write.
“I needed those structured and supportive spaces in which to really become a writer.
And getting into IIML was massive. To get in was a really big deal.”
Accolades and recognition soon followed, first with a collection of poetry titled Wild Dogs Under My Skirt which, originally published in 2004, has grown into a multi award-winning ensemble theatre production, including in 2020 the Outstanding Production of the Year at Off-Broadway theatre, Soho Playhouse.
Her time at Te Herenga Waka a formative experience, Tusiata believes it was in doing her master’s that Wild Dogs Under My Skirt truly took shape.
“The course really let me go into poetry in a way that allowed me to feel that writing was my place. To be in the company of other great writers, and to have the support of academics like Bill Manhire. I look back on it with fondness.”
Since then, she’s published four more collections of poetry, held a number of writers’ fellowships and awards, been appointed a Member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for services to poetry and the arts, and in 2021, won the prestigious Ockham Award for Best Book of Poetry, making history as the first ever Pasifika women to win this award.
None of these successes have come without their challenges though, says Tusiata.
In contrast to the Ockham Awards’ judges describing The Savage Coloniser Show as “an enthralling performance that expresses the outrage shared by many, while maintaining faith that love helps the healing process,” an adapted stage-play performed earlier this year received heavily publicised condemnation and accusations of reverse-racism.
The show, based on the book of the same name, imagines a scenario where a group of brown girls plan to take violent revenge on Captain Cook or white men like him “who might be thieves or rapists or kidnappers or murderers.”
Like all of Tusiata’s work, it is unrelenting, brutally honest, holds big ideas, and pushes hard against the status quo and what is comfortable.
But those who took offence thought the show disrespected taxpayers who fund public art like Tusiata’s, and thought the anti-racist poem was, in itself, racist.
Labelled the ‘Avia Controversy’ by media, Tusiata never wavered from her position, suggesting her critics sit down and read her book in full as opposed to weaponising individual lines into two-minute sound-bites.
“A hate-fuelled racist they called me.
So I wrote another book, the Big Fat Brown Bitch and the first section is basically a response to all of that craziness.”
Now living in Aranui with her mother, 89, and raising a teenage daughter of 16, Tusiata is heartened by witnessing more young Pasifika women tell their stories.
“I think when I get to the end of my life, if I can say yes I did what I came to this planet to do, and I helped other women to do that too, then my life would have been worth it.”
On being selected as a distinguished alumni this year, Tusiata is both honoured and surprised.
"Hated by some, in trouble with others, completely ignored by some people and then having these kinds of recognitions—there is a whole lot of conflicting things going on at the same time, but having said that, I do really appreciate this award."