Extract: Ode: Don’t punish the wealthy
Author:
Tusiata Avia
Publisher:
Te Herenga Waka University Press
ISBN:
9781991001399
Date published:
01 November 2023
Pages:
256
Format:
Hardback
RRP:
$49.99
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Tusiata Avia, author of Ockham-award-winning The Savage Coloniser Book, returns with a brilliant and eviscerating work, Big Fat Brown Bitch. These are poems of defiance, confrontation, consolation, satire, sorrow and fury.
Ode: Don’t punish the wealthy
Oh, Nicola, I really don’t have time for this today, I’m wiping the damp from the walls for God’s sake, I’m feeding my babies instant noodles for God’s sake, and you’re telling us: Don’t punish the wealthy, so, I just have to sit down for a minute and write a poem.
Because what else am I gonna do? When you and Chris and David say shit that makes us angry and powerless and stupefied, what else am I gonna do?
Compare you to Captain Cook? Call you bitch? Or David a bitch or Chris a bitch or Winston? What else am I gonna do?
Come for me, babe, what else have I got to lose?
Don’t punish the wealthy.
Eat the poor.
We are big and fat these days, Nicola. The poor aren’t skinny like you guys, we are fat from all the two-minute noodles (you’d be surprised at the fat content in those suckers) and the $1 loaves of bread here in South Auckland and Porirua and Aranui. Can’t get Vogel’s in our dairy, babe, and who’s got money for that anyway, or petrol to get to the supermarket?
Don’t punish the wealthy – whoever they are. I haven’t actually met any of them. They don’t come to our dairies or our garages or know our brown brothers who live in them, who y’all talk about like you’ve even met us. You know the reference I’m making here, ay, babe?
Eat the poor instead, Nicky, we are fat and juicy and our kids are full of phlegm, it’s all the carbs and the cold. Yeah, even here in subtropical South Auckland, Nic, the walls are weeping and the bedrooms are cold.
Kids and their coughing are the ones you should punish, they’re running this economy into the ground with their free doctors’ visits, but don’t worry: eat us. You know we have a cannibal past and you are vying for queen, and royalty always gets the choicest cuts – the back of the neck is the best bit – so let’s get the BBQ going, the hāngi going, the umu going.
Lie us down and wrap us in the New Zealand flag, lie our mucus- filled babies down and wrap them in blue, which is also the Crips’ colour.
You guys have lots in common – the Crips and the National Party – both of you train the hard way. The Crips train from babyhood, on the streets, like boot camps. National trains our babies in their boot camps. The profits, the rackets, the gang pride, the blue verses the red.
Don’t punish the wealthy.
Eat the poor.
We will keep you going all day. The choice backs of our necks will power you through these hard times, this recession coming, the hard fight at the ballot box coming. We will keep you so warm you’ll have to open your windows at night and breathe in the fragrant air of Epsom and Khandallah and Merivale.
Take a big bite of us, babe.
Don’t punish the wealthy.
Eat the poor.
Extract from Big Fat Brown Bitch by Tusiata Avia (Te Herenga Waka University Press).
