Giving Birth to My Father

My father has been chipping himself down since he arrived here, he is half man and half vessel, readying for the journey to Hawaiki.

Giving Birth to My Father is about learning to live with a loss that seems simply too heavy to bear.

First, Tusiata Avia tells the imagined story – the one of how things should go – followed by the story of what really happens. As her father travels through his last days and into the arms of his tupu'aga, transformed, the family gathers around him with their love and raw need, and their suffering turns to storm clouds.

For Avia, his death is a beginning. Parent and child have switched places as the river carries them downstream, and she sees her father with new eyes. But this is also a time of not knowing to whom she belongs and where she will be welcome now.

This is an extraordinarily rich poetic work about grief and renewal that will rearrange its readers. Giving Birth to My Father takes in a world of family and memory, including a sequence of poems about a much-loved brother as he faces a life-threatening injury. It is a book about ways of holding one another even after we are gone.