It claims that the first part of the novel, culminating with Grace’s suicide, invokes Oceanic memory by revisiting several key stages in Pakeha-Maori relationships. Given these controversies, this essay will analyse what postcolonial ‘third’ spaces of Maoritanga (Maoriness) the written and filmed version of Once Were Warriors negotiate within New Zealand neocoloniality from a Bakhtinian perspective of identity formation.Īn exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective. Thus, Laurence Simmons (1998: 334) points out that Tamahori’s cinematic transfer of Duff’s semi-autobiography highlights the “complexity and ambivalence of the relationship between the political and the commercial”. Yet,Duff wrote an original screenplay that Tamahori rejected because he considered Duff too personally involved “to make the changes to keep people in their seats”. He states it was the first time someone had made an authorized attempt to write about the harsh living conditions of the disenfranchised Maori urban underclass.

Part-Maori director Lee Tamahori, who turned this novel into the widely-acclaimed homonymous film, has a more balanced view of the Duff case. On account of exaltation of western individualisme and exposure of the rigidities of the tribal caste system and male-dominated gender division in traditional Maori society, Duff has often been identified as collaborating with an assimilative European mainstream agenda. Generally, the recasting of the politics of guilt and blame the novel projects has not readily met with acceptance from progressive readership. Dealing with contemporary Maori alienation in New Zealand’s urban areas from a harsh self-critical perspective that other renowned indigenous authors had never employed, it propounds a shifting of the responsibility and solution for the indigenous predicament from white mainstream society to the Maori themselves.

Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) became an instant bestseller in his home country, New Zealand, and immediately established his reputation as a powerful writer.

Once were warriors book