This paper suggests that a productive and creative memory of the Maori minority as a social agent may be seen at work throughout Once Were Warriors. Like the novel’s multiple shifting narrators, and like Duff himself, she constructs ‘interstitial intimacy’ where readers get glimpses of an ‘insider’s outsidedness’, to use Homi Bhabha’s phraseology. In addition, by encroaching upon the Pakeha owner’s land, she can be said to create a terrain of difference where the cultural and political values of Aotearoa/New Zealand might be negotiated anew.
Duff grew up in Rotorua and although he didnt live in Fordlands, his relatives did. He tried writing a thriller as his first novel, but it was rejected. Theyre sobering statistics for the suburb that inspired Alan Duffs Once Were Warriors book.
The novel’s pivotal passage is also seen as a piece of Māori cosmogony revisited: Grace may be said to reenact the founding myth of Hine-Tītama/Hine-nui-te-pō’s flight from her incestuous father into the night. Alan Duff (born October 26, 1950, Rotorua, New Zealand) is a New Zealand novelist and newspaper columnist, most well known as the author of Once Were Warriors. Against the author’s intention and ideology, a close examination of the narrative’s turning point presents Grace’s suicide as an occasion to revisit the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand from times prior to contact with Europeans – including times of so-called Māori ‘slavery’ – down to the 19th-century British settlement. Where did the novelist Alan Duff get the idea of naming his novel Once Were Warriors, when a clear and actually objective analysis of our society would have shown that the book could more.
It claims that the novel invokes Oceanic memory more than its author is willing to admit. An exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective.
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