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Once Were Warriors, 1990
This first novel by the New Zealander Alan Duff roused controversy over its raw, truculent language and its belligerent portrayal of Maori citizens disoriented by a loss of racial pride and the collapse of their culture under the persistent onslaught of the Western ways and values imported by white European colonizers. The underlying theme is of interest to anyone concerned about the preservation of native civilizations disrupted first by conquest and then by the overwhelming intrusion of foreign influences, and Duff's aggressive description of a blighted Maori community strums the same strident chords sounded in similar studies of present-day American Indians, Australian aborigenes, Amazonians, and other luckless invaded peoples (or, once, even the primitive British and Gallic tribesmen dragged by the scruff of their necks into the Roman Empire, if one wants to recall a few earlier instances of drastic social upheaval and meditate upon the long-term consequences, for good or for ill).
Although certain passages in Once Were Warriors tend to masquerade as a sociological exposé, this is a polemical work of fiction and, as such, needs to be taken with a grain of salt. Despite a high degree of readability, due mainly to the material's sensational presentation, the book cannot be called an unqualified success. And since it highlights only one segment of a larger canvas, cautious readers will prefer to acquire from its pages some knowledge about what may be an unfamiliar reality without mistaking Duff's novel for a definitive source-book. The author selects a worst-case scenario and sets his dramatic story in a slum called Pine Block, located on the edge of a small New Zealand town. In this seedy enclave of social misfits the Maoris crowd into shabby, low-rent government housing or make do with abandoned cars; recklessly trash their neighbourhood; allow their unschooled children to run wild in the streets and band into gangs of vandals and glue-sniffers; splurge on beer and race-track bets; scrounge a living from the dole, petty crime, or an unskilled labourer's wage; let off steam at loud, hard-drinking, pay-day parties; and generally fritter their lives away, unmotivated, ambitionless, ignorant even of their own language. But they have heard that they were warriors, once upon a time. So the men are obsessed with posturing as tough and invincible, greatly admire the black American boxers they watch on television, and make a point of suppressing "wimpy" displays of sentiment.
The rather spare plot centers on the woes of the Heke family: Beth, a battered wife who slowly begins to wake up to the going-nowhere plight of Pine Block and tick off the reasons, putting her finger not on white "oppression" but on the defeatist attitudes of her own people; her cock-of-the-walk husband Jake, always ready with a punch in the face, whose whole world is to strut tall in McClutchy's Bar; and their six troubled children. As the book opens, the eldest son, Nig, is about to join the swaggering Brown Fists gang and a younger boy, Boogie, to be interned in a juvenile correction home. The thirteen-year-old Grace is the only member of the family who turns up in court to support Boogie when he is sentenced. A sensitive girl, she nurses dreams of stepping out of Pine Block into the wider world beyond. But Grace is raped, possibly by her own father, and commits suicide. Jake violently rejects suspicion, although haunted in mind by the fear that he might actually have done the deed while drunk--he cannot remember. Thrown out of the house by an outraged Beth, he becomes an outcast and a homeless drifter. And Nig, not wholeheartedly satisfied with his dangerous choices, is swiftly killed in a gangland brawl.
Standing amidst the wreckage of her family, Beth grasps at the rediscovery of old customs as a means of salvation. When she experiences the cathartic relief of a traditional Maori funeral held for Grace in the tribal village where she herself was born, she remains deeply impressed by the charisma of the chief and his apparent ability to function in the modern world, neatly dressed in a pin-stripe suit, while still brandishing a white whalebone handclub with consummate mastery and fostering the memory of the bygone times when the Maori were warriors indeed. With this man's help, Beth becomes a catalyst for change in Pine Block.
A major hurdle in Duff's novel is the relentless, fist-in-the-guts language ("You bedda not be in my shaded gaze, mutha, or I'll fuckin deal to you") larded with obscenity and crude phonetic variants on standard English, which is not confined to dialogue alone--as the author intended--but slops over to usurp the overall narrative tone. The resultant down-and-dirty effect is an inherent facet of Duff's basic concept, designed to express both a hostile, touch-me-not stance and his characters' lack of self-esteem. Speaking almost exclusively from the viewpoint of Maoris, the invisible narrator seeks to worm inside their skins and imitate an intimate, present-tense, stream-of-consciousness style, but even if the rough talk is being presented as the typical indigenous jargon, the cadence and choice of words are virtually identical in every person, of whatever age or sex and in all circumstances, to the detriment of convincing individuality. There is really only a single voice in Once Were Warriors and Duff could more effectively have opted to impersonate one character and write frankly in the first person.
Another drawback is pace. Since almost everybody gropes around either in a funk or an alcoholic fog, most of the action comes across as a homogeneous blur of inarticulate emotion, beer-fumes, and befuddled lack of self-control that, while never degenerating into incoherence, undermines the sense of progress from one event to the next. This effect is deliberate on Duff's part, because it conveys the stuck-in-a-rut degradation of Pine Block life, but when a feeble forward development finally occurs in the last chapters, leading out of this haze of mindless brutality and purposelessness towards hope for a brighter future, the transition strikes the reader as devoid of adequate foundation and what should be a climax becomes an inconclusive let-down--like sobering up with a headache on a dull grey morning.
Once Were Warriors has been made into a highly praised film. This reader has not seen it, but is of the opinion that the potent visual and aural immediacy of cinema would most likely make it a fit vehicle for Duff's expressive talents, more appropriate perhaps than this interesting but flawed novel.
© Wordreign, January 2000
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