Closing the Gaps: Once were Warriors from Book to Film and Beyond‪.‬

Alan Duff's novel Once Were Warriors, first published in 1991, made an immediate and profound emotional impact, more for its perceived realism than for its literary merit. (1) It is about the Heke family, poor Maori living in an urban ghetto. Jake, the father, is often unemployed and violent. Of the children, Grace kills herself after being raped by a man she thinks is her father. After this tragedy, Beth, the mother, is shaken into taking control of her life and the lives of her remaining family. With help from a respected Maori elder she sets about transforming her community, encouraging them to take pride in themselves, and to aspire to the success and wealth which some Maori have achieved. This scheme is not the only resolution in the novel. Violence as a recurring motif is never entirely discredited: on the contrary, it is a source of racial pride. The regeneration of the ghetto includes 'a resurgence of fierce pride, a come-again of a people who once were warriors' (p. 127). The description of a haka evokes vividly an encrazed and atavistic urge to 'RISE UP! RISE UP AND FIGHT! AND FIGHT!!' (p. 128), showing that the educational activities encouraged by Beth are not the only means of restoring racial self-respect. There is an extra dimension, left out of the film and of subsequent novels by Duff, which transcends the ghetto problem and possible solutions to it, and points to a fundamental human condition. Jake Heke becomes 'just child weeping for another child' (p. 198). He is excluded from the present because neither Beth nor the old admirers of 'Jake the Muss' will tolerate him after the rape of Grace, and he is excluded from belief in a past in which he would have been slave, not warrior. He is apparently beyond hope, reduced to begging and sleeping rough. In extremity, however, he reacts with compassion. He cares for a whimpish street-kid, 'drawing the boy closer to him, sayin nothing' (p. 187). Grace had done the same for her seven-year-old brother when he was frightened by the adults' drunken raging. She cuddled up to him, 'feeling the damp of his tears on his pyjama top, the wet and then familiar stench of his piss' (p. 25), and later, after she has been raped, her only comfort is that her friend Toot holds her hand in the cobwebbed miserable car-home where he shelters while his parents get drunk inside the house. Amongst the enabling conditions in this far from simplistic novel is the vision of civil intimacy among those who are reduced to the thing itself, unaccommodated, poor and bare. It is no solution in itself to poverty, but it is a view of human goodness that makes imperative the need to find one.