Journal of New Zealand Literature Closing the Gaps: "Once Were Warriors" from Book to Film and Beyond Author(s): Ruth Brown Source: Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL, No. 17 (1999), pp. 141-155 Published by: Journal of New Zealand Literature and hosted by the University of Waikato Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/20112315 Accessed: 11/01/2010 11:32 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=jnzl. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Journal of New Zealand Literature and University of Waikato are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of New Zealand Literature: JNZL. http://www.jstor.org CLOSINGTHE GAPS: ONCEWERE WARRIORS FROM BOOK TO FILM AND BEYOND Ruth Brown Alan Duff's novel Once Were Warriors, first published in 1991, made an more immediate and profound emotional impact, for its perceived realism than for its literary merit.1 It is about the Heke family, poor an Maori living in urban ghetto. Jake, the father, is often unemployed a and violent. Of the children, Grace kills herself after being raped by 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 a family. With help from respected Maori elder she sets about trans to forming her community, encouraging them take pride in them to to success some selves, and aspire the and wealth which Maori have is not in achieved. This scheme the only resolution the novel. Vio lence as a motif is never on recurring entirely discredited: the contrary, it is a source of racial The of a pride. regeneration the ghetto includes of fierce a of a once were resurgence pride, come-again people who a warriors' (p. 127). The description of haka evokes vividly an encrazed and atavistic urge to 'RISE UP! RISE UP AND FIGHT! AND FIGHFI? (p. 128), showing that the educational activities encour Beth are not the means of racial aged by only restoring self-respect. an extra out There is dimension, left of the film and of subsequent novels by Duff, which transcends the ghetto problem and possible to to a solutions it, and points 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 inwhich he would have been slave, not is to warrior. He apparently beyond hope, reduced begging and sleep In he reacts with He cares ing rough. extremity, however, compassion. a for whimpish street-kid, 'drawing the boy closer to him, sayin noth same ing' (p. 187). Grace had done the for her seven-year-old brother was when he frightened by the adults' drunken raging. She cuddled to on up him, 'feeling the damp of his tears his pyjama top, the wet 141 142 Journal ofNew Zealand Literature 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 par enrs get drunk inside the house. Amongst the enabling conditions in this far from simplistic novel is the vision of civil intimacy among are to those who reduced the thing itself, unaccommodated, poor and bare. It is no solution in itself to poverty, but it is a view of human to one. goodness that makes imperative the need find In the film version of Once Were Warriors (directed by Lee Tamahori, 1994) the script, written by Riwia Brown, dramatises the Heke family predicament, straying from the original mainly in the way that it is resolved. Instead of trying to join the Pakeha system, Beth leaves the town and goes 'home' with her remaining three children (and Toot) to her ancestral where remains of a sense of Maori territory enough strong and to a much neater community spirituality suggest happy ending, than the unresolved possibilities put forward in the book. Whereas an the book ends with evocation of basic human worth (even Jake's), in the film he is left unredeemed and apparently irredeemable. Out side the of Maori he his mates seem not to pale tradition, and matter, as a if lifetime of boozing and fighting is all they're good for. Social realism is an element of both book and film, but the shift to a from book film marks movement away from realism, and away a a from connection with New Zealand life, to being celebration of New Zealand art. For one it was an success in thing overwhelming box-office terms, as the biggest box-office film in New Zealand his tory, surpassing Steven Spielberg's Jurassic Park (1993). In their book on New Zealand film, Ian Conrich and Sarah Davy comment that the film refocused international attention on the small but very successful and competitive film industry of New Zealand.2 It is the inter-relationship between New Zealand national life and national arr which Iwant to explore in this essay. Iwrite it from the UK from an at a time when and, therefore, off-shore perspective, and means to or increasing globalization that the degree which either life ever art can be quarantined from outside influences is less than it has are a been. The conflicting agendas of life and art shown in review in the British Independent of the film Once Were Warriors? The reviewer nores that it was the worst for the ever 'perhaps advertisement country on to that it is a of 'to made', going say triumph art, demonstrating Closing the Gaps 143 miracles this is of. the world what underpopulated country capable notes how life art seem to be at Rena Owen, who plays Beth, also and odds. She is aware that the film might be considered damaging be cause audiences would believe allMaori are like that, but with a shift in similar to the she dismisses fears of a bad na register reviewer's, tional image as 'small minded and invalid', and equates 'reality' with Maori participation in artistic triumph. Anything that puts the body on of Maori writers, actors and directors the international map has to be for us. It our them good empowers people by giving self-respect'.4 a ? These quotations from people with stake in the film industry ? a an actor successful national art academic writers, reviewer, place a above negative portrayal of national life. Diplomats, however, have two different priorities, and successive High Commissioners for New Zealand to the United Kingdom (John Collinge in 1996 and Paul East in 1999) introduced conferences I attended in London about New Zealand culture with the hope that ex-patriate New Zealanders to correct the inaccurate of Maori will be able negative and image portrayed in Once Were Warriors. To the extent that New Zealand as a small nation has always been concerned to attract investment sometimes (and immigration) by pre a favourable of itself there is new about senting image overseas, nothing a globalization. Diplomats with stake in 'selling' their country will naturally be concerned about any negative images, and the New Zea sense at land of itself, propagated home and abroad, has always stressed its egalitarianism, its opportunities for the 'fair-go' for all its citizens. This is not to say that poverty has never existed, but that its existence or has tended to be denied played down. When John A. Lee wrote in a Children of the Poor (1934) about New Zealand with class divisive ness one reviewer was 'There is no and widespread poverty, appalled: hint to the overseas reader that the conditions described were out of as the ordinary'.3 Here, with the High Commissioners' worries, the concern so some is not much that there is poverty, but that people a overseas might get the impression that there is lot of it. It is not that New want to conceal simply Zealand publicists pov or that the national of is a scam. as erty, self-image egalitarianism If, we to are have been lead accept, all nations imagined communities, then the way a community imagines itself to be affects the way it is, and the sort of poverty portrayed in Once Were Warriors carries with it 144 Journal ofNew Zealand Literature a conviction that such deprivation is indefensible and that there has to a be way out. Early on in the film version, Grace asks her friend Toot, 'Do you think we'll ever get out of here?'.