ABSTRACT
At first glance, the writing of Alan Duff, whose outspoken views on contemporary Maori affairs have repeatedly courted controversy, seems far removed from that of the other Maori writers discussed in this book. Through a psychoanalytic reading of Duff’s début novel Once Were Warriors (1990), however, this chapter will demonstrate that although Duff has argued elsewhere that Maori must stop ‘blaming’ their socio-economic problems on the Pakeha colonizing culture, the novel acknowledges that race-related social divisions precipitate and exacerbate problems of identification for those from minority cultures. This chapter analyses the way in which domestic dysfunction, violence and substance abuse are explored in the novel as symptoms of a wider cultural malaise within Maori society, demonstrating that as is the case with the other Maori texts discussed in this book, Duff’s novel is also informed by an underlying ‘wounding’ and ‘healing’ paradigm.
