“Two Souls, Two Thoughts, Two Unreconciled Strivings…” [W.E.B. Du Bois] “How could I fight the damage unknown When childhood’s murderer’s seed was sown?” [Alan Duff, aged 20. [1] ] I The Primacy of Dissent I think it’s arrogance to say “How dare you stand up and say this!” Well I’m saying, “I’ve just stood up and said it, what are you going to do about it?” My critics are so used to everybody falling into line. They’re used to being able to bully people. And I’m saying “I’m a warrior, too!” I got brought up as a warrior and I don’t remember a warrior ever allowing himself to be bullied. ALAN DUFF [2] Alan Duff’s Szabad (Auckland: Vintage, 2001), Hungarian for ‘Free’, in many ways encapsulates the enduring preoccupation of this gifted author since he first burst onto the New Zealand literary scene like a flaming (indeed scorching) meteor in 1990 with Once Were Warriors, with its excoriating visceral analysis of the ‘landscapes of power’ (the prevailing pattern of social ecology) in contemporary Aotearoa, such that no less august a critic than Lawrence Jones asserted (in my opinion erroneously) that “Duff’s novels of contemporary Maori life…have no mythic elements and no hopes for a communal future” as they emphasize “individual responsibility rather than social and historical causation.” [3] Duff insisted to Vilsoni Hereniko that in Warriors he “exalted Maori culture” (which is haltingly true) but “knew the book would upset some of the politically correct brigade because they had different reasons for our high crime rate, and everything else. Having been there and done that myself, I knew they were just telling absolute lies or else they were just spouting theories that were completely irrelevant to the real situation.” [4] It was surely almost to escape reductive stereotyping as a ‘Maori’ novelist , to show New Zealanders the scale of other people’s collective sufferings (i.e. to keep Maori grievances in perspective) and to demonstrate the complex linkage and interplay between individual and collective fortune that Duff set out to write a finely nuanced novel set in Sovietized Hungary between 1952 and the post-Stalinist uprising of 1956. Duff’s ‘Hungarian novel’ had been on his mind at least since 1993 and it shares the focus of Duff’s earlier texts with complex assays into a warrior manhood (focused on a quite unsettling admixture of sexual initiation, bravado, prosecution violence and warriorhood for both genders but typically the sympathetic probing, not unnaturally, goes deeper into male psyches). Hone Kouka has lamented what he views as Duff’s imaging as a romanticization of the warrior into the colonizers’ “beautiful, savage alien”[5], which is a unique way of re-stating the ‘Noble Savage’ stereotype. However, Duff’s young Hungarian nationalist and freedom fighter, Attila Szabo, continues this positive exploration—shorn of being narrowly embedded in New Zealand ethnic categories. This novel , then, assists Duff’s ambition to be viewed as a global author and is also a continuation of his engagement with stifling totalistic (=traditional Maori) and totalitarian systems, freedom being Duff’s cri de coeur as he reframes his most vital concerns in a European context. If Warriors was The Indigene speaking, Szabad expresses Duff’s European Self. (And to show the inter-linkage of this psychic duality, in 1994 Duff flew to Budapest to promote the Communicado film of Once Were Warriors and has visited Hungary to research the later novel three times.) In my perspective, Szabad may operate as a key to unlock Duff’s ongoing thematic concerns as what some would dub a ‘cowboy capitalist’, for Duff also taps into a frankly commercial and popular culture stream, recalling art critic Lawrence Alloway’s comment about Pop Art: “We felt none of the dislike of commercial culture that was standard among most intellectuals, but accepted it as fact, discussed it in detail, and consumed it enthusiastically.” [6] Allied to his desire to create commercially successful ‘page-turner’ fictions and films, Duff has insisted that “A healthy culture should subject itself to questions” and that much in Maoridom has struck him as pertaining to “one of those rigid cultures that did not allow questions.”[7] This may be the legacy of a closed Stone Age (or Pounamu Age) culture being suddenly pushed into a Bronze/Iron-Age world, for Te Maire Tau asserts that Maori, like most tribal people, lack a theory of historical change: that they have a past but are ahistorical (the past, and sometimes the ancestors, always stand before them) and in traditional terms exist in a free-floating world cut adrift from external influences (a closed-knowledge system underpinned by a paradigm of genealogy and a static, cyclical world-view), one resistant to the spirit of critical rationalism (the willingness to subject one’s ideas to criticism and modification) and to a secularized historicism which is future as well as past-oriented. Dr Tau insists that the traditional knowledge system (matauranga Maori) is best seen as of limited heuristic value—as “a belief system rather than one of true and certain knowledge”, and that “the real issue is one of dismantling the restrictive web of beliefs and tradition (that strangles tribal groups) for progressive open ideals, while maintaining kinship.” [8] Tau cites Karl Popper’s analysis of the transformation of early Greek tribal society to the more open one of humanitarianism (which Popper analogized to Polynesian, specifically Maori, groups) and espouses the need for open-minded attitudes among Maori “which value unorthodox thinking and dissent.”[9] Alan Duff has, without doubt, offered both and aplenty. II Transgressive Textuality Duff, Keri Hulme, Witi Ihimaera and Albert Wendt are all vital to this discursive exploration and contestation as they, variously, resist (as has Ihimaera, in his ‘gay’ thematizations) the kind of essentialization which Kouka seems to wish to protect (Noble Nativist stereotyping)—indeed, their recent work manifests a keen desire to create counter-essentialisms about ‘Pacific’ identities. Witness Wendt’s entry into futuristic dystopian narrative (Black Rainbow [1992]), Hulme’s desire to engage in sci fi /fantasy elements and virtual reality modes (a la Philip Dick and Brian Aldiss) in the-as-yet unpublished Bait and On Shadow Side, Duff’s Szabad (a Eurocentric fiction which draws sustenance from his father’s Second World War memories in Central Europe and Alan’s own gritty experiences of resisting Stalinized left Political Correctness in post-modern New Zealand), Ihimaera’s Bulibasha:King of the Gypsies (1994), Nights in the Gardens of Spain (1995) and The Uncle’s Story (2000) and Sia Figiel’s hard-hitting, transgressive texts. These counter-movements (marked by a fusion in most cases between standard NZ social(ist?)-realist narrativity and more expansive, expressive tropes) argue for a widening of self-definition and an assertion of creative agency which seems to resist narrow pigeon-holing, and is very much akin to the exciting expressionistic outpourings of visual/plastic artists such as Emily Karaka, Robyn Kahukiwa, Andy Leleisi’uao, Michel and Sheyne Tuffery, Paratene Matchitt, Cliff Whiting, Shane Cotton, Peter Robinson, Selwyn Muru, Ralph Hotere, et al. The philosophical problem I am probing is why verbal artists in New Zealand seem strait-jacketed and pressured to perform on ,and conform to, a narrow ‘canvas’ of ethnicized expectations related to the micro nation-building project towards a revived pre-contact Golden Age of sovereignty under the rubric of te tino rangatiratanga , in which the tacit modus operandum is to provide empowering, uplifting and visionary images of their publics (ethnic subjects and subjectivities) or else to face bemusement and—sometimes—anger for abandoning the primrose path of politico-literary ‘virtue’. I am in no sense decrying positive and visionary role-model enhancing art, merely asserting the right of all artists to pursue their transgressive dreams and visions with freedom ( but with a concomitant responsibility not to flagrantly outrage respected traditions) in what Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes once memorably called ‘the marketplace of ideas’ [10]. This freedom must, of necessity, involve the right to query past and present cultural practices and values –as Duff has done so notably—and to proffer alternative visions of existential possibility for indigenous people (including, as a matter of logic, the libertarian as one option) as they chart their course in the hazardous Te Ao Marama of this third millennium. As an instance, Albert Wendt has cited his ‘A Sermon on Rot’ (1975) as an indictment of some Pacific Island political elites oppressing their own subject peoples—“In some cases, it’s worse now than under colonial rule.” [11] Wendt has also been extremely frank about one of the most difficult ironies (reversals) of history—that the colonized may be turned accidentally into colonizers, as in assertions by primary indigenes (e.g. the Maori) that later ethnes (whether they be Eurozealanders or Pasifika people) lack any indigenous grounding. Notwithstanding this paradox, there can be no doubt that ‘whiteness’ is an implicit, but distinct, legal doctrine in Anglo-American jurisprudence (as Cheryl Harris has cogently argued) and that Euro identity constitutes a very powerful and traditional form of property in the construction of divergent racial objectivities and subjectivities; that it is “a ghost that has haunted the political and legal domains” and has overtly “warped efforts to remediate racial exploitation”: [‘Whiteness’] has blinded society to the systems of domination that work against so many by retaining an unvarying focus on vestiges of systemic racialized privilege that subordinates those perceived as a particularized few—the “others.” It has thwarted not only conceptions of justice but also conceptions of property that embrace more equitable possibilities. [12] Alan Duff, we must remember, was raised in the assimilationist era of Nash-Holyoake and the Hunn Report and also of what Peter Cleave (The Sovereignty Game: Power, Knowledge and Reading the Treaty [1989]) has termed Article One (kawanatanga, or state-based) readings of the Treaty of Waitangi, and this inflexion has limited Duff’s perspective on the contractual obligations of the Crown as Treaty partner, and thus fed into Duff’s anti-collectivist figuring of the position of Maori and inter-ethnic political relationships in New Zealand. Consonant with this, there is no question that Duff’s neo-liberal universalist assumptions of competitive individualism have a naïve air about them, a dogmatic preachiness to the fore in his Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993)—what the American gadfly Michael Moore calls the “Uncle Tom porn” of (in the American context) ‘house niggers’, or “blacks who are trotted out to push the white agenda.” [13] Christina Thompson is very acute when writing about how Duff essentializes ‘Maori culture’ as simple, Neolithic, virile and static—insisting that when venturing into socio-cultural analysis “He is dogmatic, uninformed, and deeply irritating” [14] and notably intolerant of views other than those held by entrepreneurial Europeans (such as his millionaire friends Bob Jones, Douglas Myers, Bruce Plested and Christine and the late John Ferneyhough). But Thompson concedes that Duff is not wrong about everything, noting that “His ethnographic accounts of contemporary Maoridom have the unmistakable ring of truth, and his analysis of Maori tradition is at least worth taking the time to read.” [15] She is, I suspect, correct in noting a shift from the positive, recuperative view of Maoritanga (as a vehicle of cultural regeneration) vouchsafed to his readers in Once Were Warriors (1990) and the doctrinaire New Right dicta which fill the pages of his essays in that controversial 1993 book. The influence of Duff’s Evening Post columns doubtless figured in this changing equilibrium, for from 1991 until 2001 such syndicated output as a member of the almost exclusively Pakeha ‘commentariat’ exposed Duff to the pleasures of being ‘stroked’ by a largely conservative Kiwi populace, many of whom would read Duff’s trenchant and pithy asperities and enjoy his insistent drumbeat rhythms in a newspaper but would, proportionally, be less likely to read a long, difficult novel (from the standpoint of punctuation and ‘voice’). One is reminded of Frantz Fanon’s comment about “The native intellectual [who] has clothed his aggressiveness in his barely veiled desire to assimilate himself to the colonial world. He has used his aggressiveness to serve his own individual interests.” [16] There is no doubt that Duff is a philosophical ‘neo-con’ and a deeply historicized writer who cannot see the importance of this and, consequently, he explores the problematics of ethno-cultural identity in an idiosyncratic manner which rejects and outrages the pat theorizing of left academics. (That may be another vital reason why he wrote Szabad : to dramatize the culs de sac in which left totalistic systems drive us.) However, if John Wilson is correct, critics such as Michael Novak, Hilton Kramer ,Allan Bloom and Roger Kimball have over-reacted to the politicization of academe and the threats posed by the middlebrow culture of the ‘popular humanities’.[17] The great—and unrecorded—irony in all of this is that Duff’s natural constituency (academically speaking) is the ‘New Left’ cadre (the New Canonists) who typically espouse his kind of working-class and anti-elitist forays into subaltern vernaculars and who uphold popular culture as worthy of scholarly scrutiny, while Alan’s pals on the right (modern versions of 1950s High Culture intellectuals) actively decry such crass and meretricious lower-order (democratic) demotics! An instance of this is to be found in Peter Beatson’s Landfall review of Warriors, in which the leftist critic suggested that the novel should be read against a “social background…rather than that of the very different genres of art-novels”.[18] Danielle Brown opines that Beatson “apparently” undermines “Duff’s work in terms of a system of literary value”[19] when I think that Beatson quite consciously does so. Perhaps this is the moment to cite Hilton Kramer, who has scorned the trendy theorists for espousing “the liberal-left politics of race, class and gender” and has simplistically assessed their baleful influence as follows: This grim scenario of an accelerating intolerance for dissident [=neocon ] views, which has made the very idea of literary quality a kind of crime against the claims of “minority” writers, if not indeed a violation of their civil rights, is accompanied, moreover, by a precipitous decline in the prestige of literature itself.[20] Alan Duff has proved to be a really original and unplaceable writer, a kind of rogue hormone in the Kiwi body politic who confutes Kramer’s binary simplicities, for Duff’s ‘figure in the [textual] carpet’ was a conservative one yet he was welcomed by other Maori writers (many of whom he scorned privately as culturally romantic dreamers and purveyors of patronizing rural essentialisms, tepid ‘noble savage’ pieties and PC simplicities premised on their belief in a lack of indigenous agency brought about solely by an overwhelming experience of colonialism). These compadres initially valued Duff as an ‘authentic’ member of the brown caucus. He was also fatuously positioned by many reviewers “as that most-beloved-of-literary-creatures, the brash young writer with potential” (Brown [21]). (He was in fact 40 when Warriors was published.) But Brown notes how, once his second novel (One Night Out Stealing) and non-fiction book (Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge) were published, many Maori (e.g. Ranginui Walker) and non-Maori writers and reviewers (e.g. Nigel Cox) moved to disown him as ‘inauthentic’: “There is an active politics of exclusion at work which serves not only to marginalise Duff, but to discredit him personally as well”.[22] I agree wholeheartedly with Brown that attempts to restrict the meanings of Duff’s texts are “highly problematic” given “that certain aspects of postcolonial theory advocate a multiplicity of voices and readings”. [23] Such PC gate-keeping is regrettable and not only problematic but deeply patronizing, implying (at worst) that the majority of Maori and tagata Pasifika readers are unsophisticated and hold naively realist views of narrative: simply an untenable position given the richness of storytelling (albeit largely oral) in Polynesian cultures! Brown’s deconstruction of Cox’s elitist reading position (in the now defunct magazine Quote Unquote) is incisive and on-point inasmuch as it operates on privileged ideas and “supports inhibiting guidelines of literary value, which can be manipulated to practice [sic] a politics of inclusion and exclusion.” [24] These are culturally fascist strategies (insisting on ethnic monovocality), and Brown argues that they are deployed against Duff because, unrestrained, he “is a considerable threat to the pieties of Pakeha liberals, who have embraced to the point of appropriation what Ken Arvidson calls ‘the pastoral mode’ of the ‘Maori Renaissance’”.[25] Duff, prima facie, is indeed “highly reactionary”[26] but his contestation of binary (biculturalist) politics is useful in a vibrant post-colonial context in scrutinizing state processes on behalf of people who do not feel that they fit this template yet have valid citizenship claims and needs. Brown is courageous in asserting that one may disagree with some or all of Duff’s New Right dogmas but that he has played a quite critical role in a democracy in fostering critique against the “often bureaucratic systems of Maori and Pakeha politics” and their attendant complacency, such that his writing “and the critical reception of it might be viewed productively as an energising force, which demands an ongoing re-negotiation of identity politics in New Zealand.” [27] What Brown seems to be suggesting is that while Duff’s analysis is certainly simplistic at times, it is also useful for a paradigm restructuring of kaupapa Maori social policy. III Neo-Liberal Contractarianism Doubtless Duff would agree with Michael Novak that “Capitalism is the first social system organised around mind. It gives primacy to mind—to practical intellect, in the first place, but in the end also to intellectual research and contemplation for their own sakes.” [28] Duff shares an ebullient enthusiasm for competitive individualism, for the market economy, for private enterprise creativity and for the sanctity (if not the privity) of contract, even if he espouses such values at an often simplistic level. This free-market and contractarian philosophy (about which Duff boasted when he was a self-employed sheet metal insulation contractor in New Zealand and England) came to the fore in 1995 once Lee Tamahori’s film of Once Were Warriors (1994) had grossed around NZ$20 million. Undoubtedly Duff’s small on-screen credit was insulting (a point which hit me upon first seeing the film) and he was stung at having Tamahori and Producer Robin Scholes reject his screenplay and resented Communicado farming it out to Riwia Brown (whose task was to soften the bleakness and create more believable dialogue). The film-makers did not do themselves any favours when failing to allocate Duff a seat and to call him onto the stage at the premiere. Duff, fuming at these slights, seized on a profit-sharing clause his publisher (Bob Ross) had put in the film-rights contract, which stated that “If the company receives a profit from domestic and/or off-shore sales of the feature that profit will be distributed equitably to key creative participants including the author.” Duff had extended his home on the strength of a financial return on his screenplay work and this profit-sharing clause and so when refused any revenue (after he claimed 25% of all profits), Duff took the high moral ground, stated “This is a contractual issue and an issue of principle”[29] and, on 18 May 1995, took Communicado to the Auckland High Court in a civil proceeding in contract. Duff stated that the film company were not running off with his creation and money without a fight, insisting of the wildly successful movie: “I was the star. There is no question that Alan Duff was the star”, swiping at Tamahori that without Warriors, Lee “would still be making ads”! Tamahori responded that Duff signed away the rights to his book and that he was saddened that Duff’s “arrogance knows no bounds” and that he was “grasping and greedy.” For his part Duff has sensibly agreed that “certainly Tamahori and I were never going to be bosom pals, not even acquaintances.”[30] Mr Justice Blanchard had the interesting task of ruling on a case based on a 1990 novel, using the New Zealand Bill of Rights Act 1990 (Duff v Communicado Ltd [1996] 2 NZLR 89-104). This litigation became a prime exemplar of the Duff ‘Loose-Jaw Syndrome’, in which the author’s notions of bush-law and his skill at hyping matters up put him in a legally perilous position. As plaintiff-in-chief Duff made some ill-advised statements to Television 3 and, especially, Radio Pacific which earned him a Contempt of Court citation from the defendant company (on 15 September 1995), who alleged that Duff was using his media mana to embarrass the company and to elicit public sympathy and pressure designed to force Communicado “to come to a settlement with him on his claim” (92). Even worse, from the standpoint of due process, Duff made wildly inaccurate statements about court processes (specifically a Judge’s decision on the enforceability of his claim which that Judge had not in fact made). A core issue was whether the public interest was served by Duff’s outspokenness (clearly this was not the case). Blanchard J held—in a clear rebuke and advisory against Duff—that Litigants themselves, having chosen the Court as their forum [as Duff did], would be expected to exercise greater restraint in their out-of-Court public comments on their litigation especially when, as in the present case, it was a squabble about money and no more than a curiosity to the public (90). Consequently Duff was committed for contempt of Court (91) for his reckless radio comments which pressured Communicado Ltd on a matter before the Courts: an act of gross misjudgement (if not of egregious immaturity) from a man who clearly thought he was a master in the importance of being bellicose, having himself initiated the ‘good copy’ of these media reports, according to Communicado’s counsel, John Katz (92). (They were certainly unlikely to have crept out of the Commercial List on their own motive power, although Blanchard J declined to rule on that issue.) The Judge did, however, content himself in his extra-judicial summary with the delicious, tinder-dry comment that in observing the “clash of egos between Mr Duff and Mr Tamahori, neither of [them] came across to this viewer as essentially a modest person” (94). It was in the context of his Radio Pacific interview that Duff revealed himself as an accomplished mischief-maker with what His Honour called his “completely inaccurate” misrepresentation of a Commercial List hearing (Blanchard J, 95). The learned Judge considered the argument that s14 of the NZ Bill of Rights Act 1990 did not protect a contempt , but engaged in “balancing the benefits of freedom of expression against the [correlated] benefits of protecting the administration of justice” (99) unhampered by the circulation of arrant falsehoods concerning sub judicae matters. Blanchard J found that “Fair and temperate criticism is protected” by s14 NZBORA (101) and allowed that making inadvertently prejudicial comment is permissible. While freeing Duff of a contempt charge for his TV appearance, Blanchard J noted that in the radio interview the following day “Mr Duff went rather further” and made comments that “were unfair and intemperate” (103) and prejudicial to the due process owed to his co-litigant. The Judge did not mince his words, accusing Duff of lighting a fire under Communicado—“Mr Duff helped to light it. Now he added further fuel”, such that “he was seriously interfering with Communicado’s rights as a litigant to have trial in a courtroom, not trial by media and public opinion” (103). This is a seriously stringent judicial ruling against Mr Duff who “has overstepped the mark” (104) and which ought to have given the angry quasi-Caliban of Havelock North—“I can well imagine Mr Duff’s tone from the words…and the tone of his voice on the television programme”—real pause as he bemoaned the loss of assets that he alleged to Communicado ‘thou tak’st from me’ (The Tempest, 1.2, 397). I am, however, more certain that Communicado were able to put a new spin on my phrase ‘Wrestling with Caliban’ after this failed course of action and because a few years later the doughty Duff made—this time covertly—another attempt to derail someone else’s day in court. These are strange, seemingly opportunistic, actions for a market liberal (who ought to espouse the dispassionate precepts of legal positivism and not engage in vigilante justice). Duff’s runaway pen and tongue have caused him other scrapes with the law, as when he and HarperCollins had to apologize and settle out of court for rash comments Duff had made in his book Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge about one Michael Avanti [31] and when his friend the painter Para Matchitt faced criminal prosecution for allegedly violating a 16-year-old girl, Duff jumped in (without checking the legal state of play) and reportedly offered the girl’s mother up to $40,000 in return for dropping the charges against Matchitt (a fascinating instance of naivete about police procedure). The mother noted that Duff himself risked being charged with attempting to pervert the course of justice (subversion thereof under cover and for cash) and that when he took belated legal counsel Duff quickly withdrew the offer (and himself from view). [32] As another, less strained, instance of Duff’s conservatively grounded values, if we recall Houston Baker’s 1987 paper ‘The Promised Body’—delivered at Yale and which discussed Afro-American paradigms of ethno-violence in the context of American civil rights discourse (in which Baker asserted that “the African body emerges as a canonical announcement of a promised or covenanted body”[33]), we can see how Duff’s neo-liberalism in Once Were Warriors drives in the opposite direction. Where there would be a fine parallelism to be made between Black people seeking equal rights under the US Constitution (and under Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863) and the position of colonized Maori seeking to attain promised Treaty of Waitangi guarantees, Duff’s implied author will have no truck with this kind of hazy collectivist generality which, not coincidentally, undermines the enshrinement of individual property-rights. The Baker position in the humanities discourse has been described as ‘Left Eclecticism’ by the eminent UC-Berkeley Professor of psychoanalytical criticism, Frederick Crews, as a praxis of radical cultural marxism in which In dealing with a given painting, novel, or piece of architecture, especially one dating from the capitalist era, [‘left eclectics’] do not aim primarily to show the work’s character or governing idea. The goal is rather to subdue the work through aggressive demystification—for example, by positing its socioeconomic determinants and ideological implications, scanning it for any encouraging signs of subversion, and then judging the result against an ideal of total freedom. [34] Roger Kimball, while an intellectual alarmist and avowed counter-progressive, was sadly right to observe in 1990 (the year Once Were Warriors was published) that the core assumptions, “values and aspiration of traditional humanistic inquiry” have been undermined so that “It has become practically axiomatic in the academy that one cannot invoke so jaded a notion as individualism without an elaborate garland of reservations, qualifications and caveats.”[35] The assault on the solitary bourgeois ego has certainly been over-determined and Kimball cites the 1986 Stanford conference papers, somewhat ominously titled Reconstructing Individualism, in support of this claim. However, Cheyne, O’Brien and Belgrave have emphasized that the radical individualism which Duff sees as a panacea for collective malaise was a major force of disempowerment of the tangata whenua, and this was certainly true in the way that the Native Land Courts denied Maori collective (iwi) legal personality (guaranteed under Article II of the Treaty of Waitangi) and individualized title in order to break up tracts of tribal land: Colonisation brought with it the notion that individuals were autonomous and self-defining. The state in Aotearoa/New Zealand has persistently attempted to impose liberal individualism on Maori, particularly in the ownership and management of property. Individualism was also a means of denying the collective sovereignty of the group. [36] Cheyne et al. argue forcibly, contra the Duff promotion of competitive capitalism, that capitalism and colonialism are indissolubly linked and nefariously so, for Individualism is inimical to Maori interests, and participation with market reforms or with claims settlement in the environment can only compromise Maori interests. Maori attempts to re-establish cultural and environmental continuity between the past and future based on spiritual concerns can only be threatened by placing taonga in the marketplace. [37] Of course this refuses to heed Duff’s singular contribution to limning a localized psychology that has been so well expressed by Tim Armstrong: namely, that in a powerful (marketized) taonga like Once Were Warriors Duff has shown “an aggressivity which has been turned against the self, even at the level of the narration” which “demonstrates in the starkest possible terms the difficulties of racial categories.” [38] Perhaps more importantly, Warriors has sold 120,000 copies and run into 24 editions in New Zealand and been translated into French, German, Italian, Japanese and Dutch as well as being published in Britain, the US and Australia (along with his other titles, of which its sequel, What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?, has sold 50,000 copies). [39] A success this phenomenal cannot be discounted by flip cultural sloganeering (sneering?), as it obviously testifies to the fact that a very powerful mythos has been let loose and shared with a deeply receptive polity. As Denis Welch has observed, Duff “may not swing his fists any more, but he remains a warrior of the written word; each book that he writes is like a taiaha flung quivering into the ground in front of the reader—a wero [sic], a challenge, an eye-balling demand to hear what he has to say”—and obviously people do pay heed, probably in large measure due to what Welch calls Duff’s “alive and dangerous…spiky prose”.[40] Roger Maaka has pointed out that about 73% of Maori live in urban areas [41], and so Duff’s fictions definitely ‘speak’ to the contemporary social realities of mainstream Maoridom, in a way that the foundational (and rurally nostalgic) texts of Witi Ihimaera and Patricia Grace flew in the face of increased post-World War Two deracination and urbanization. Maaka added that: Two of the realities of Maori society today are that 80 percent of people identifying as Maori live outside their tribal areas and that some 27.5 percent acknowledge no tribal affiliation (NZDS 1991). If the vision for the advancement of Maori society is restricted to autonomous tribal development predicated on a traditional picture of one tribe, one territory, that vision is flawed, and its appropriateness for our development as we enter the twenty-first century is questionable. [42] We must keep in mind that while Duff ,through his maternal (Hinau) bloodline, belongs to what Maaka correctly describes as an historically “colonized minority in New Zealand society” [43], his paternal bloodline (of establishment academic mainstream Pakeha Duffs) explains partly why he espouses various forms of assimilation to modernity, coupled to a genuine commitment to Maori cultural pride. However, almost in keeping with Duff’s pessimism, we are left with Maaka’s grimly realistic judgement that “the process of detribalization is irreversible, and that the notion of the tribe-cum-nation as an expression of mana Maori motuhake ‘Maori sovereignty’ is more ideology of the politically active and the educated elite than a reality for the flax roots of Maori society.”[44] Maaka urges “a radical redefinition of tribe” if Maori are ever “to establish any lasting socio-political binding of the Maori community” in the postmodern world.[45] Small wonder, then, that Paul Spoonley, writing of the film of Once Were Warriors, argued that “Both Duff (the author) and Lee Tamahori (film director) appear to be caught in a cultural double bind—namely that of depicting Maori culture as problem as well as solution.” [46] It may also be what Edward Said means in his insistence that truth is only situational and political and comes close to the Gramscian notion of hegemony, in which people are complicit in their own submission and domination. That idea is entertained in the film (via Jake’s final manslaughter and raging in the Royal Tavern carpark) and was robustly maintained by the implied author of the originating novel. IV Once Were Warriors: Contesting the ‘Noble Savage’ in Aotearoa (Assimilation Blues) Vocality is thus a key issue in Duff’s fictional texts, especially given his ‘mixed race’ lineage. There is a degree of unconscious postmodernist narrativity in Duff’s plentitude of voices, especially in Warriors, which reminds one of Linda Hutcheon’s observation that while “the postmodern has no effective theory of agency that enables a move into political action, it does work to turn its inevitable ideological grounding into a site of de-naturalizing critique.” [47] This describes Duff’s intent very well as he splices viewpoints and re-joins them in a dynamic verbal collage which queries ethnically essentialist claims, although his assertion that “what makes me a top novelist is that I’m not self-obsessed: I’m not in it [Warriors]. I’m everywhere but I’m nowhere” [48] cannot be sustained, inasmuch as several critics have pointed up the problem of locating linguistically distinct character voices and because Duff as implied author and puppet-master can be clearly traced and ‘heard’ preaching away in the voices of more than one character as well as in that of the narrating functionary. This recalls Gertrude Stein’s statement that “one has no identity that is when one is in the act of doing anything”, for the masterpiece “has nothing to do with human nature or identity, it has to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing in itself and not in relation. The moment it is in relation it is common knowledge and anybody can feel and know it and it is not a master-piece.” [49] These initially baffling (indeed gnomic) utterances begin to cut a useful swathe through the literary practice of a self-proclaimed ‘top’ author like Duff, largely because of his ego-intrusiveness into the multiple voices which populate all his New Zealand-based fictions. For the sermonic ‘authorial’ voice frequently cuts across the unmediated expressions of mental entities to pronounce ethically on approved and disapproved beliefs, assumptions and behaviours, restricting interpretive freedom and staunching the flow of ‘authentic’ character interiority. Stein implicitly celebrated Keats’ famous notion of the ‘negative capability’: the capacity of the great artist to practise what William Dilthey called Einfuhlung (acts of extreme imaginative empathy with others, their perceptions, dilemmas and postulated feelings as freed from the filter of egocentricity as possible). Stein postulated that mediocre writers live, like most people, in identity and memory, “so they are not an entity but an identity” [50] (impliedly full of ego). If her high notion of great art based on self-erasure holds any validity (that ego-identity “does stop the creation of master-pieces” which are built upon strong ego-suppression and self-forgetfulness [51]), then arguably Duff’s often fiercely combative and engage ideological interpositions can really problematize and circumscribe the power of his fictions. This is because he has too strenuously advocated his own beliefs and values which tend to be those of the occupying power—those of what Graham Kinloch calls “the dominant elite [which] tends to adopt an ‘asssimilationist’ orientation toward minority groups; i.e., in order to be accepted, they must conform to that elite culturally, politically, and socially, assimilating into the social system on the elite’s terms rather than stipulating their own criteria or asserting their own independence.” [52] Duff actually makes an instructive case in terms of Kinloch’s ethnic schematization, as a writer with a pronounced “assimilationist-ameliorative emphasis” [53], which is unsurprising given that his non-Maori lineage (viz.,the Duff line) conforms to Kinloch’s definition of the migrated cultural and ‘racial’ elite who partook in a colonial social structure based on “a system of institutionalized racism for economic and political purpose.” [54] And if we keep before us Kinloch’s reminder that such elites, in colonial settings (as in New Zealand), have “certain vested interests, psychological as well as economic, in its stereotyping of minorities”, as in ‘blame the victim’ strategies [55], we may see the significance of Alan’s uncle Roger Duff’s litanies of contempt for the Kaiapoi Ngai Tahu people at Tuahiwi. Harry Evison has pointed out that the anthropological paradigm of Pitt-Rivers (the ‘black failure’ thesis) was endorsed in terms of Maori psychological failure by the young Duff in his Master’s thesis Tribal Maori and the Great Society (Canterbury University College,1943) based on a culture contact study of Tuahiwi. Roger Duff wrote in that text that “To grow up in Tuahiwi is to grow up in degeneracy”, in a world “in a morbid state of social maladjustment”. He opined that “The standards of the family and of the community are those of shiftlessness, poverty and defeat. Everybody is poor, everybody is lazy, none can express himself [sic] in activities of value.” He noted that “an unrestricted gratification of personal appetite is the perversion of healthy self-assertion” and lamented the decline from a great Maori past into a “physical and mental degeneration” (of poor health, drunkards, loafers and young fellows who cannot speak Maori)—a “general slothfulness and ugliness of life”. Duff attributed Ngai Tahu’s landlessness and malaise to the paralysing effects of collective psychological shock (the Ngati Toa raids and the mass influx of European settlers and Bronze Age technology thereafter in the nineteenth-century): To the primitive tribesman, able to envisage only two phases of relationship with foreigners—either that he dominated their mana, or that they dominated his—it would seem clear that his race was run. Land was docilely sold, practically given away, and in the middle fifties [1850s] the Maori was already virtually landless, and an object of curiosity in his own homeland. [56] Roger Duff went on to conclude that racial intermarriage alone had saved Maori from extinction: in Evison’s précis, that “The superior mana of European fathers in mixed marriages, said Duff, ‘effectively barred off their wives and offspring from the fatal panic and despair which allowed the Maoris proper to die en masse’. Like [the Rev. J.F.H.] Wohlers, Duff thought the ‘European race’ possessed a superior psychological strength. Wohlers wrote: ‘They [the “mixed bloods”] had inherited a spirit of enterprise from their fathers, which was wanting in the Maori proper, and were therefore better able to throw off despondency’”.[57] The stance of what Tau calls Duff’s “assumed moral superiority, heavily influenced by Rousseau’s romanticism” leads him to argue that Roger Duff would have been better reading Karl Popper’s book The Poverty of Historicism (1944) than pronouncing on a ‘Calibanized’ culture about which he knew very little.[58] Certainly these passages betray ‘raced’ notions of space, character and subjectivity which have been labelled as the ‘If it’s gonna be done right, it’s gotta be done white’ school. The influence of Uncle Roger on the teenaged and troubled Alan Duff (when he stayed with Roger and Myrtle Duff while attending Christchurch Boys’ High School in 1965) cannot be precisely traced [59], although Alan does recount his uncle’s pride in his anthropological studies (his D.Sc) and contacts and Roger’s “fixation with all things Maori”, showing his nephew the sketches of tattoos which the uncle had drawn as a teenager. Alan adds (unaware of that 1943 thesis) that Uncle Roger was always rather bemused by my tales of what our Maori relations were like back in Rotorua, for I don’t think he got near that heavy-drinking, violent kind of behaviour, perhaps because he didn’t want the romantic notion destroyed. [60] To the extent that subjective conceptualizations of situational patterning may contribute to one’s formation as a ‘meta-racist’ (someone who sees themselves as ‘racially blind’ or race-neutral [61]), Alan Duff shares his uncle’s 1940s conceptions of Maori who ‘once were proud warriors’ and is a meta-racist to the extent that the pakeha voice which speaks in his non-fictional writings (such as Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge) resists decolonizing discourses in his race-based narratives. Kinloch summarizes the conservative, socially possibilist and ‘meta-racist’ stance in terms of “an assimilationist orientation, which overlooks racial inequality and the colonial aspects of the social structure in general”. Citing American examples, Kinloch continues: The ‘race relations problem’ is defined predominantly as the minority groups’ lack of conformity to white American culture with its white emphasis on moralism, thrift, and hard work. The perceived solution of this problem is the integration of minority groups with little, if any, attempt to take their inequality and economic deprivation into account. Such pressures for increased conformity ignore problems of alienation and the recent development of racial separatism. Colonial elites typically attempt to culturally assimilate minorities on their own terms, resulting often in increased nationalism. [62] In fact Kinloch’s call for structural change in a colonial and vertical relationship between ruling elite culture and ‘minorities’ (regardless of whether they are enclaved or disenclaved) is one which Duff ardently resists, befitting Kinloch’s point that “if the race problem is not viewed as structural, the alternative is psychological reductionism, in which people’s attitudes only have to be modified in order to deal with the problem. No real change in the social order ensues and race continues to function as the basis of role assignment, group identity, and individual prejudice.” [63] Clearly Alan Duff is rather blind to the need for postdomination social strategies, being a psychological reductionist focused primarily on the achievement of individual agency, holding a secularist perspective and decrying nearly all notions of collective disempowerment for Maori which have been integral to the colonial project of those who wish to align themselves with what Sir Tipene O’Regan has called the ‘Ngati redneckery tribe’. This is why Duff can celebrate one wahine toa, his exemplary Beth Heke (Once Were Warriors), the brave wise woman standing up to injustice and micro-power within her dysfunctional Pine Block community but must, perforce, derogate the late Irihapeti Ramsden for her attempt in nursing education to devise and inscribe protocols of cultural sensitivity (‘cultural safety’) as “a fanatic and a radical”—someone who “is not only not a helper of her people, but rather someone with a personal agenda, whatever on this mysterious earth of psychology that might be.”[64] That tell-tale phrase ‘earth of psychology’ is the latent parapraxis, or unintended slip of the pen, which tells us that Alan Duff’s orientation is not only assimilationist but embedded in a psychological rather than a sociological template, and by a teasing alchemy the book in which this robust counter-argument with Ramsden’s philosophy occurs strangely echoes the sub-themes of Uncle Roger’s 1943 thesis written fifty years earlier. That in itself may be significant inasmuch as the 1990s reprise of 1940s attitudes helps us to better fix the locus of Alan Duff’s conservative and back-dated analysis, anchored in monocultural, Anglocentric and neo-colonial New Zealand which had, in 1943, yet to ratify the Statute of Westminster and thus formalize its independence as a Pacific nation. This becomes very clear if one reads David Ausubel’s The Fern and the Tiki (1960), with its astute liberal diagnosis of the New Zealand ‘social imaginal’—in its myths as a robust frontierist yet also a welfarist community yoked uncomfortably to a repressive mid-Victorian social ideology (a punitive social climate of self-policing McCarthyism) with its associated tacit Anglo-Saxon racism and acceptance of an extra-legal colour bar. [65] Ausubel’s assessment of nervous liberals still holds sway (pp.128-29) as do his comments on anti-intellectualism and a preference for manual labour : that “the intellectual is often suspect” and the “university student is classed as a loafer; the folks at home wonder when he will quit all of this tomfoolery and settle down to an honest day’s work” (p.29). Ausubel was also a robust critic of New Zealand’s tourist-town shibboleths on its race relations and he emphasized (after much fieldwork) the existence of an unspoken ‘colour bar’ in social life (p.215), in which if “the Maori is judged on his merits as an individual—if he behaves as a European he is treated as one”(p.150), which seems astonishingly relevant to the behavioural imperatives governing Alan Duff’s life. The visiting psychiatrist-psychologist ranged widely amongst the Maori community during 1957-58 as a Fulbright scholar and his research focused on youth, both Maori and Pakeha. A particular interest was delinquency (“adolescent waywardness” which Ausubel described as “a transitory disorder” [pp.130 & 131]) and one of its contributory factors, unsurprisingly, was residence in “an urban slum” and among a newly urbanizing Maori proletariat who experienced “the ordinary tensions of cultural integration”, all of which became allied to “growing anti-Maori prejudice” (p.139). As elsewhere, the broken home factor was pivotal and Ausubel’s conclusion to The Fern and the Tiki sounds remarkably like the situation of Duff’s Heke family in Warriors, suspiciously eyeing the affluent estate of their affluent white neighbours, the Tramberts: For as long as New Zealanders persist in deluding themselves that all is well in the sphere of race relations, the only realistic prospect for the future is the emergence of a brown proletariat segregated in the urban slums and living in a state of chronic tension with their white neighbours (p.215). These sentiments were published in 1960 (when Alan’s parents separated and Gowan Duff retained custody of his children at the family’s state house on its quarter-acre section in Rotorua) and the almost Eisenhowerian tenor of a few of Ausubel’s statements on Maori self-help uncannily prefigure Duff’s later, dated (or recycled) and neo-conservative offerings for the advancement of ‘his’ people. But Ausubel and Duff would disagree about the literal-minded concepts of race equality which Duff later espoused so trenchantly: Many pakehas assert that if the Maori desires social and economic equality with the European, he must be prepared to compete with him on equal terms and to renounce all claims for special benefits and privileges. This in my opinion is an ultimate rather than a currently realistic or desirable goal (Ausubel, p.156). Ausubel went on to make a comment that may well cut to the bone about the stress suffered by some mixed-race individuals. He stated that he was “greatly impressed with the prominence of colour consciousness in the pakeha’s mental and emotional image of the Maori and in the Maori’s mental and emotional image of himself”, to the effect that if New Zealand’s ethnic propaganda was to be believed and skin colour held no social significance, “half-castes would be regarded as half-caste Europeans just as frequently as they are regarded as half-caste Maoris”, but –as in North America—Ausubel noted that “persons of mixed racial ancestry are almost invariably classed as members of the darker and socially less prestigeful [sic] group” (p.159). This was the reality which Alan Duff grew up with, although in Rotorua (his hometown until his early teens) he was in fact more likely to face denigration from his Maori relatives for having a touch of the ‘white-brush’, which would be an explosive mental cocktail to live with, given that at that time he was identifying more with his Maori kin in Whaka village. Duff’s adolescent rebellion against academic achievement is to a degree explicable if one heeds Ausubel’s point that many Kiwis of the 1950s and 1960s would attribute any success amongst ‘half-castes’ to the ‘white blood’ flowing in their veins and this would certainly be a sufficient reason for a proud Maori child to wish to renounce the Prospero self and play up the Caliban one (the drinker/fighter/curser, etc.). What is even more tragic is that in a society hell-bent on assimilation, the mixed-race inheritance may indeed become the curse which Duff has talked of. Ausubel wrote about what I call ‘Duff Syndrome’: that when such a person wishes to hold to Maori communal values but “becomes a good little pakeha he frequently becomes an object of derision”(p.170). Even more difficult is the experience of many who constantly refer to their ‘Maori and pakeha sides’ and delude themselves “about the facility which they as half-castes can move from the Maori to the pakeha world and vice versa” when they may end up being seen as ‘good Maoris’ “who grace the drawing rooms of generally anti-Maori pakehas”(p.203). Allied to this comes Maori self-blame in which, Ausubel observed, they had assimilated various pakeha attitudes and misconceptions about race relations—the tendency to over-generalize individual misbehaviour to the entire race, the failure to appreciate that individual members of a racial group could not in fairness be prejudged or discriminated against because of the failings of other members of their race, and the inability to realize that the characteristic shortcomings of the Maori people were not of innate origin but reflected difficulties in adjusting to or adopting pakeha standards (pp.203-204). Although Ausubel uses the past tense here, the Duff project of the 1990s was to cleave to such discredited assumptions under the rubric of ‘common sense’. How right Sir Tipene O’Regan was, however, to argue that if New Zealand had taken notice of Ausubel and Forster (The Maori People in the 1960s) “we would have handled our social policy issues better as a nation” and that the larger Aotearoa village society “has to be held responsible for the designer-made social disaster that is Maori”—really since the 1850s when the Pakeha colonial state ‘vapourised’ the legal personality of its Treaty partners. As O’Regan has so clear-sightedly insisted, We seek rangatiratanga [the declared Treaty right to asset ownership and control]. It’s a concept limited now by circumstance but potent. To us it means control of our assets. If you haven’t got control then rangatiratanga is just a slogan for prayer time.[66] V Duff’s ‘Outlaw’ Voice It is difficult to displace Ranginui Walker’s comment that Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge “is basically a reflection of cultural politics in New Zealand”, although he was probably too harsh in asserting that Duff “does not rate in the Maori world because he is not part of the people’s struggle for emancipation and social advancement”. Walker was correct, however, to observe that The intelligentsia see him as a cultural renegade not worthy of being dignified by public comment. But to the Pakeha he represents the great white hope of turning back the dynamic of Maori self-determination.[67] Duff’s is certainly an ‘inlaw’ (conforming) voice in terms of the dominant monoculture (and thus an ‘outlaw’ one in much of Maoridom), and it is here that Christina Thompson’s commentary on Duff’s “bent account of both cultures” reverberates: that his hybrid position , coupled with a note of outrage, has distorted potentially valuable insights from both sides of the ‘ethnic fence’ and so he “is at once unthinking and aggressive, and therein lie both the strengths and weaknesses of his work.” [68] This angry moralistic quality—which was powerful as an affective superstructure to novels such as Once Were Warriors, State Ward and Both Sides of the Moon—has vitiated the value of Duff’s wider commentary. This became clear in his vituperative and totally dismissive response to Andrew Vercoe’s passionate (if at times very poorly argued) polemical riposte Educating Jake (1998), which Duff simply could not abide and so he shot the messenger (an experience I may fairly claim to have experienced first!). Duff slated Vercoe’s rather heated book as “repackaged Waikato University garbage rhetoric” and “tripe” just as earlier he had great fun deconstructing (with much finesse and tact, be it noted) my paper on ‘Wrestling with Caliban’ as fraudulent rubbish (“obscure, academic waffle”) and playfully misrepresented our discussions. It made a great column and I remain both hugely respectful of his talent and very fond of the man of Te Arawa (Ngati Rangitihi and Tuwharetoa). [69] There is no doubt that Alan Duff subscribes to the dictum of William Zinsser that “If you want to change the world write the truth and write clearly.”[70] But in his zeal to dismiss my application of a Shakespearian logic to the historical experience of Maori, Alan clearly missed the central irony that in his own encounter with noted relatives such as Dr Roger Duff, he was acting like a surly Caliban at the feet of a powerful Pakeha Prospero and that no amount of decrying that Maori should not become ‘brown-skinned Pakehas’ can disguise his own rebirth as a bourgeois native which, it seems, has contributed greatly to his public notoriety, not least in Duff’s aggravating polemic, Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993). At least one astute writer has called Duff a dangerous, ungrown-up child, and so the awful Caliban, or perhaps Chowbook, stereotype recurs.[71] In the lead up to Duff’s first non-fiction book, his first publisher, Bob Ross (Tandem Books), may only have been presented with “a collection of newspaper columns” by Duff, but Paul Bradwell (of HarperCollins, who published Maori) has written that he, while equally unimpressed with “recycled journalism”, suggested and received from Duff “a wholly new and original non-fiction book developing in greater depth some of the subjects touched upon in some of those columns.” [72] Notwithstanding this, Thompson’s assessment of that difficult book is acute: One of the most startling things about Duff’s work is the way he consistently renders Maori values in negative terms, recasting Maori virtues as Pakeha vices. Generosity becomes an inability to practice [sic] self-restraint, family loyalty becomes a bar to self-improvement, modesty becomes poor self-esteem, casualness becomes sloth, pride becomes arrogance. Pakeha values [or ‘Duff family values’], on the other hand, are never critically examined. Competition does not involve oppression, individualism cannot be read as selfishness, upward mobility never translates as greed. [73] The saddest part of the Duff story is that, as Thompson observes, the positive visions of Maoritanga in Warriors (which I explored in the first critical paper on the novel), as a force for “the recuperation of traditional knowledge and practices”, are “rudely repudiated in the essays as maladaptive strategies”, so that Thompson ponders why Duff, “as an upwardly mobile member of the working class, simultaneously resents and romanticizes” them.[74] Baffled by these stark contradictions, Thompson is undeflected from pursuing clear-sightedly the core ideological bias of the Duff culture commentary project: that in works like One Night Out Stealing (1992) he seems determined to naturalize the economic relationship between New Zealand’s two cultural groups [Treaty partners—BH] (and two classes). There is no sense in this novel [One Night Out Stealing] of the social price paid for Pakeha privilege, no sense of a relationship between the luxury that Pakeha money commands and Maori impoverishment. Rather, we are presented with the Maori character’s apparently sincere desire to be uplifted through contact with Pakeha wealth (symbolized by Persian carpets, classical music, and so on). This is at once moving and horrifying: moving because who cannot empathize with the desire to have what is out of reach? horrifying because of the implication that to be rich (and Pakeha) is to be a fully realized human being.[75] In this, Duff acts as an apologist for what Benjamin Barber has called secular cultural imperialism and the neo-liberal myth of omnipotent markets (‘ McWorld’ values), with its privatizing attachment to consumerism. Placing Duff’s libertarian values in an ethnic context, we should recall that James Baldwin famously described Uncle Tom’s Cabin, or, Life Among the Lowly (1852) as “a very bad novel”, being “self-righteous” and loaded with “virtuous sentimentality” and “a catalogue of violence”, with Mrs Stowe leaving unanswered and unnoticed the “only important question: what it was, after all, that moved her people to such deeds.”[76] Describing the novel as an anti-slavery pamphlet accords slightly with Duff’s first novel (if ‘slavery’ is construed liberally in modern New Zealand as a self-imposed degeneracy of the kind Roger Duff decided reigned at Tuahiwi). Thus Warriors can be seen to follow Stowe’s formula that “black equates with evil and white with grace [we think of Grace Heke staring hungrily at the white Trambert paradise]; if, being mindful of the necessity of good works, she could not cast out the blacks—a wretched, huddled mass, apparently, claiming, like an obsession, her inner eye—she could not embrace them either without purifying them of sin” [77]. It is certainly hard not to hear Baldwin’s plaint that in modern ethnic iconography “the robes of the saved are white” and that for the ‘colored’ person it is “this cry, implacable on the air and in the skull, that he must live with”[78] without finding an answering echo in the textual unconscious of Alan Duff’s prose. Also pertinent to appraising the Duff project is Baldwin’s terse reminder that a people deprived of their political sovereignty find it almost impossible to recreate the image of their past, let alone project hopeful visions of their future, “this perpetual recreation being an absolute necessity for, if not, indeed, the definition of a living culture.” [79] Lying behind this is the call for a cadre of black intellectuals (W.E.B. Du Bois’ ‘talented tenth’), and in that perspective Alan Duff may well qualify as an admittedly problematic ‘New Maori’ thinker: one who rejects Rousseau’s organic theory of the state and notion of popular sovereignty (The Social Contract, 1792) in favour of Adam Smith’s individualism and whose singularity inheres in what the Marxist sociologist and NAACP co-founder Du Bois called ancestral ‘twoness’ (The Souls of Black Folk [Chicago; A.C. McClurg & Co.,1903]), in which the ‘native son’ can only see himself through the revelation of the other world: “One ever feels his twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings…” [80] Duff has dramatized this dual (slightly schizoid) and definitely liminal sensibility in his remarkable novel Both Sides of the Moon (1998), but I think one can also usefully (and respectfully) raid Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) and apply the terms ‘Caliban self’ and ‘Ariel self’ to Alan Duff’s dual personae as a writer and private person. And Duff’s battle with the politically correct recalls, in an inverse form, Du Bois’ struggle against the tepid Horatio Algerist homilies of the assimilationist black activist and author Brooker T. Washington (Up from Slavery [New York: Doubleday, Page & Co., 1901]), such as his insistence that the anti-black policies of the South were justified because of the Negro’s degradation[80]. Before we recoil from such an ‘Uncle Tomish’ stance (as Duff has), Douglas Brinkley reminds us that the iconic and splendidly feisty Rosa Parks was nurtured as a result of Washington’s success in dealing with rich white philanthropists just as Duff has done with his Duffy “Books in Homes” scheme in New Zealand.[82] In Duff’s case, he appears to be one of Homi Bhabha’s ‘mimic men’: those with dark skins but who adopt the white masks of the oppressor culture and who, as a matter of logic as one of the self-colonized, rebuff and rubbish all attempts to demystify and confront the premises of, and violences associated with, decolonization. In this he surely recalls the stereotypical figure of the ‘field nigger’, the colonized intellectual, politically atomized to think only in individualistic terms, as Fanon emphasized: The native intellectual had learnt from his masters that the individual ought to express himself fully. The colonialist bourgeoisie had hammered into the native’s mind the idea of a society of individuals where each person shuts himself up in his own subjectivity, and whose only wealth is individual thought. [83] Fanon has defined decolonization as a process which transforms individuals and polities—“It transforms spectators crushed with their inessentiality into privileged actors.”[84] Of course Fanon was describing colonial systems of magnitudes of greater oppression than obtain in contemporary New Zealand. Thus Fanon’s dyad of Settler and Native becomes problematic for a cultural commentator like Duff who actually embodies both identities, so Fanon’s assertion that “the settler only ends his work in breaking in the native when the latter admits loudly and intelligibly the supremacy of the white man’s values”[85] is astonishingly suggestive in reference to Duff’s life-history, inasmuch as it can generate the spectre of Duff as a kind of Poe figure (‘William Wilson’ [1839]) or a Norman Bates (Psycho) locked at some point(s) in his past in a psychic struggle between two competing (same gender but cross-ethnic) selves with one eventually destined to prevail in his psyche. While this sounds, prima facie, like the stuff of trashy Gothic fiction, there is a sense in which this is likely to have been true for this man of Fanonian masks. Before a reasonably final adult ego-identity was established the turbulent young Alan clearly experienced—at some indeterminable level—what Fanon calls this “primary Manichaeism” in which “the settler never ceases to be the enemy, the opponent, the foe that must be overthrown”.[86] But, at a personal level, Alan Duff conformed finally to James Belich’s contestable process (which the historian insisted happened to the nation) of ‘recolonization’[87], but not before a huge amount of angst and hurt when exposed to racist slurs in Christchurch in the critical teenage years. After struggling as a young man with anti-Pakeha feelings, after his battles with European authority (Rotorua Boys’ High and Hamilton Boys’ Home) and the crises of multiple incarceration (Waikeria borstal and Mount Eden and Wormwood Scrubs Prisons), Duff seems to have experienced some kind of metanoia and become a born-again Pakeha and ,ipso facto, recolonized himself. This quite complex biographical process has contributed to creating the dynamic and intensely self-contradictory man and writer whose stubborn individuality and resistance to simple pigeonholing has troubled many. Radicals would be quick to align Duff metaphorically with Fanon’s “affranchised slaves, or slaves who are individually free.” [88] Given Duff’s impressive Pakeha lineage (arts-academia) this is hardly surprising, even though a reading of Duff’s memoir (a searing exposure of his youthful aching need to connect and its title, ’out of the mist and steam’, a brilliant metaphor for confusion and anger) would give the lie to slick statements of this kind. Nevertheless this is the point to traverse some key family history. With Oliver Duff as one’s grandfather (Editor of The Press [1929-32] and founding Editor of The Listener [1939-49]) and that man’s four offspring all high achievers and with a grandmother who had published a novelized memoir called Otago Interval (1950), one may with some justification assert that there was some implicit pressure to measure up and be significant in some way. The four offspring were Alison (a noted sculptor), Gowan (Alan’s father, also known as Pat), a forestry research scientist specializing in tree mensuration, Roger a noted anthropologist and ethnologist for the Canterbury Museum, and Theodore, a University lecturer and psychologist. The three Duff sons attended Christchurch Boys’ High School (Gowan 1925-1928; Roger, 1926-1930 and Theodore, 1930-1932) in the heady days when it was a selective and strongly academic institution and had moved (1926) from its Worcester Street site to the spacious Ilam setting. Thus Alan followed there in 1965 between the Hamilton Boys’ Home (after his expulsion from Rotorua Boys’) and a stint at Waikeria Borstal after being caught in an act of after-hours shop-theft in Rotorua. Before starting at Straven Road for the 1965 year (Form 4) Alan had moved in with Roger and Myrtle at their Winchester Street home and had accompanied them over that summer before school started to a Canterbury Museum dig at Pyramid Valley (north of Hawarden, mid-Canterbury) where Uncle Roger had been following up his earlier research into moa bones in an acid-free swamp. Dr R.S..Duff (born 1912) had studied at Otago University under the noted ethnologist Henry D. Skinner after being Dux of CBHS. He later took an M.A. at Canterbury College (previously cited) and gained First Class Honours (1943) after having worked as a cadet in the Office of Samoan Affairs(1935-37) before being appointed, in 1938, as an ethnologist at the Canterbury Museum. Duff published a pamphlet (Pyramid Valley [1949]) and later a noted book, The Moa Hunter Period of Maori Culture (1950), in which he dismantled Julius von Haast’s Eurocentric, serial and binary model of indigenous settlement (of two discrete, Palaeolithic and Neolithic, eras), largely on account of his collaborative work with J.R. Eyles at the Wairau Bar, the oldest Polynesian site of occupation in New Zealand. Dr Duff was Assistant Director of the Canterbury Museum (1945-47), assumed the Directorship in 1948 and was a FRSNZ, received a D.Sc from Canterbury University (1952) and the Percy Smith Medal for anthropological research (Otago University, 1949); he was awarded a British Council scholarship (1947-48) to study museums in Britain and Europe and, in 1961, a Walter Gren and SEATO travelling fellowship to study archaeological collections of South East Asian nations, which reinforced his views about this region as the origin for Polynesians. Small wonder that the troubled teen (Alan) looked up with great admiration and some awe to this remarkably accomplished man of learning. For all we know, Roger Shepherd Duff may well have been an unconscious role model (a kind of Prospero figure) in Alan’s eventual recolonization away from the stereotype of the flash ‘Maori’ criminal, having met his distinguished uncle in London for the last time only days before Alan faced trial and certain imprisonment for taking part in systematic and major bank fraud in the City. VI Colonialism Redux: ‘The Caliban Principle’ A work of art does not answer questions: it provokes them; and its essential meaning is in the tension between their contradictory answers. LEONARD BERNSTEIN [89] duff adj. 1. (sl.) worthless, counterfeit, useless. 2. quick to anger. [90] Contradiction and contestation of viewpoint lie at the heart of Alan Duff’s oeuvre to date, even in Szabad where robust dialectical exchange and disagreement power the narrative as the ideological and gritty physical conflict between citizens and combatants in Budapest drives the plot to its grim (albeit survivalist) endgame. In many ways Szabad throws a clarifying light upon the core achievement and underlying dynamic of Duff’s fiction which—stating it simplistically—operates upon the principle of dialectic. But, to again invoke the great ‘Lenny’ Bernstein, do Duff’s works make their ethical journeys in strongly compassionate terms? Bernstein regularly exhorted his fellow humans to forge selves (and, correspondingly, art works) not conditioned “by environment and conformism, by status needs and power needs, by indulgences and kicks—no; but to develop a self that is illuminated by conscience, answerable to honor, and nurtured by compassion.” Bernstein, who represented the very best of American idealism and progressive liberalism, asked: Where is the compassion in our new drama and literature? Where is conscience to be found among the fatuous fads that parade as art in our time? [91] Any searching analysis of Duff’s controversial and best-selling works would do well to interrogate them against Bernstein’s criteria of honourable intent and the retrieval of compassion and conscience. But such an inquiry cannot proceed without taking cognisance of Ngugi Wa Thiong’o’s ruminations about the alienating effects of “a cultural bomb” , the language and cultural hegemony delivered by the colonizers, which serves to annihilate a people’s own belief in their names, in their languages, in their environment, in their heritage of struggle, in their unity, in their capabilities and ultimately in themselves. It makes them see their past as one wasteland of non-achievement and it makes them want to distance themselves from that wasteland. [92] For, like all Maori people, Duff was brought up in an era of neo-colonial domination in which imperial cultural knowledge was upheld as the beacon of excellence and the chosen vehicle to explicate European ontology and epistemology; as Abdul Janmohamed has stated, “the ideological function of all ‘imaginary’ and some ‘symbolic’ colonialist literature is to articulate and justify the moral authority of the colonizer and—by positing the inferiority of the native as a metaphysical fact—to mask the pleasure the colonizer derives from that authority.” [93] The manifold contradictions and complications which must result for a bright person whose bloodline comprises elements of both colonizer and officially colonized may only be fitfully imagined, but Duff once let his guard slip about this agonizing ‘Catch 22’ syndrome in a column: Being of two races was another cause for suffering. You just couldn’t win. The pakeha you upstaged in exams said: “Well, you’re still a Maori anyway.” And some of my Maori relations when I went penny diving at weekends to Whaka would tell me, “Go home! You’re a white maggot. And you’re a clever dick.”[94] One recalls Du Bois’ haunting words: “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity.”[95] Is Duff a cross-over intellectual, the Salman Rushdie of New Zealand, as he once feared being called ? [96] He is certainly acutely aware of his hybrid status and has talked of his schooldays as a time of “social-spiritual turmoil”, noting that the conflict between his Maori and Pakeha sides is “the curse of being half-caste: you’re never one nor the other. But I think of myself as a Maori….Emotionally I’m a Maori; intellectually I’m probably not.” [97] Again the classic Caliban-Prospero dyad appears as Duff recalls himself as a “troubled half-caste Maori youth” [98] struggling “inside the inadequate, uncoping, angry, frustrated mind” [99] to emerge out of the chrysalis and away from the maleficent influence of his Sycorax-like native mother. In recounting the first time he ran away from home (at age 11, about a year after his parents split up), Duff has written “I do recall this achingly hopeful feeling that someone would be at the other end of my adventure rainbow with a pot full of love to give me. Motherly love, I guess.”[100] And, anent this sad commentary, in March 1967,when Duff was 16 and serving time for robbery in Waikeria Borstal, he read of the death of his beloved grandfather Oliver Duff in The New Zealand Herald while in the kitchen and knew the force of tears. One of his mentors had gone: another loss. And as if to underscore the lack of ‘mothering’, his grief-stricken solo father “had forgotten to inform me of the sad news”, Alan has written, adding that ‘Pat’ Duff visited Alan “soon after the funeral and apologised for not thinking to let me know”.[101] Although Gowan received the legal custody of his children, Alan had chosen to live with his Uncle Tupu and Aunty Baby two miles away at Whaka village and the reasons for this had much to do with peer factors: as a shy youngster with low self-esteem, he “perceived that most of the Maori kids had low self-esteem” and were also shy. Duff adds “I wanted to be with my mates” who, like him, loved to play rugby. Also “they liked to fight; I liked to fight, so there was plenty of fun to be had there.” [102] + + It is clearly a premise of this paper that mythic and psychodynamic interpretations of authors are permissible and useful provided that their approximative and metaphorical character—as conceptual rather than precise tools— is always kept firmly in mind. Mythic templates from Shakespeare’s The Tempest (such as the Ariel, Caliban , Sycorax and Prospero archetypes) seem suggestive to Duff’s own highly personal tempest. Meredith Anne Skura reminds us that when Shakespeare created Caliban as a New World native The Tempest was “the first work of literature” to allude to such a person [103], thereby forging the most potent cartoon image of the indigene. The mythos of the witch-mother sent into exile and conceiving a sub-human, half-caste child (Caliban) and imprisoning her servant Ariel (an oddly colonialist gesture for a coloured woman to perform) and later dying, abandoning her angry, alienated and cursing son until the magical advent of the bookish European hermit-magus, Prospero, definitely resonates with the ‘Duff family romance’ in certain quite specific ways. The most penetrating one lies in what Skura has identified as the uniqueness of the Caliban portrait (the ‘field Negro’): being that in Caliban for the first time Shakespeare shows “will”, or narcissistic self-assertion, in its purest and simplest form as the original “grandiosity” or “megalomania” of a child….Like a child he thinks often about his mother. [104] Skura adds that Caliban’s childish lawlessness enrages Prospero: “To a man like Prospero, whose life has been spent learning a self-discipline in which he is not yet totally adept, Caliban can seem like a child who must be controlled, and who, like a child, is murderously enraged at being controlled.” [105] It is hard not to discern in this description echoes of Dr Duff trying to assist his wayward nephew in 1965 (“A devil, a born devil, on whose nature/Nurture can never stick; on whom my pains,/Humanely taken, all, all lost, quite lost” [106] ) as it must have seemed when Alan tramped off to borstal, even though we must remember that the Caliban stereotype does not fully fit the Duff template inasmuch that while both Caliban and Alan are half-castes and very angry men, the real-life literary boxer did not plot murder even though he has boasted of his libidinal capacities and achievements with well over one hundred Mirandas. And, of course, the Prospero figure accepted his Caliban (“This thing of darkness I/Acknowledge mine”[107]) and, forgiving him, released Caliban to the fate of his own choosing. Fortunately in real-life, as in the play, the ending was comic: Roger and Pat Duff had not (as a Prospero-composite) wasted their pains and their Caliban eventually dedicated himself to worthy ends: “I’ll be wise hereafter/And seek for grace”[108]. It was to be a protracted and immensely painful path, however, as out of the mist and steam attests, yet for all that a deeply valuable one. He aroha whaereere, he potiki piri poho [‘A mother’s love, a breast-clinging child’] That aspects of this costly personal struggle help to generate really insightful art was confirmed in 1998 when Duff, about to launch his extraordinary novel, Both Sides of the Moon, stated that “anyone who writes a novel will tell you it’s a two-way deal where, for your book purchase, we share part of ourselves with you.”[109] And, given Duff’s own background, it is not difficult to understand why his Opus I , Once Were Warriors (launched 1 November 1990), has a symphonic structure (Duff writes that “A novel sits inside a writer’s head like a musical composition” [110]) with sound mixing and verbal amplification and softening in a text which embodies debate, contradiction and clashing perspectives and which ends with the accusing second-person plural (the collective ‘you’) addressing the total Kiwi polity. That novel—as Witi Ihimaera has said [111]—is a haka and also akin to the repeated ‘Whaddarya’ yelled (if not flung) at the audience which closed Greg McGee’s play Foreskin’s Lament (1980), challenging everyone to face the problems and to try to be part of resolving them. Christina Thompson has gone so far as to agree with Ihimaera but she has glossed the thrust of Duff’s work as “a challenge, in the form of insult, to Maori to prove their own worth” but one in which he proclaims “a reassertion of Maori power to determine the course of Maori lives.” [112] Thompson very sensibly emphasizes that it is “grossly patronizing” to suggest that “Duff has proved himself a ratbag of the highest order by suggesting that Maori compete on Pakeha terms.” [113] This is, in fact, the key ground of difference between Duff and Andrew Vercoe: how Maori are best to surmount the perils of what (describing The Tempest) Leslie Fiedler calls “the black-fair encounter”.[114] Fiedler was correct to insist that Caliban’s label as a savage and deformed slave (an amalgam of the New World Minotaur and homme sauvage) “raises themes of colonialism and race” [115], Caliban being an enchained and colonized victim of European perfidy and a degraded man colluding with Stephano and Trinculo in violent revenge against the enslaving white magician (Prospero) and thus “preparing to become the first drunken Indian in Western literature” and an “ithyphallic” native man to boot. [116] But when Fiedler rightly describes the unregenerate shadow-clown Caliban dogging Prospero’s footsteps until his death, writing of “the Caliban principle”[117], one is returned to Poe’s William Wilson, a man with a bifurcated lower and higher self. Poe’s ‘William Wilson’ is a potent pre-Freudian story which explores the tortuous intrapsychic conflict within one self radically divided against itself: the studious, bookish, conscientized, scrutinizing and accusing Super-ego constantly hounding and warning its Caliban-Id composite (who is fond of bad company, extravagant spending, alcohol and gambling and is later exposed, like the mature Alan Duff, as a cheat and criminal fraudster). This remarkable text (which runs along the surface on lines of a creaky Gothicism) explores the duality of the doppelganger ego brilliantly but does so unproblematically, inasmuch as there is no ethnic dynamic in the mix to further complicate the escalating psychic stresses which Poe transcribes.[118] That acknowledgement made, a symbolic reading of the text (in which the Wilson self eventually commits moral suicide) may accommodate the hard-earned wisdom of a man exposed to the almost tectonic pressures/fissures of growing up with the extreme stereotypes which comprised his biracial heritage (viz., the emotionally reserved, principled, book-learned, scripted and quietist, almost Puritan Pakeha strain and the stereotypical undisciplined, ‘off-the-wall’ emotionally volatile and uninhibited and careless, occasionally violent and spontaneous/’flash-point’ Maori one) which may be loosely categorized (after Fiedler) as the Prospero and Caliban principles. Just as Prospero eventually acknowledged Caliban as his, so Alan Duff has been given insufficient credit for eventually effecting a merger of these almost Faustian dyads, and it is the creative tension, uneasy fusion and splitting apart of these imperfectly reconciled elements in Duff’s psyche which profoundly mirror and project the unease at the heart of New Zealand’s officially (but uneasily and haplessly) ‘bicultural’ polity—and this homology of micro and macro pressures may well account for both the power and unsettling ambiguities which lie at the base of Duff’s concerns. Such tensions and often indecorous contradictions erupt rudely, even crassly, in Duff’s writing to disturb the prissy surface pieties of our official ethnic discourse and Duff is easily blamed for exposing these raw and unwholesome, cross-grained vistas to public comprehension. This is a variant of his own (perhaps reactive) game of shooting the messenger: the honest (if flawed) writer who provides harsh and grating perceptions and insights into what s/he judges is really there. Looking on dispassionately at the outbursts of this fascinating and sometimes frustrating man of great sensitivity and artfully disguised passion, one can see Duff juggling his prose between the twin principles (i.e. between an expressive, passionate, fiery and ‘in your face’ Caliban mode and the Apollonian rationalism and sharpness of analytical insight deemed the Prospero mode), trying to enact a constructive synthesis from the clashing dialectic. In such moments, Alan Duff recalls a man on the high wire, swaying this way and that as he trims his ‘act’ to the winds and countervailing forces he is trying to understand and surmount. This can be a heroic undertaking, filled with risk and high daring, not to mention a punishing level of self-exposure, for which he has received very little credit. If Te Maire Tau could lament Roger Duff’s lack of exposure to the writings of Sir Karl Popper in 1943 (when Popper was actually working at the same University), there can be no question that Duff’s nephew is strongly imbued with Popperian urgings (theTaha Pakeha inheritance) such as Popper’s espousal of ‘critical rationalism’ against the pre-scientific and dogmatic thinking of closed tribal societies and the Austrian’s conviction that “clashes of values may be valuable, and indeed essential for an open society” and, furthermore, that any human society lacking conflict “would be a society not of friends but of ants.” [119] For Duff is committed to what Popper called an objectivist approach, counterattacking subjectivist and essentialist positions in search of hypotheses which are arguable and testable and in which real solutions to real problems are sought even as one acknowledges (philosophically) that these will always, at best, be provisional. In his war against dogmatic thinking Alan Duff is certainly also committed to Popper’s ‘human world 3’: the realm of theories, books, ideas, problems and debate, and to Popper’s credo: We owe to the interaction with world 3 our rationality, the practice of critical and self-critical thinking and acting….It is through the attempt to see objectively the work we have done—that is to see it critically—and to do it better, through the interaction between our actions and their objective results, that we can transcend our talents, and ourselves. [120] As Duff put it, “In a nutshell, all I am is a seeker of the truth, and if the truth happens to expose me while I am at it, so be it. I am prepared to take the risk: I’ll keep walking out on that limb of truth until I drop off or until I find another tree to step onto.” [121] In his second column, Duff advertised his prognosis that social salvation for Maori lies in “the tools of reality”, such as “variant concepts, [and] the dynamics of discussional discovery”. [122] Given this commitment it is hardly remarkable that Duff should clash with the radical and highly agitprop outpourings of young firebrands such as Andrew Eruera Vercoe and with what Duff would see as Witi Ihimaera’s vivid misinterpretation of Duff’s own metaphorization: that “we will not be content to be on a bus that continues to deliver us to Pine Block”.[123] Vercoe cited Denese Henare’s vision for her tipuna—that she will “continue to argue the Treaty [for]….Maori don’t want to be passengers on the bus. We want to be driving the bus, with our hands on the steering wheel” (Vision Aotearoa).[124] That inflexion is entirely consonant with the implications of Duff’s novel (if not of his often simplistic polemical writings). Henare’s metaphor of the ‘Bus Ride to Justice’ obviously derives from the U.S. Civil Rights era after Rosa Parks initiated the Montgomery Bus Boycott against cruel Jim Crow segregation laws in 1955. Douglas Brinkley points out that this act of concerted mass defiance provided the cause for the NAACP to follow its 1954 test-case (Brown v Board of Education) in overturning the racist apartheid (‘separate but equal’) ruling of the U.S. Supreme Court in Plessy v Ferguson. Brinkley notes that from 1 December 1955 “the phrase ‘back of the bus’ became a synonym for, and a rallying cry against, racial discrimination” in the United States. [125] Beth does liken Maori slavery to the Afro-American experience but in an inverse manner that would not delight the new traditionalist fundamentalists (“Us Maoris used to practise slavery just like them poor Negroes had to endure in America…Yet to read the newspapers, on the TV every damn day, you’d think we’re descended from a packa angels, and it’s the Pakeha who’s the devil”, Beth tells her children adjacent to the Wainui pa of her traditional upbringing [p.103]). Certainly Ihimaera has missed Duff’s point in Warriors: one of the ‘Pine Blockers’ watches Beth’s culture clinics and decides to join in or risk ‘missing the bus’, which shows that Duff’s entire output to date is designed to contradict and controvert the nay-sayers to Beth Heke’s vague dreams of bettering her lot (as the voices she hears in her head in reflective moments chorus, “Come on, Beth, don’t kid yourself. You ain’t going nowhere but Pine Block” [Once Were Warriors [126]). Duff, just like Ihimaera and Vercoe, is ranged against such dispiriting and negative views of Maori agency and he used Beth as a central reflector-character to articulate both the deep frustration, talent and energy (wairua) of her people, having married Jake and while knowing him to be a “fist-happy” man, she “could see the, you know, potential in him” (p.9). Beth is also a sterling fighter (p.13) and warrioress (change-agent and role-model [p.132]) who refuses to be cowed by adverse circumstances. A superficial reading of Beth’s opening indictment of her people’s apparent complicity in the slum-life of Pine Block (Ch.1: ‘A Woman in Pine Block’) can be read as a reprise of Roger Duff’s somewhat haughty ruminations as Beth catalogues the street-urchins and incipient Calibans of her Two Lakes suburb, but this is to misunderstand both the compassion and the justified anger (sometimes even rage) at wasted possibility in Beth’s lost community (‘Lost Tribe’ [pp.30-31]) just as many have misread Alan Duff’s insider perspective and seen it as confluent with Roger Duff’s academic outsider moralizing. Consider the moving passage, which resists the socially predestined ‘race role’, as Nig is initiated into the Brown Fists: Talkin tough and rough, we ain’t grooving to no sensitivity, whatever ya call it, it sucks. So then their sentences had little length. Short spurts. More like grunts. And curses. Fucks. Cunts. Wankah. That sorta thing. (Yet inside all this unspokenness like some uncoiled spring of beauty, unnerstandin, just achin to unleash itself) (p.141). Is this not empathy? I can partly appreciate Sue McCauley’s ‘argument’ that 1990 would turn out to be a year of significance for New Zealand not “because of a landslide election, or the 150th anniversary of a moot point” (the Treaty of Waitangi) but 1990 will be (should be)[marked as] the year in which Once Were Warriors was first published. Alan Duff—a name that will soon be as familiar as retrenchment or bicultural—has given us this terrible and wonderful novel. Interestingly, Beth Heke is somewhat like her creator as a mixed-race person (“being about half with white blood on both sides of her parentage” [p.19]), and the life-fiction parallel is knowingly sustained by the fact that the Hekes live at 27 Rimu Street (p.55), when Pat and Kuia Duff lived in their black creosoted state unit at 29 Matai Street (which bisected Rimu Street, Rotorua). The point is subtly made, however, that the Duffs were not the Hekes and that, unlike Duff, Beth has escaped the dichotomy of having a well educated father (B.Sc) and a mother who, he says, “in contrast, was an uneducated woman of violence” (a woman who left school in Standard Four): Whatever has made me whatever the fuck I am, was having the two extremes of upbringing: of education and reason and rational thinking on the one hand and the absolute opposite on the other. But if my father was uneducated and white he would be violent too—I’ve no doubt—but coming home from school sometimes and seeing all this violence, waking up in the middle of the night and the bloody cops are there and the thumping and the blood and the carry-ons, obviously that shaped my outlook. [127] If this seems to be skirting the biographical/intentional fallacy, George Steiner reminds us that We must read as if the temporal and executive setting of a text does matter. The historical surroundings, the cultural and formal circumstances, the biological stratum, what we can construe or conjecture of an author’s intentions, constitute vulnerable aids. We know that they ought to be stringently ironized and examined for what there is in them of subjective hazard. They matter none the less. They enrich the levels of awareness and enjoyment, they generate constraints on the complacencies and licence of interpretative anarchy. [128] Ihimaera, in rejecting what he calls “the victim-blaming, Maori-bashing Duff stuff”, seems to view Duff’s journey in simple absolutes: as a progress/regress from the colonized Caliban man to the neoconservative Prospero (i.e., reverting to the call of the stronger, in this case, Pakeha Duff, bloodline), the affluent and quietist master spirit who wishes to counsel the restive natives to accept their lot in a happy cosmos in which Vercoe propounds Duff to argue “what he claims to be the only truth—that Maori have no-one else to blame but themselves.”[129] This is too reductive (in keeping with the fervid and occasionally sloppy rhetoric of Vercoe’s parallel ranting against Duff’s rant in Maori). What Duff has in fact articulated is a profound belief—he would deem it a prognosis—that the inherited Maori social infrastructure has demonstrably failed, being in essence too rigid, simplistic and generative of narrow thinking, locking his people into a victim entitlement mentality and to a bleak, futureless status quo existence. In 1991 Duff rejected the liberal diagnosis of colonialist oppression, doubting that the Maori ‘Life’ model “is the epitome of success” and arguing that what made him a criminal was not “Pakeha oppression”; that “In fact, if it was anything outside myself, then it was Maori. It was having as role models adult Maoris who coupled heavy drinking with extreme violence.” [130] Duff wrote that : Violence was our everyday witness. It was the way you sorted out your differences, solved your disputes, expressed the range of your passions, from frustration to a grossly warped notion of love. If it moved and it upset you, you punched it. Smacked it. Smashed it. Donged it. Whatever it took to shut it up or teach it a lesson, that is the behavioural model you grew up knowing. Life was violent. Life was Maori. (But why?) [131] The Duff prognosis is for education (Prospero and his books) and for cultural and intellectual diversity (for questioning, lateral thinking, self-analysis, self-criticism and irreverence) but his critics have been too ready to conflate Duff the feisty columnist with Duff the more sensitive author. For instance, Once Were Warriors opens with Beth Heke cursing her rich white neighbours, alienated both from her culture and her land (Duff knows and understands the dual meaning of the concept of “alienation” and expresses its terrible and paradoxically sapping vibrancy throughout most of Once Were Warriors), and at the hope-affirming tangi which closes the otherwise grim text, attention is playfully drawn (for those with eyes to see it) to the waka-shaped cloud forming high above the ceremony: The last refrains of sweetsad hymn more mighty than the departing rumble and roar of Browns [a Maori gang, who had set up Nig Heke for death]. And a sky stayed blue. And that cloud formation had changed shape—Oh, but only if you’re looking for that sorta thing (Ch.19: ‘So Life, It Is for Those Who Fight’,p.198). Similarly, no one seems to have noticed the mythic undertone underlying the book’s pivotal event (the suicide of Grace Heke): that the father-daughter incest not only mirrors the social reality of endogamy in certain contexts but relates powerfully to the founding Maori myth of ‘The Girl of Dawn’—Hine-titama , whose father, Tane, cohabited with and married her (and out of shame at this primal act of incest she left the world of light into the dark world, becoming Hine-nui-te-Po, goddess of death and the underworld). Grace wonders “why she herself felt this aching in her heart whenever she thought about her father, which aching felt like love. And such a lovely night of stars above” (p.49). But all this notwithstanding, some of Vercoe’s polemic does have real point , such as his strong doubt that “the social panacea can be found in schools, polytechs and universities alone”: I can not and will not accept that our salvation is just a matter of getting a mainstream education, changing your attitude or participating in cash incentive schemes as Mr Duff has suggested. It’s not as simple as that. Institutionalised education on its own is not going to solve the problems Maori face today.[132] Vercoe’s proffered solution for Maori is the need for “a relinquishment of power by government” , an end to state paternalism and the restoration of tribal rangatiratanga instead of the demeaning ‘born-again’ New Rightism of corporate Maori warriors who used to be street radicals (he seems to be lining up Donna Awatere-Huata here)—as people who “have become mates with the very personalities who for years fed the racist animal” and “have commodified the Treaty in a way, extorting money from a covenant and making a sham of the whole process of liberation.” [133] In fact, Vercoe closes his response to Duff (‘A Letter to Alan’) by recycling Duff’s bus metaphor, accusing Duff himself of missing the bus and stating that the disposition of his charismatic anti-hero, Jake Heke, “is most emphatically a derivative of the world you purport to sustain, and that world guarantees that Maori will never have power.” [134] Duff saw this, but only through fogged-up lenses: in Chapter 16 of Warriors (‘Deep Tattoo’) he has Chief Te Tupaea engaged in spellbinding oratory in Pine Block and telling his dispirited auditors that the Treaty of Waitangi was a sacred contract between equals that the English only signed “when they knew we would never give up”: A contract! IT WAS A CONTRACT. Then silence. And just the coughs and sighs and rustle of movement. Te Tupaea just stood there, legs astride, fists on suited sides. A contract…Whispering it, so the ones at the back had to ask what’d he say, and then their whispering dying down. And Te Tupaea again whispering: Which—they—broke (p.179). Te Tupaea has hit the point but his historical analysis parallels Duff’s (in being flawed: the Treaty was not signed by a race of defeated people, minus Article Two, after the Land Wars!) and it veers away sharply from any political engagement with the power culture which marginalized his people as Duff refuses to hold the other Treaty partner to account for these massive collective abuses of due process and constitutionality. Instead we have a big haka and references to the true spirit of warriorhood (moko chiselled onto flesh), and accusations against the Lost Tribe of alcohol dependence and a false culture of machoism (pp.180-81). Cut to Fade Out before any dangerously leftist ideas (what Sewell once called ‘the beastly communism of the Maori’) can take root. The Chief preaches a positive but politically naïve code of self-responsibility and likens the ongoing Treaty breaches to a storm (a one-off event), making use of a spectacularly false analogy of the kind frequently found in Duff’s columns: So what? he asked them in this booming voice that didn’t need no microphone. Do I accuse the storm that destroys my crops? (Well, come ta think of it that way…) No! No, I don’t accuse the storm. I clean up. THEN I PLANT AGAIN! (p.182.) How is one meant to be able to accuse an inanimate force of nature with which one can have no definable contractual relationship? Andrew Vercoe and others could make highly effective use of this ‘plant again’ motif, translating it into a re-negotiation of the original broken contract and to the planting/creation of new models of bicultural governance, but neither Duff nor his chiefly mouthpiece will have any truck with macro-political arguments and solutions, even as we can applaud his micro-politics of self-renewal. (One cannot stifle the suspicion that Duff’s Chief echoes Tupaia, the Tahitian aristocrat whom Captain Cook brought to New Zealand in 1769 and who helped to usher in a wider conceptual world, Te Ao Pakeha, to the Maori mind.) But the big lacuna in Duff’s argument is that he cannot perceive that the kinds of worthy changes which he urges upon urban Maori are likely to aggregate over time into positive self-worth and high levels of civic participation that will be expressed in coherent and politically nuanced demands for a restitution/re-constitution of the broken Treaty partnership of 1840. That Duff would sternly reject this strategy of transforming core power structures is apparent by his determination to publish his haka (or was it a one-man taua?) before 1990 ended and even making express reference to that date (being the 150th anniversary of the signing across New Zealand of the Treaty of Waitangi) inside the text of Once Were Warriors, a seemingly apolitical novel but one which was situationally rich in a challenging conceptual (socio-political) polemic which actually seems close to Angus Calder’s recent, rather one-sided comment that “There is much to be said for wishing Maori and pakeha were bound by the politics of the gift rather than the contractual obligations of Treaty partners”.[135] Also, Duff showed that he was aware of, but vehemently rejected, ‘colonialist excuse-making’ in the closing portions of Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (1993).However Vercoe is right to spot the core fallacy in such idealistic, apolitical (and ultimately worthy) aspirations (Calder’s gift dynamic), insisting that Duff’s position “suggests that Maori have always had the power to make a difference” when that has, demonstrably, not been the case given that in dealing with Maori generically (let alone in iwi terms, over time) the colonial and neo-colonial state never ceded Maori the due exercise of their collective mana and rangatiratanga as guaranteed to them in Article II of the Treaty, “despite what some of the most prominent commentators on law have to say.” [136] Vercoe’s concluding thoughts are far from the ‘tripe’ which Duff the accommodationist (and descendant of kupapa forebears) has slated them to be: If the Once Were Warriors scenario is to diminish, then the Crown must give Maori the resources and the power to deal with their problems in their way. We cannot make any significant strides forward as a nation—socially and economically—until the veil of paternalism is lifted. I would hope that our destiny will be one in which we regard each other as equal in terms of what each culture has to offer. Jake Heke has a future in Aotearoa, but he can’t achieve it on his own. Like his victims, he too needs strong support, willing hearts and open minds to lift him and provide him with the mana that will allow him to make a positive mark on the world. [137] Given that ‘heke’ is an intransitive verb meaning to descend from or to migrate, Vercoe’s parting rumination on the wider cultural significance of a redeemed Jake Heke (as symbol) is potent and pregnant with possibility as it takes on what Fleras and Maaka have termed a long-standing “reluctance to challenge the constitutional first principles of White settler governance” (the neo-colonizing framework) and the lingering effects of a demeaning “colonial clientelism” and guardianship in the settler dominion of New Zealand. As Fleras and Maaka note, “Colonialist paradigms refuse to exit graciously, since indigenous demands collide with a host of deeply embedded constitutional principles.” [138] Duff simply cannot concede the force of the point that indigenes are not akin to voluntary migrants but, instead, were involuntarily colonized “and ruthlessly exposed to social and cultural pressures not of their choosing” so that they “perceive themselves as a people or a nation, in possession of sovereignty with or without formal Crown recognition, and as a social reality whose animating logic resonates around the principle of a relatively autonomous political community rather than the struggles of race, classes, or genders.” [139] The very concept of a sub-national ethnicity given constitutional rights to a degree of relational autonomy from the main polis without involving secession (=micro-sovereignty) would strike Alan Duff as monstrously absurd, if not inconceivable, given that he sensibly makes no claims to be a political thinker and seems to regard the paramountcy of the Crown (indivisible Parliamentary supremacy, authority and entitlement) with complete equanimity and—paradoxically for a libertarian ideologue—evinces no comprehension of citizen oppression at the hands of settler state governance agents and agencies. It is precisely this blindness to Article II Treaty rights of Maori and to the possibility of what Maaka and Fleras term “overlapping yet multiple sovereignties” [140]—what I call a transformational politics of co-sovereignty—which has generated most of the opprobrium which has been directed at Duff in his own land. It is also why Otto Heim is spectacularly inaccurate to use the language of express intention in stating that in Once Were Warriors Duff was (after Keri Hulme) “the second writer to commit himself to an exploration of the broken family as a measure of the postcolonial disruption of Maori society.” [141] However Heim makes a disturbing analysis of “the novel’s primitivist view of Maori culture”, with its relentless “diagnosis of the ‘Maori problem’…that the people are locked in a perpetual Girardian mimetic crisis from which there is no escape except through sacrifice”—a logic and “dialectic of desire and appropriation characteristic of a much wider popular culture” [142] and, also, found in the early writings of Roger Duff. Unlike other Maori authors, Alan Duff the mainstreamer refuses to fight Pakeha constructions as he does not recognize Maori culture as an organic, holistic entity (which should not have Eurocentric boundaries) and his dominant modern writing models have all been ‘European’ (William Faulkner, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Hubert Selby, Jr., E.L. Doctorow, Earle Thompson, Oliver Duff and Gerard Manley Hopkins). In this I am reminded of George Steiner’s profound analysis that Liberalism must espouse the view that the very notion of the racial is wholly suspect, that it has no demonstrable content or meaning. It is a shibboleth of superstition and obscurantism, there is no such thing, there is nothing unmixed, the mixtures are beyond human computation, the melting pots are everywhere. [143] But Steiner rightly—and disapprovingly— insists that our world is tribal “to an unprecedented extent” and that the “dislocation of modernity has fuelled atavisms of enracinement”, a centripetal movement designed to counter “the centrifugal forces of modernity.” [144] And concomitant with these trends goes the production of canonic texts and textualities, enshrining the ethnos (national types).. Duff would hang his hat with Steiner’s radical, anarchic individualism against the claims of privileged communities: There is no synagogue, no ecclesia, no polis, no nation, no ethnic community which is not not worth leaving….I repeat: there is no community of love, no family, no interest, caste, profession or social class not worth resigning from. [145] VI The Contest Within: ‘An Ordinary Maori Who is Quite Good at Writing’ So the young Author, panting after fame, And the long honours of a lasting name, Intrusts his happiness to human kind, More false, more cruel, than the seas or wind. SAMUEL JOHNSON. [146] Duff created Once Were Warriors in a Dickensian mode: the novelist as a social documentarian—like a cameraman with a microphone making a cinema verite ‘report on experience’ (to adapt John Mulgan’s phrase). Duff primarily wrote Warriors because he had something very serious to say. Certainly that is how Lynne Loates viewed the book, writing as a nervous, affluent white liberal hugely discomfited by the gruelling insights heaved her way: “I hate to say this, but I’d feel more comfortable if this novel had been set in Soweto, rather than in New Zealand.” Loates described Warriors as “a mind-rush of punch-drunk, colloquial jargon” and “a saga of hard truths.” [147] Poet John Summers added that in “this stream-of-consciousness chronicle…while much is explained, nothing is condoned”, writing perceptively of “Duff’s own fearless”, Blakean ‘mental fight’: Well, we’ve had “Native Son”, “None But the Lonely Heart”, “Knock on Any Door” and so on, all good clean personal tragedies. “Warriors” is more, the thrown voices of a whole people channelled to us through one mouth and lifting beyond tragedy: great. How great I hesitate to say of this not faultless novel, but great for all of us here and now, a great prophetic work. [148] In his first newspaper column, Duff described himself as “no learned scholar” but as a man who “came here the long and hard way. I have no academic qualifications, I haven’t even done an elementary course in journalism. I’m just an ordinary Maori who is quite good at writing.”[149] When one reads his immensely moving memoir, out of the mist and steam (1999), a line of Jill Ker Conway’s comes to mind as she wrote of “the misguided warriors…whose occupations call for the arts of peace and negotiation but who know only the call of battle.” [150] Yet this ought not to occasion surprise in Duff’s case, for as Allan and Louise Hanson have noted, the ideal image of a Maori man in traditional culture “was as a fierce, defiant warrior: the blustrously violent, tongue-thrusting, eye-bulging figure postured in the haka (war dance) and fixed in so many wood carvings.” The Hansons write of this “bellicose male vocation” [151] and we need also to be mindful (as has been emphasized already) of Alan Duff’s temporal location: that, for instance, in 1967 (when he would have been a Lower Sixth Former) 88.5% of Maori pupils left school unqualified while the European figure was just over 50%; that, as K.Brown observed, “Maori pupils tend to leave school at 15 years old and work in labouring jobs to earn big money” and many Maori pupils’ “aspirations are similar to those of low status Europeans.” [152] J.K. Hunn (1960) drew attention to the fact that in proportion to numbers there should have been seven times as many Maori sixth-formers, and the Currie Commission (1962) reported that where 29.7% of Pakeha pupils left school with School Certificate or a higher qualification, only 4.8% of Maori students did so. In Duff’s case this was a real concern of his teachers at Christchurch Boys’ High School as he was catching the equivalent of “the Pine Block teenage boy disease: he [was] starting to scowl at the world” (Warriors, p.45) and priming himself up for further incarceration. In out of the mist and steam Duff writes of “a sense of worthlessness I have always had” (p.142). He also refers to his “peculiar mind” (p.175) and of his duality as both dux of Glenholme Primary School and bad boy, behaviourally at odds with authoritarian and dogmatic teachers (p.20). The heartfelt dedication of his memoir is to his father, “for always holding reason above the storms of emotion, and for providing enlightenment”, and the “unlikely marriage union” (p.17) between Gowan Duff and Hinau (‘Kuia’) Josephine Raimona was clearly the springboard for Duff’s statement via Jimmy in Both Sides of the Moon: “I am two races, two cultures, and most of all, two different thinkings. I am in a way against myself. But I can speak for both.” This mental duality, this quality of being continually (or at least too frequently) set against oneself recurs (p.42). Alan credits his gentle father as a key influence for always “challenging conventional thinking” and for “never allowing anything but truth to be his judgement” (p.21) but these were quietly heroic modes, well beyond his son’s ken for many a year. Describing Gowan Duff’s tragic battle with brain cancer, Alan writes beautifully of their parting conversation and of his own deep “need of encouragement and affirmation”, and “Alan the insecure one” (p.23) records once feeling distinctly alienated from the Duff-Sinclair clan (“I had stopped belonging….It just seemed to me that my destiny was going to be significantly different—and certainly of worse outcome—than theirs” [p.62]). Later, when in Waikeria, Alan was berated by the borstal psychiatrist for ‘letting down your illustrious family name’ (p.137). He has conceded “I have always liked breaking the rules” (p.87) and this, combined with the peaceable Duff inheritance, clearly fuelled an endo and then intrapsychic conflict of troubling proportions for Alan Duff (relating his arrival as a London ‘crim’, Duff writes that he “desired only personal power, over my internal psychological enemy, namely myself”[p.195]). Having narrated an unhappy episode as a young man in Christchurch and then joining up with his old Whaka mate Mark Takarangi in Wellington, Alan describes them both at this time, unsparingly, as ‘losers’: We’re conceptually lost, don’t have the armoury, which is knowledge, which is application, which is everything we are not (p.169). The views of Alan’s mother, ‘Kuia’ Wrigley (formerly Duff), were finally given some space in 1994 in a feature article and these provide an interesting counterpoint to Duff’s theme that his mother was to blame for his troubles. This is confirmed in a disturbing willingness to ‘knock her’ as Duff put it to me in 1991: in his memoir he recalls dreaming of her as a witch (Sycorax to Caliban); “I knew by the age of five that I was scared of my mother” he writes (p.40) even as he recalls her more tender qualities (pp.40-41). Yet there is still the shattering line (as he recalls her arrests for breaching the peace) that “She doesn’t deserve the title, nor the name” of ‘Mrs Duff’ (p.38) at such moments. Duff recalls that her violent outbursts (one which landed Pat Duff in hospital) led him to feel “thoroughly and deeply miserable”, even contemplating suicide (p.55) and that the antics of ‘the Queen of Matai Street’ caused his shyness and onsets of periodic and chronic facial blushing: I railed against the world, my teachers, other students, any figure of authority….I sought out my ilk, the lost boys, the considered troublemakers, the rebels of the school. Mostly they were Maori….We weren’t really aware of how our low self-esteem made us appear, these pictures of sour-faced little shits who spoke in mumbles and laconic bursts of anger and smart-arse talk, who spent our idle hours getting up to mischief or picking fights (pp.96 & 97). Duff’s sister Josie (who was battered by her mother) was reported as saying that Alan has used his mother “as a prop” to explain his later problems which were largely his.[153] Kuia Wrigley recalls that before she left Gowan Duff, he always took the side of his children against her and even called her ignorant, proscribing her from speaking Maori in the home, from serving the preferred (‘fatty’) food her relations ate and from allowing the children to attend Sunday school. Mrs Wrigley added: He [Pat Duff] couldn’t see any fault in his children. No, and Alan was very arrogant. Actually , the whole lot of them were arrogant. You see, they’d had the European upbringing. [154] This is a plausible account, re-emphasizing that Prospero integrationist and Eurocentric template of intellectual superiority and effortless authority in the Duff self-image. Moving back to Alan’s troubled secondary schooling (his last brush with formal education), in 1965 at Christchurch Boys’ High (where his mother argues Pat sent his sons “because even the [local] Pakeha kids’ English wasn’t good enough! That’s the type of person he was” [155]), Alan is remembered by his English master as a nice, small boy and “the tidiest, cleanest pupil in the school.” Colin Macintosh taught Alan English in Form 4 (IVSM, an able class) and recalls that the Headmaster, Charles Caldwell, brought him in gladly as a Maori student (having told the almost all-male staff that it worried him that Christchurch Boys’ had no Maori students other than one Pete Woods).[156] Macintosh remembers young Alan as a stylish rugby player of sinuous moves and also that he wrote beautiful prose, insisting that Duff “had a spirit of mind that the staff failed to appreciate.” Duff was a member of the school’s athletics team and played in its 12th XV rugby side, which won all but one of its local games. There were new ‘young bucks’ on the staff at that time, including Brian Brooks (now a distinguished labour law academic at Victoria University) and the All Black John Graham, and Bruce Mason’s The Pohutukawa Tree was a new set English text. However, in spite of several thematic and character cross-linkages (especially that of cultural renewal) between it and Once Were Warriors, Macintosh confirms that Mason’s play was not used at Form 4 level at that time. Macintosh was very unhappy that Alan was determined to leave school at the end of Fourth Form (having turned 15 by then) and told him he was capable of doing a University degree and (cringing now as he recalls this) urged Alan: ‘You’ve got to come back; you owe it to your people’. He recalls that Alan told him ‘I want to be happy’ and wanted a life of no stress, to live like a barman uncle up the East Coast. That inspiring English master, Macintosh, saw into the heart of Duff’s talent, as did Alan’s brother Nick. Some years after severing his contact with formalized education Alan, aged 21, had a job in Auckland and renewed contact with Nick, who was studying for an M.A. in philosophy at Auckland University. Meeting in a pub, Nick Duff gave Alan a copy of the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), perhaps sensing that the ‘Dark Sonnets’ in the Poems (1918) would speak to his troubled younger brother: He saw more in me than I did, for upon being directed to Hopkins’ ‘terrible sonnets’, written during his period of great internal, spiritual struggle, I stood there in this Parnell pub reading them in an increasingly stunned state (out of the mist, p.170). Years later, when working on Once Were Warriors, Duff realized that his prose rhythms were echoing Hopkins’ abrupt sprung rhythm. There is also little doubt that Hopkins’ ‘inscape’ (physical descriptions) had an influence upon Duff’s ‘instress’ (the author’s distinctive stylistic impress). In fact Duff has acknowledged that “it was from Hopkins’ words [that] I truly fell in love with the written word”: It was the sprung rhythm Hopkins achieved, his use of alliteration and what he called “instress” which played on the inner stress he perceived in words and so constructed sentences in which this stress could emerge, like a coiled spring, or a slower plant-like emergence.[157] However arguably the real ‘instress’ of all Alan Duff’s writing is summed up in Kimberle Crenshaw Williams’ crisp statement of “white supremacy’s racial binarisms”[158], and nowhere is this more to the fore than in his extraordinarily powerful and disturbing fifth novel, Both Sides of the Moon (Auckland: Random House/Vintage, 1998). Indeed the foregoing discussion has really been by way of an introduction (‘scene-setting’) for a nuanced reading of that troubling novel: the product of what Leola Johnson and David Roediger (describing the black celebrity athlete O.J. Simpson) have defined “as a seemingly colorless but fully racialized commodity, brilliantly positioned to be marketed to middle-class white men.” [159] The theme in this reading is William Faulkner’s powerful re-statement of prejudice: ‘a nigger is not a person so much as a form of behavior’, which has an unfortunate resonance in the bichromatic nation of Maori and traditional Pakeha, and it is this turbid undercurrent of unconscious racism which troubles and profoundly unsettles Both Sides of the Moon such that it is a defensible reading tactic to assay Both Sides of the Moon as exploring in the Kiwi experience an antipodean variant of the problematics of the American ‘white man’s Negro’/Maori. Some commentators would analyze Duff as a modern ‘Pakeha-Maori’ in New Zealand’s racial mythology. Certainly Alan Duff, like Simpson, while richly talented, owed much of his early crossover success to his ‘race’, and Johnson and Roediger’s references to “the historic consumption of black bodies by Western capitalism” [160]—while overblown in the New Zealand context, as it lacked an organized Western slave system—certainly resonates with the almost fetishistic appropriation of Maori flesh in the films of Once Were Warriors (1994) and What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? (1998) as these, in Davinia Thornley’s words, force audiences “to watch the destructive results of institutionalized racism.” [161] But Thornley seems to see that this thematic is not obvious and adds (correctly) that in Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors “Maori are represented as deficient and depraved, especially when seen in the light of (Pakeha) social systems.” [162] Anthony Adah comments forcefully on the film version of the sequel, Broken-Hearted (with a screenplay this time by Duff), as a politically regressive text which exploits male violence and misogyny and inscribes the plot with masculinist value, noting that the graphic violence and revenge schema are “emphatically gratuitous and serve no purpose but to offer the viewer a sensational thrill”, and he argues that Duff’s use of character or gang names like Grunt, Snakes, Hawks and Apeman “amounts to a re-colonizing mission that eroticizes and demonizes urban Maori life”. [163] Adah completes his denunciation of Duff’s film by citing Cornell West on the dire assumptions of the ‘liberal structuralist’ vision (the neocon one) which powers it and views “people in egoistic and rationalist terms according to which they are motivated primarily by self-interest and self-preservation.” [164] VII Both Sides of the Moon (1998): ‘Reports from Duff Country’ —Towards Ethnic Realism, Agency and New Visions of Past, Present and Future There can be little doubt that Duff has drawn upon elements of his blighted upbringing in constructing the character of Jimmy Burgess in Both Sides of the Moon. Jimmy is “the half-caste product of an unfortunate union”, a composite Pakeha and Maori growing up in the early 1960s in a small town, Waiwera/Whakarewarewa (on the fringe of Rotorua) with relatives in the Maori village on its outskirts.[165] Jimmy (in the words of the cover blurb) understands about belonging and not belonging and once he learns about his brave but not unviolent warrior forebear , Te Aranui Kapi (out-casted from his tribe five generations earlier), Jimmy “begins to understand the darker implications of his heritage”, just (we may observe) as Duff has done. Chris Prentice has observed that in this novel “Duff continues his association of violence with propensities both racial and cultural” [166] and unpacks some disturbing conceptual baggage: Jimmy’s father is Pakeha, and is ‘good’, but ineffectual, while his mother is Maori, drinks, gambles, and is sexually promiscuous. Jimmy feels and expresses shame and disgust for his mother, resentment at the lack of what he regards as true mothering, a true mother’s love; but this extends to a contempt for her as Maori, her—and his own degree of—Maori-ness. [167] Prentice unpacks the logic of Kapi’s ‘cowardly’ escape so that his “running is redefined as the product of his own questioning of the hierarchical, murderous and cannibalistic culture to which he belonged.” Prentice emphasizes the fact that Kapi joins a ‘cognitively deviant’ group who have fled from all the traditional appurtenances of a traditional, warrior culture (tapu, tohunga, utu) and attained a freedom which “enables them to change as their circumstances change”. However Prentice insists that Duff’s vision of Maori self-victimization operates on the mis-assumptions “that children are the primary victims, that Maori culture has become a yoke to be shaken off, and that transformation is fundamentally a question of the individual decision to accept responsibility”[168], which is a clear-sighted analysis but one which rather trivializes Duff’s serious, and finally loyal (if imperfect), critique of Te Ao Tawhito and Te Ao Maori (the ancient and modern Maori ‘worlds’). Reviewing the book, David Eggleton likens to Jimmy the survivor to ‘Attila the Half-Caste’, “a warrior cub who possesses both the stoic strength of his Maori ancestors and a sceptical common sense learnt from his Pakeha father”, and remarks perceptively that Both Sides of the Moon is another instalment of Alan Duff’s vision, that all-enveloping atmosphere which sometimes seems to swirl out like psychic weather to lash the whole country. The Duff voice is a subterranean whisper running through the back of the mind. [169] I consider Duff’s texts as ‘Reports from Duff Country’: a sub-geography and ethnographic realm peculiarly his own yet in no sense detached from the mainstream of ‘Aotearoan’ cultural history. Indeed, in this text Duff seems determined to explore the debunking of Rousseauistic notions of early and untouched peoples, as in Robert Bigelow’s The Dawn Warriors (1969)—a work of realist biological anthropology which insisted that theories of “prehistoric peace [are] very rarely supported with evidence.”[170] Eggleton adds, with marvellous understatement, that “Duff is a novelist who knows how to rock the house” and notes Duff’s talent at getting inside the criminal mind to “show adrenalin and testosterone at work”: Edited in with Jimmy’s small-screen story is a widescreen gory story about a band of Maori outlaws at the time of first Pakeha contact. Duff portays the exploits of these warriors as a kind of decontextualised psychopathic bloodlust. The violence builds up to regular spasms of intensity that leave you gagging. Here is the stench from a ruptured bully-bag of bile that the author insists on rubbing your nose in. Sadism, cannibalism, incest, slavery and abasement—Duff slathers it on. [171] There can be no doubt that in this novel Duff is set about critiquing and revising Maori cultural assumptions and behaviours, in a vividly imagined past and experienced present penned with visceral intensity and deft scenic cross-cutting. Both Sides of the Moon ,despite minor irritations, lapses and repellent detail (unabashed sexual crudity and a pornography of violence), is an intense and blazing work of art in which Duff’s bifurcated inheritance speaks forth: he is narrator both as Uncle Roger of the pre-Pakeha Maori dystopia and also a modern privileged native informant (the narrator locates the Burgess plot in 1960 [p.153]). In fine, Both Sides gives voice to a powerful internal oscillation and dissociation of ethno-cultural sensibility which, in its Kapi episodes, offers an eccentric and singular ethnography laced with many angry satiric shafts from the postmodern era. Duff surveys the grim antics of the habitually violent and coarse-grained Calibans of the land of birds, a race of hardy and depraved sub-Olympians whose unthinking mental and moral enslavement is tragically replicated amidst the twentieth-century inhabitants of Waiwera, whose equally imaginatively stunted lives embroider Duff’s ‘Drinking v Thinking culture’ theme as they live out limited but expressively rich lives in a “beer-sloshed” world (p.152). Northrop Frye has observed that satire “is militant irony: its moral norms are relatively clear, and it assumes standards against which the grotesque and absurd are measured.” [172] This works with Both Sides , but only if the European dominant is accepted as normative and as the fountainhead of human-rights discourse. Frye added that the satirist “has to select his absurdities, and the act of selection is a moral act”: Attack without humor, or pure denunciation, forms one of the boundaries of satire….It is an established datum of literature that we like hearing people cursed and are bored with hearing them praised, and almost any denunciation, if vigorous enough, is followed by a reader with the kind of pleasure that soon breaks into a smile. [173] Whether the readers of Both Sides of the Moon derive amusement from Duff’s grim and excessive satire is debatable but when Frye reminds us that the satiric impulse “appears to have begun with the Greek silloi which were pro-scientific attacks on superstition” [174], we seem to be within striking distance of Alan Duff’s terrible re-construction of pre-contact Maori life: the grimly violent and unhappy world (Te Ao Tawhito) before the Euro-colonizers (the “white-skinned demons” [p.148]) came both to enlighten and to appropriate land from the indigenes of Aotearoa. Duff works to create an anthropological thriller with its unsparing and depressing accretions of a violent and pre-literate warrior culture of conformity and mindless abuse. Duff strives to create a joyless ‘dark age’ lifestyle without redeeming features and succeeds in delivering his negative vision via often rhetorically over-blown sentences which heap retrospective invective upon these atavistic ‘savages’. To take a random excerpt: The invaded chief roared out vilest insult at their enemy name, he spat words of derisive contempt at the tribe, he hurled words to the air, the blue-white-puffed sky, that this enemy’s ancestors were imposters, they were really slaves, they were worse than that, they were of outcast lineage, their warriors buggered men, their women fucked dogs, their children feasted on maggot-infested shit, their carvings were ridden with wood-consuming insects, their everything was deserving only now of this: as he, and all his others, broke out in howling laughter as death flew, rushing furiously at them, and so did unspeakable spittle of enemy’s outrage fly from tattooed faces, bared teeth—and then they, the invaded brave remnants of tribe, turned and rushed down the trenches that became tunnels. And enemies foolish, blood-thirsting, rushed after them (pp.148-49). This sequence is the escape from thraldom to Maori captivity by Kapi’s band of heroic outcasts trudging “towards yonder hills” (p.150) and a new life as conceptual rebels: forebears/tipuna of Jimmy Burgess (aka Alan Duff), the “thinking thought-stricken man” (p.157). Counterpoint is an essential part of Duff’s literary style, for he has Jimmy recalling that his kuia mentor, Mereana, informed Jimmy about her concerns that the white man broke the conceptual world of the old people “with his different laws”, which ousted the old dispensation (pp.159-60). Jimmy reports that before Mereana’s death “She had told me she cried for the warriors they once were who could not make adjustment”(p.160). Chapters 23 and 24 retell the story of Kapi, the mythic ancestral progenitor of Jimmy-Alan, and a recycled, truly indigenous, variant of John Mulgan’s ‘Man Alone’ (p.163). The leader of these Maori men and women alone declaims to Kapi in a jarringly modern mode: We are we. Belonging to no tribe, nor owing to any edict or law or tapu or code of conduct, except that which we have imposed upon ourselves—then he chuckled—which is not so restrictive (p.163). It is only in this breakaway community that the indigenes can ‘put on a happy face’ (Kapi thinks that these people “did not act like outcasts living life in permanent misery for many were without strain and many had grinned openly” [p.163]). Kapi has undoubtedly discovered the true (and rare) Noble Savages in this ethnographic version of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. Kapi, after stumbling around the bush for some time, has happened upon a chief-less group who also thrive without elders and who practise gender equality (p.163). Even more extraordinarily, these quasi-Popperian tribesfolk are atheists and reject the authority of tohunga and all claims of hierarchy (p.164)—truly an ‘imagined community’. However, they insist to Kapi: “We are not a people, we are single existences banded together to share food, share thought, share bodily needs”(p.165): an amazing fantasy of pre-Pakeha Maori individualism. Duff’s narrator reports Kapi’s encounter with people who value mind, mental divergence and change over static (and unquestionable) certainty and who posit the white man as a salvific force (p.169). This band of happy cognitive deviants re-name Api ‘Moonlight’ to reinforce in him an awareness that he last left the ‘dark side’ of the conceptual moon for “the side you see in the sun’s light”(p.170). It is a stunning similitude. Mihinui Taikato instructs Kapi in an important conceptual distinction between passive and active identity-formation: whether one lets the culturally dominant meaning make one or one makes one’s own meaning (p.193) and, discussing Tekapo’s empiricism (being “of the eternal interest in everything”[p.203]) , insists that “no understanding nor change for the better comes if your thinking stays still”(p.196). Duff lays on a disturbing portrayal of the mainstream Ignoble Savages freed from all restraint (Tangiwai is raped the same day she is to give birth to Ratanui, the son of Kapi)—“they lived in every unthinking moment, a people more crude than any could imagine”(p.200). Meantime the brilliant Tekapo has been observing the white ones spreading across the land (p.205), signalling in this gazing a trope of active native agency , reinforced when some of this new tribe make an “acquiring raid on the white invaders” (p.206). The narrator describes this group, living in strange territory under the dual onslaught of Te Rauparaha and the white goblins, as “this materially dispossessed but intellectually most possessed of all this land’s original inhabitants” (p.209), and this becomes clear when these proto-liberals engage in rather improbable disquisitions on tolerance for divergent sexual orientation (p.208). There are clues that Alan Duff, following Uncle Roger’s interest in the Moa-hunters of Te Wai Pounamu, has set Kapi’s band of escapees in the takiwa (tribal territory) of Ngai Tahu, shown in the narrator’s reference to “this land, which was never this group’s in the first place” (p.205) and in the express naming of “plains” (Ka Pakihi Whakatekateka o Waitaha), and of the infamous Ngati Toa warrior Te Rauparaha, the “mighty arrival [who] was said to be claiming dominion over all this land” (p.209). Kapi and his merry band of ex-warriors seem to have stumbled into the grim aftermath of what Buddy Mikaere has called ‘The Kai Tahu Wars’.[175] Mikaere makes the point that Te Rauparaha’s musket-driven taua (war parties) of the late 1820s-1830s were so tragically successful only because Kai Tahu had vitiated themselves with a peculiarly self-destructive inter-hapu feud called Kai Huaka (‘Eat Relations’)—and that only because in about 1824 a Taumutu woman (Murihaka) from Waikakahi (Banks Peninsula) wore a dogskin cloak which belonged to chief Te Maiharanui (the upoko ariki of Kai Tahu) when he was absent, gravely offending protocol and setting in train a cannibalistic campaign of almost mafiosi ferocity among kin groups in the region[176]. Duff’s sly and subtle deployment of these referents and time period serve to embroider his didactic design in demonstrating (i) that Maori could/can be their own worst enemies and (ii) critiquing neoclassical ‘Fatal Impact’ theorists who believed that the advent of Europeans ruined a myriad of Pacific Paradises, further dramatizing Duff’s strong conviction that the pre-Treaty era was in no sense utopic, no ‘Paradise Lost’. Duff follows the missionary view that the idea of the ‘noble savage’ is an oxymoron and, as Kerry Howe points out, “The stereotype they advanced was that of the Ignoble Savage, one who led a brute-like existence” and so they sought the transformation of the indigene “into a brown-skinned European”. [177] That said, the primary purpose of the novel—apart from its boundary-breaching qualities as ‘ethno-history’ and an ‘anthropological thriller’—is somewhat inexplicable, except as in its dedication to its author’s several children “by way of explanation” and to his deceased father, which underscores the work’s quasi-autobiographical project in exploring why Alan Duff has been such a combustible and contestable figure as he follows Alice Walker’s declaration that “good writers write what they believe; they cannot help it…” [178] Walker knew virulent rejection when she published The Color Purple and exposed rape and incest in the black community and drew from this outrage among her own people the moral that such anger against writers can be sourced in a collective lack of self-worth and insecurity—“we have a hard time believing we are lovable. We also have a great fear of learning ‘bad’ things about ourselves because we are sure these ‘bad’ things will be cause for more people not to love us.” [179] Certainly Duff lays on the recondite imagery of the book (“those strange objects of symbol-covered, thin layers of material, like beaten weaving material”) as “the door to understanding the white man” (p.209), emphasizing the boon that literacy offered Maori and the manifold opportunities which it presented for “a contest, a means of testing one argument against another” (p.233). The language is almost Popperian, reinforcing the challenge of creating an ‘Open Society’: open to conceptual and structural (organizational) change of the kind pioneered by Te Aranui Kapi and his open-minded new hapu. This is the true meaning of borstal boy Jimmy Burgess’ belated recognition that “I’m my ancestor Kapi and now I’m Tangiwai Kotuku, staring at another reality” (p.221).In all of this Duff has conformed to Albert Wendt’s observation that “In a major way, all creative writers are historians. The most revealing and meaningful ‘histories’ about a people are the stories, poems, myths, plays, novels and so on written by themselves.”[180] This truth is the springboard for the extremely powerful opening statement of Jimmy Burgess: I see and am my childhood in the swirl and clarity of being kind of black man, sort of nigger, in my own country: kind of white, sort of ‘The Man’, by the other half of me. I am torn; yet I am more whole, since I am of both understandings, though of no singular one. I am two races, two cultures and, most of all, two different thinkings. I am in a way against myself. But I can speak for both (p.7). This sense of a dual racial typology, of being part colonizer and part colonized, informs and troubles the whole Duff project and it led to the brilliantly effective lunar motif of Both Sides of the Moon (“I don’t want to live on the dark side of the conceptual moon”[p.12]). Duff’s narrator expands his vision: I see a people with too much of themselves on the dark side of the conceptual moon, like hapless animals in a deep forest trap, with daylight (and freedom) all around them—no, not entrapped animals, since none knows what is light, not true light of the mind; they are self-perpetuated to a state of permanent darkness. They have no written word, thus no means of looking at themselves (p.27). In this rather grandiose claim Duff’s narrator (alter-ego) calls to mind those who followed Sir George Grey’s assimilative solution, in which even some Maori leaders wanted to suppress te reo and, in J.M. Barrington’s words, “become acquainted with the means by which the Europeans had become great.”[181] The repeated trope of ‘seeing’ somewhat surprisingly, entails the first real recognition in a Duff text of the impact of colonization when “the British put swift end to [Maori] presumptions in mid-clash; arrogantly imposed the laws and punishments of another culture, another civilisation on a not-then-very noble, war-entrenched disarray of tribal savages” (p.25). However this recognition never obscures Duff’s positivistic assessment of a prevailing “blindness in our [Maori] inherited outlook” and his vexation that in a physical fight “you stop thinking, you cease being a contemplative being and become beast being. Stupid being”(p.180). Caliban again. The privileged platform which he claims for himself and Jimmy Burgess is derived from being “half a rational boy” of “good enough stock” and accessing his father’s “analytical mind” and thus not feeling the overhang of “low ceilings on our possibilities”(pp.180 & 181) despite being yoked (like a Jungian soul) to two dominant modalities, the second being that of his Sycoraxian mother, the woman of lust, gambling and booze who was “the cause of it all”(p.9)—the derailing of her offspring. This hardy woman “is a physical existence of Maori going back a thousand years” and the mature Jimmy upbraids her as a promiscuous “slut” (p.23) and recalls wanting his ineffectual, enlightened and over-civilized Pakeha father to have “smashed her to a pulp and thrown her out”: He should have rejected his own code, temporarily put aside his moral principles, and done the bitch. He should not have allowed her repeated assaults on him to happen without same reply. And then he’d have fitted and we could have reshaped ourselves, with his more respected, affectionate assistance, to something more meaningful. But he didn’t. Principle won. His kids, I’m sorry to be telling him so many years later, they lost. Most of them did. When one is too many to lose of your children. To death or failure or, worse, despair. Death is over. Failure can be rationalised. Despair is the cry from the living graveyard (p.58). Nicholas Thomas, in an eccentric foray into literary criticism, has argued that what he terms “the efflorescence of liberal white primitivism”(a New Age and environmentalist ethic) has valorized indigeneity as a mode of resistance (primitive purity) against the post-Enlightenment project of modernity “and thus rendered indigenous modernity almost a contradiction in terms”[182]—as somehow oxymoronic. Thomas addresses the prospect of Once Were Warriors informing “a new or hardened racism” in its country of origin and queries whether indigenous writers can “represent contemporary identities, without conceiving of them as impoverished versions of a nobler tradition?”[183] Thomas asks usefully if the negation that Maori are no longer the warriors of yore can itself be negated and “can the condition be transcended?”[184] Thomas stereotypes Jake as the prime culpable figure in Duff’s first novel and as an emblem of degeneracy (taking “the name of warriorhood in vain through his wife-beating”) and simplistically declares that “the warrior past is ennobled at the novel’s recuperative moment”, but is correct to assert that Duff treats Jake’s “constitutive oppression as one internal to Maori society rather than a product of the colonial encounter”.[185] When Thomas contrasts “the spirituality and pervasive relatedness constitutive of Maori and Aboriginal cultures” with “the wastelands of industrial modernism or the depthless simulacra of postmodernist consumerism”, he betrays a simplistic arcadian essentialization of indigenes, and Both Sides of the Moon could almost have been custom-written to challenge this false binarism, as Duff relentlessly creates a work of that ‘indigenous modernity’ which Thomas deemed to be only “a contradictory and inauthentic location.”[185] Thomas insists that Warriors “does not come across as a work that finds a new language of identity”, citing the “equivocation and weakness of the ending” with its idealization of rehabilitated people being too unreal, bland and wholesome “to go any way toward overpowering and superceding the horror of the present.”[186] These are indeed strange sentiments to issue from a scholar of what he calls “Indigenous socialities” in the Pacific and whose work well acknowledges the horrors of cannibalism and the views of early voyagers among Maori such as George Forster (Cook’s Resolution, 1773) that they were assisting in the mission civilatrice to benighted Antipodean barbarians. Indeed Thomas has cited the young Forster reporting that as Cook’s men set up camp at Astronomers Point (Dusky Sound), “all around us we perceived the rise of arts, and the dawn of science, in a country which had hitherto lain plunged in one long night of ignorance and barbarism!” [187] I would assert, contra Thomas, that indigeneity and modernism/modernity are not an oppositional binary set in the contemporary sociology of Maori. For its part, Both Sides conjures up visions of the horror of a pre-Prospero/Pakeha past for Maori that banishes politically correct (and equally idealized) discourses about the wholesomeness of the Maoriland Paradise,which mirrors the cultural recovery which Thomas finds so bland and unconvincing and which confirms the existence of a note of sly and knowing parodic irony to Once Were Warriors which ‘left eclectics’ like Thomas are usually blind to. (This ambivalence of nuance may explain Peter Simpson’s discomfort with the alliance of “tragic grandeur” and the “deep pessimism scarcely tempered by the manufactured optimism of its ending.” [188]) In conclusion, Duff’s emphatic and vigorous denial of what Shelby Steele has called the politics of victimization (‘victimology’) and his espousal of the classical liberal values of self-reliance, struggle, effort and the sanctity of the individual as another avenue of power [189] recalls Dan Davin’s prescient statement in the 1980s about writers of the ‘Maori renaissance’: They’ll have to go through awful crises of self-conscious confusion between political motives and the pure literary motive of getting something down on paper which represents the truth as you see it and not the truth as you want it to be accepted by other people. [190] That, in a phrase, sums up the ultimate significance of the phenomenon of Alan Duff, who is both a tutua (a radically dislocated person with no claim to land) and, despite his boisterous and repetitive forays into neo-conservatism, the fearless New Zealand Orwell (the fighter against left Political Correctness and upholder of the human right to commit ‘thoughtcrime’) who has said he “never gets angry, he always gets even.”[191] Duff has also expressed what he felt his true legacy has been: “I hope one day they’ll say, Alan Duff was the man who started the process of growing Maori New Zealand up! But somehow I wouldn’t put money on it.” [192] Is it perhaps more productive to view Duff as a postmodern Maui-potiki, breaker of received truths and simple pieties? Christine Tremewan reminds us that Maui was a trickster (tinihanga) and innovator (atamai): one whom Wohlers called ‘a strange person’ and one who is usually connected with the noa or non-tapu side and many of whose acts “involve the breaking of tapu.” [193] Tremewan notes that Maui’s acts, while designed to better the human lot (the ira tangata), “are performed in such a capricious and unconventional manner” that he generates mixed responses of admiration and wariness.[194] This sounds like a person specification for Alan Duff and is a far better analogy than that of Caliban, who was a colonial construct; Maui being an indigenous marker of pre-colonial ways of knowing as a restless and somewhat boastful and cruel warrior man of unabashed sexuality who, however, fished up new land and enjoyed cosmographic ambitions (ensnaring the sun for human benefit) but whose over-reaching spirit was punished when he tried to overcome death by vanquishing the great woman of the night, Hine-nui-te-po, and was killed in another trial of personal mastery. Not surprisingly, Maui is the greatest culture hero in Maori mythology. Perhaps, more appropriately, Duff harks back in interesting (and unexplored) ways to Tamatekapua, the restless and combative founding ancestor of Duff’s own Te Arawa tribal configuration[195] as Duff, for all his apparent hubris, seeks the amelioration of contemporary Maori in keeping with the modernist values of achievement, work, efficiency, practicality, progress, material comfort, democracy, individualism, ambivalence about over-valorizing race and ethnicity, and, instead, placing a high value on science and secular rationality (his Te Ao Pakeha strand). Reviewing Once Were Warriors, Spiro Zavos praised Duff for having exposed “the political phoniness and superficiality of the Maori school of writers that began in the 1970s with Witi Ihimaera”—a school which, asserted Zavos, boosted the post-imperialist belief of the New Zealand literati that “the Maori problem is really a Pakeha problem.” [196] The value of Duff’s uncompromising realism, Zavos maintained, was to “kick in the guts” the “Maori obsession with blaming the Pakeha for the rottenness, spiritual and physical, that permeates Maori communities” in a novel that celebrates “the redemptive qualities of free will.”[197] Ken Arvidson, a more measured (and qualified) analyst of Maori-Pakeha relations, once observed in similar vein that the Pakeha’s “racial guilt” and “impotence in the irreversibility of an historical fait accompli to perform any act of sufficient expiation” has “been one of the retarding forces in the growth of satisfactory Pakeha literature concerning the Maori” and that something of its reality and its effect is touched upon by Vincent O’Sullivan: ‘To what extent’, he asks (rhetorically), ‘does convention already prevent the appearance in fiction of, shall we say, an attractive capitalist, a depraved Polynesian?’ [198] Arvidson adds that in modern New Zealand literature the Maori is figured as “most commonly right, or justified, or in some position of moral invulnerability; if in the wrong, he is generally the victim of some form of social determinism” and that the Eurozealander guilt for ethnic dispossession is the “nineteenth century’s final legacy to the twentieth, and the one most difficult to deal honestly with.” [199] In this framework of thought one can see how Alan Duff has been a salvific force of cultural recuperation (recovered self-respect) for Pakeha, as his fictions have confronted the myth of the ‘noble savage’ and smashed it once and for all in a New Zealand context, and by presenting himself as a happy bicultural capitalist who has, arguably, banished the curse of liberal Pakeha guilt for the deeds of the tupua ( goblin-ancestors from the sea). Quite simply, Duff the trickster has broken the sacred gourd of perpetual grievance, and for this daring and highly visible exercise of his critical and richly imaginative faculties as a prophet of possibility there can be no forgiveness in certain quarters of the Maori community. In this one is reminded of the firestorm which erupted around Alice Walker for her award-winning novel The Color Purple (1982), which explored and exposed intragroup violence among the African-American community—what Kimberle Williams called ‘intersectionality’ as it embraces “the race and gender dimensions of violence against women of color.” [200] In like manner Duff’s pioneering interrogation of Jake Heke’s slave status and of his appalling projective violence against his wife (Beth) seemed actively disloyal to sectors within Maoridom, recalling the claim that Walker’s Celie was an inauthentic character in “the intracommunity debate about the political costs of exposing gender violence within the Black community” which, Williams asserted, “might be read as a consequence of silencing discussion of intracommunity violence.” [201] I hope, therefore, that this phenomenological exploration of Alan Duff has shown how and why, given his ‘mixed race’ position, there are powerful psychogenic reasons—among others—which have virtually dictated that he cannot simplistically hold one highly valued side of his inheritance (the invader/colonizer/settler) responsible for the difficulties attending the other (the invaded/colonized native) and, more critically, for Duff’s profound belief that if he can liberate himself from this bind without flying apart, so too can the entire Maori community do so without resorting to a host of decolonizing strategies and anathemas fixed on Te Tiriti.(Cynics might argue that Duff’s impatience with Treaty-based arguments is derived from the fact that Chief Te Heuheu of Taupo refused to sign Te Tiriti in 1840—a stance upheld by the Arawa tribes. However, this was premised on a refusal to surrender mana to the Crown.) What Duff cannot perceive has been well expressed by the American critical race theorist Cornell West: that “law reflects and produces racial power.”[202] Even allowing the vast difference between the old legal separatism and enshrinement of ‘color prejudice’ in the USA and the New Zealand Treaty-based jurisprudence, there can be no doubt that West is correct to identify “a structural relationship between law and white supremacy” as a constitutive force in its own right and so, treaties or no, “the law is shown to be thoroughly involved in constructing the rules of the game, in selecting the eligible players, and in choosing the field on which the game must be played.”[203] One may even argue that the law constructed racial typologies in New Zealand by binarizing the Treaty partners (which was necessary as Te Tiriti o Waitangi was an international legal instrument between two asymmetrical but sovereign polities) but that its servants broke that solemn compact to the extent that by 1851 the politician Alfred Domett (1811-87) expressed his “utter contempt” for it and asserted that its recognition of a Maori right to their land was “absurd” and Colonel Robert Trimble stated in Parliament in 1881 that the Treaty ought to be “relegated to the waste paper basket”.[204] The worst effect of this colonizing mindset was that it created a set of ‘otherizing’ strategies, a dynamic of white supremacy which discounted and traduced indigenous identity and claims and thus created a domain of hegemonic rule which, in Kimberle Crenshaw’s words, only ever succeeds to the extent “that the ruling class world view [here, that of Pakeha settlers] establishes the appearance of a unity of interests between the dominant class and the dominated.” [205] That unity seems both reflected and refracted in the consciousness of Alan Duff and in the texts flowing from his pen, so that, without quite realizing it, Duff is a prophet of the de-romanticizing impulse and of wholesale (and unproblematic) Maori recolonization, which makes for an exciting literary ‘ride’/journey if (at times) a deeply frustrating one. There seems little doubt that he has been exploring the organization of an occasionally retrogressive racial fantasy in New Zealand and constructing in all his novels what Linda Williams has called “moral reform melodrama”—a “melodrama of racial victims and villains”[206]—and also unconsciously conforming to Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s point that there was in the 1950s and 60s a negative global policy discourse of the ‘native problem’. In Smith’s incisive words, The natives were, according to this view, to blame for not accepting the terms of their colonization. In time social policies—for example, in health and education—were also viewed as remedies for the ‘indigenous problem’. By the 1960s this approach had been theorized repeatedly around notions of cultural deprivation or cultural deficit which laid the blame for indigenous poverty and marginalization even more securely on the people themselves….Many Maori people who grew up in New Zealand in that era believed that we were to blame….Problematizing the indigenous is a Western obsession. [207] Yet, even in this light (Duff entered his teens in the 1960s), and despite his occasional naivete, Duff is promoting a challenging version of indigenous modernity and agency in James Clifford’s ‘post-neocolonialist’ world. As such he wishes to answer Purchase’s conundrum and show that the indigene can indeed modify ‘his’ traditions and, furthermore, demonstrate that the ‘native’ has the resilience both to retain ancestral ‘heart-pride’ and also engage with the ‘civil’ world of modernity very much on ‘his’ terms. Duff’s work has operated like a splinter in the eye and has arguably been a useful—if not uncontroversial— intervention in New Zealand’s evolving civil discourse.  ENDNOTES: The quotation leading the title of this paper comes from Purchas’ 1625 commentary on William Strachey’s account of the ‘treachery’ of Virginia’s semi-nomadic Algonquian Indians (in the Powhatan Confederacy) who had seized a lone whiteman, led him into the woods near Jamestown and sacrificed him: see Samuel Purchas, Purchase His Pilgrimes, 20 vols. (Glasgow: Maclehose & Sons, 1905-1907), Vol.XIX, p.62 and Strachey, ‘A True Reportorie of the Wreck and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight’ (15 July 1610); in (ed.) Louis B. Wright, A Voyage to Virginia in 1609 (Charlottesville: The University Press of Virginia, 1964), pp.1-101 (esp. pp.88-89). Cf. also Arthur Quinn, A New World: An Epic of Colonial America From the Founding of Jamestown to the Fall of Quebec (Boston: Faber & Faber, 1994). 1. Duff, poem written at age 20; cited by Michael Fitzgerald, ‘The Warrior Within’, “Books”, Time, 13 February 1995, p.53. 2. Duff to Vilsoni Hereniko, ‘An Interview with Alan Duff’, “Dialogue”, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol.7:2 (Fall 1995),328-344 at 331. 3. Lawrence Jones, ‘The Novel’; in (ed.) Terry Sturm, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English (2nd ed. Auckland: Oxford UP, 1998), p.210. In 1991 Duff reacted crossly when asked by me if he was comfortable with the label “Maori author”. Notable critical materials about his output include Peter Beatson’s Landfall 179 review of Warriors (Vol.45:3 [1991], 365-368), that of Michael Gifkins (NZ Listener, 3 September 1990, 110-112 & 5 November 1990, 109) and Christina Thompson’s robust assessment of Duff’s achievement in ‘In Whose Face? An essay on the work of Alan Duff’; in (eds.) Vilsoni Hereniko and Rob Wilson, Inside Out: Literature, Cultural Politics and Identity in the New Pacific (Lanham, MD.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999). Thompson first published this essay in The Contemporary Pacific, Vol.6, No.2 (Fall 1994), 397-413, and in it she labelled Duff a ‘bootstraps moralist and a libertarian ideologue’ and would doubtless feel that Szabad justifies this apt (but too programmatic) description of Duff. It is Thompson’s kind of ‘cultural policing’ that Duff challenges and resists at every turn. See also Bruce Harding, ‘Wrestling with Caliban: Patterns of Bi-Racial Encounter in Colour Scheme and Once Were Warriors’, Australian and New Zealand Studies in Canada, no.8 (December 1992), 136-155; Norman Oder, ‘Alan Duff and Once Were Warriors: ventilating race in New Zealand’, Antipodes: a North American Journal of Australian Literature 10:2 (December 1996), 137-139 ; Danielle Brown, ‘Pakeha, Maori and Alan: The Political and Literary Exclusion of Alan Duff’, Span 40 (April 1995), 72-80 and Tim Armstrong, ’A Child is Being Beaten: Race, Violence, and the Imaginary in Once Were Warriors’, Span 45 (October 1997), 58-72. Duff to Hereniko, ‘An Interview with Alan Duff’, The Contemporary Pacific, op. cit. at 330. Duff has charged that “right now Maori culture is in bullying, intolerant, fundamentalist mode” (‘Let’s mind our own business’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 13 June 1996,8) and, about to launch his decade-long stint as a columnist, wrote “I write out of a love for my people. I don’t want to see them end up at the bottom of the heap” (‘Novelist to air views’, The Evening Post [Wellington], 18 June 1991). Kouka and Howard McNaughton, ‘Ta Matou Mangai/Our Own Voice: A Discussion’; cited by Howard McNaughton, ‘Drama’; in (ed.) T.L. Sturm, The Oxford History of New Zealand Literature in English, op. cit., p.387. [While promised for publication in Kunapipi Vol.19 (1997) it has not appeared.] Lawrence Alloway; cited by Ingrid Schaffner, The Essential Andy Warhol (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1999), p.25. Duff to Hereniko, op. cit., 330. Te Maire Tau, ‘Science and Maori Aspirations: The Progression of Knowledge and Structural Transformation’ [: lecture to the Royal Society of New Zealand, Christchurch, 19 June 2002]. Dr Tau [then CEO, Te Tapuae o Rehua] had written of the Ngai Tahu vision to create a Maori intelligentsia able to debate the nature of knowledge in an article, ‘Bridges that reach over the horizon’, The Press, 29 December 1999, 7. [“Inventing the Future” series.] Karl R. Popper, Chapter 10, The Open Society and Its Enemies, Vol.1:The Spell of Plato (1945; rpt. London & New York: Routledge, 1993), p.171 and Tau, ibid. Popper defined the “magical or tribal or collectivist society” as closed and the open one as a polity “in which individuals are confronted with personal decisions” and individually calibrated accountabilities for those decisions (ibid., p.173). Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote a famous dissent in the US Supreme Court case Abrams v United States (1918) which immortalized the notion of a “free trade in ideas” and his belief “that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market…” Wendt; ‘An Interview with Albert Wendt’ [by Vilsoni Hereniko and David Hanlon], The Contemporary Pacific, Vol.5:1 (Spring 1993), 112-131 at 113. The full text title is ‘A Sermon on National Development, Education and Rot in the Pacific Islands’; in (eds.) T. Brammell, R. May & M. Allen, Education in Melanesia (Canberra: ANU Press, 1975), pp. 373-80. Cheryl I. Harris, ‘Whiteness as Property’, Harvard Law Review, Vol.106:8 (June 1993), 1707-1791 at 1791. Michael Moore, Ch.Four: ‘Kill Whitey’; in Stupid White Men…and Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! (2001; rpt. London: Penguin Books, 2002), p.68. Christine A. Thompson, ‘In Whose Face? An Essay on the Work of Alan Duff’, The Contemporary Pacific, 6:2 (Fall 1994), 398-413 at 404. This irritation was well expressed by Apirana Taylor in his harsh review of Duff’s polemic: ‘Means well, but’, Listener, 10 July 1993, 50-51. Taylor pointed to Duff’s “rehash of racist, rednecked attitudes” and notes that Duff’s attempt to help inspire his people is sincere “but fails because he focuses mainly on negative images. With its lack of perception, Alan Duff’s book fails to meet its own challenge—and that of Maoridom” (51). Judith Whelan described Once Were Warriors as “a king hit in the face of conventional ‘90s wisdom on the problems and solutions for New Zealand’s biggest social rift” (‘Real, ugly and no gimmicks’, “Books”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 16 January 1993, p.39), which suggests that Duff is a better novelist than formal social analyst: an experiential rather than dispassionate analytical writer. Ibid. Thompson’s view of Maori was also that of Michael King, who valued Duff’s abundant literary talent and even his nonconformism of thought but noted the book’s lack of research—that it “asserts rather than argues a case” and that Duff “has yet to master the art of effective polemics” (Metro 45 [July 1993], 136). Many of Duff’s core ideas may be found in the populism of MP Winston Peters: cf. Peters, ‘My proposal for racial harmony’, The Press, 11 August 1988. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (1965; rpt. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p.47. [Translated by Constance Farrington from Les damnes de la terre (1961).] See also Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967). Cf. John K. Wilson, The Myth of Political Correctness: The Conservative Attack on Higher Education (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1995).Novak holds a chair at the American Enterprise Institute (Washington, DC), and Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals: How Politics Has Corrupted our Higher Education (New York: Harper & Row, 1990), Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education: The Politics of Race and Sex on Campus (New York: Vintage, 1991) and James Atlas’ The Book Wars: What it Takes to be Educated in America (Knoxville, Tennessee: Whittle Direct Books, 1990) have popularized the ‘neo-con’ position of alarmism at left Political Correctness. Two books which contest this position are Ray B. Browne’s The Many Tongues of Literacy (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1992) and (eds.) Browne and Marshall W. Fishwick, Rejuvenating the Humanities (Bowling Green SU Popular Press, 1992). Browne views Bloom and Hirsch’s books as “especially mischievous instruments of misguided education” (Many Tongues, p.54). David Brooks has written of these arguments in his book Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There (New York: Touchstone, 2000), Ch.4: Intellectual Life (pp.140-188). ‘Bobos’ are bourgeois bohemians, rich quasi-scholars or ‘publicity intellectuals’, who embrace ‘Masscult’ and ‘Midcult’ products. Neoconservatism began in America with Irving Kristol, Gertrude Himmelfarb, Norman Podhoretz, Daniel Bell and Midge Decter, and such writers published their diatribes against the counter-culture and the New Left in journals like Public Interest and Commentary. The writer Tom Wolfe summarizes their (and his) disdain for what Harold Bloom calls ‘the School of Resentment’ of faux Marxists in thrall to Foucault and Derrida—that these academics “can find new proletariats whose ideological benefactors [they] can be—women, non-whites, put-upon white ethnics, homosexuals, transsexuals, the polymorphously perverse, pornographers, prostitutes (sex workers), hardwood trees” (‘In the Land of the Rococo Marxists’; Hooking Up [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2000],p.124). Peter Beatson, “Reviews”, Landfall 179 (September 1991), 367. Beatson goes so far as to label Warriors “a fictionalised sermon, sociological essay and socio-political harangue” (367) which sounds very slick but is arguably a highly reductive assessment betokening Beatson’s own liberal dis-ease at Duff’s hard-hitting assault on his people for their (as he sees it) generic refusal to take charge of their own circumstances. Thus Beatson calls the book praxis, not meditation (ibid), treating it as a manifestation of a folk-naif sensibility. Danielle Brown, ‘Pakeha, Maori, and Alan: The Political and Literary Exclusion of Alan Duff’, Span 40 (April 1995), 73. Hilton Kramer, ‘A grim scenario: The plight of American letters today’, The Times Literary Supplement, 17 January 1992, 13. Kramer edits the journal The New Criterion in the USA and has deplored ‘popular trash’ entering literary curricula. Danielle Brown, op. cit., 74. Ibid., 75. Ibid. The Cox piece, ‘Considering Alan Duff’, was published in Quote Unquote, Number 3 (August 1993), 19-21 and it offered a slightly feisty but valid appraisal of Duff’s “sloppily written” Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge, a book commission which I (for one) wondered how Alan would handle, given his clear distaste for more formal modes of research. Cox noted a lack of discipline (“Gears crash as another sentence grinds its way up a molehill, big subjects go flashing past like hoardings, but there’s no centre line that the argument is following” [p.19]) and Duff’s “biggest problem as a writer and as a cultural phenomenon: [that] he can’t afford to pause and think” , being on a production tread-mill (p.20). Cox’s essay raises valid points and even suggests that there would be positive value in Duff striding a larger writerly stage—“it’s an exciting prospect, since he’s a writer who is at his most interesting when he forgets his audience and concentrates on his characters….Maybe, like Richard Nixon, we soon won’t have Alan Duff to kick around any more” (p.21). Ibid., 76. Ibid. The Arvidson text is ‘Some Maori Versions of Pastoral’, in (eds.) Bruce Bennett and Denis Haskell, Myths, Heroes and Anti-Heroes: Essays on the Literature and Culture of the Asia-Pacific Region (Perth: Centre for Studies in Australian Literature, 1992), pp.1-10. Danielle Brown, ‘Pakeha, Maori, and Alan’, op.cit., 76. Ibid., 78. Michael Novak, ‘In defence of a social system that gives primacy to practical intellect’, “Opinion”, The Press [Christchurch],17 March 1995, 11. (Originally published in Forbes Magazine.) Alan Duff to Anita McNaught, 20/20 documentary “Claim to Fame” (aired TV3, 4 September 1995: Producer: Anna Kenna, TV3, 1995). All details about the core litigation and personality issues re Duff, Tamahori and Brown are sourced from this story. Other broad coverage of the fracas included Philip Matthews, ‘Once were partners’, Listener, 30 September 1995, 30-31 and profiles of Tamahori: Betsy Sherman, ‘Becoming a Hollywood Director’, The Boston Globe, 26 February 1995, B9 & B11 (The Movie Section) and Gordon Campbell, ‘The wised-up director’s cut’, Listener, 24 May 1997, 32-35. A profile of Riwia Brown is provided in: Patrick Smith, ‘Warrior woman’, Listener, 7 May 1994, 32 & 33. See the notable essay by Eric Shibuya, ‘(Un)Pacific Visions: Alan Duff’s Writings and Their Film Adaptations’, The Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, Vol.25 (2003), 3-13. Alan Duff, ‘Duff yet to see “Warriors”’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 18 January 1996, 7. When Tamahori’s Mulholland Falls was released, Duff conceded that he felt “a sneaky feeling of pride” in Tamahori, “even if I don’t exactly see eye to eye with him” ,’Unique quality of Americans’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 2 May 1996, 8. ‘Author offers apology’, The Press [Christchurch], 3 August 1995, 3. What is very disturbing about this is that HarperCollins (and Duff as author) made this ‘apology’ but reprinted the book in 1995 and 1998 without either removing the offending libel against Avanti or placing a statement of apology in the front of the book! (The latter would have required only gluing in a small piece of paper or of reformatting the imprint page on a computer.) This makes rather a mockery of Duff’s commitment to a discourse of basic rights. This story is detailed in ‘Parents plan to sue Matchitt over sex attack on daughter’, The Press, 1 August 2001, 7. Other ironies abound: in Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge Duff slated the convicted killer of two men at a pub, Christopher Matchitt (Ch.9: ‘Where even murder is “justified”’), very possibly a relative of Para Matchitt. Houston Baker; cited by Kimball, Tenured Radicals (1990), op. cit., p.20. Baker was doubtless conducting this analysis in the context of the Bicentenary of the adoption of the U.S. Constitution in 1787 and his paper was delivered at the public symposium on literary theory and the curriculum held at Yale’s Whitney Humanities Center (New Haven, Connecticut) in May 1987. Frederick Crews, Skeptical Engagements (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), pp.138-139. Kimball, Tenured Radicals, p.46. The Stanford publication in question is: (ed.) Thomas C. Heller, Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986). Christine Cheyne, Mike O’Brien and Michael Belgrave, Social Policy in Aotearoa New Zealand: A Critical Introduction (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1997), p.146. Ibid., p.159. Tim Armstrong, ‘A Child is Being Beaten: Race, Violence, and the Imaginary in Once Were Warriors’, Span 45 (October 1997), 70. These figures come from Denis Welch, ‘Once more were warriors’, Listener, 16 November 2002, 19-21 at 19. Ibid. Roger C.A. Maaka, ‘The New Tribe: Conflicts and Continuities in the Social Organization of Urban Maori’, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol.6:2 (Fall 1994), 311-336. Maaka was quoting 1991 figures. One imagines that the trend has ramified in the decade since. Ibid. Ibid., 327. Ibid., 329. Maaka, op.cit., 329 & 331. Paul Spoonley and Augie Fleras, Recalling Aotearoa: Indigenous Politics and Ethnic Relations in New Zealand (Auckland: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp.70-71. Linda Hutcheon, The Politics of Postmodernism (1989; 2nd ed: London and New York: Routledge, 2002), p.3. Alan Duff to Bruce Harding, August 1991. Gertrude Stein, ‘What are Master-Pieces and Why Are There So Few of Them’(1936); rpt. in What Are Masterpieces (1940 rpt. New York: Pitman Publishing, 1970), pp.84 & 88. Ibid., p.90. Ibid., p.92. Graham C. Kinloch, The Dynamics of Race Relations: A Sociological Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1974), pp.9-10. Ibid., p.36. Ibid., p.121. Ibid., p.20. Kinloch cites W. Ryan, Blaming the Victim (New York: Pantheon, 1971). Roger Duff, Tribal Maori and the Great Society (University of New Zealand MA thesis, 1943); cited by Harry C. Evison, The Long Dispute: Maori Land Rights and European Colonization in Southern New Zealand (Christchurch: Canterbury University Press, 1997), p.343. Ibid., pp.343-344. Te Maire Tau, ‘Science and Maori Aspirations: The Progression of Knowledge and Structural Transformation’ [lecture of 19 June 2002], op. cit. The citations from the Roger Duff thesis that were unsourced came from Dr Tau’s lecture. Dr Tau stated that the thesis was titled Tribal Man and the Great Society. The Christchurch experience has been recounted by Alan Duff in Chapter Ten of his memoir, out of the mist and steam (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1999). Alan Duff, out of the mist and steam: a memoir, ibid., p.125. See Joel Kovel, White Racism: A Psychohistory (New York: Vintage Books/Pantheon, 1970), pp.211-230 for an elucidation of ‘meta-racism’. Kinloch, The Dynamics of Race Relations, op. cit., p.22. Ibid., p.213 Alan Duff, Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge (Auckland: HarperCollins, 1993), Chapter 7 (‘Cultural blindness’), pp.58 & 62-63. David P. Ausubel, The Fern and the Tiki: An American View of New Zealand—National Character, Social Attitudes and Race Relations (Sydney: Angus & Robertson, 1960), pp. 6, 9 & 156. All subsequent citations from the book will be made in the main text. Sir Tipene O’Regan, ‘Readying the canoe on the beach’; in (eds.) Rosalie Capper and Amy Brown, Vision Aotearoa/Kaupapa New Zealand (Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 1994), pp.42 & 46. Ranginui Walker, ‘Eat Your Heart Out, Alan Duff’, “Te Karanga”, Metro 145 (July 1993), 137. Thompson, ‘In Whose Face?’, op. cit., 411. Alan Duff; cited by Keri Welham, ‘New author locks horns with Duff’ (NZPA), The Press “Weekend”, 14 February 1998, p.2. The witty column on my analysis of Warriors was: Duff, ‘Wasting money on academic waffle’, The Evening Post [Wellington], 10 December 1991. William Zinsser (ed.), Paths of Resistance: The Political Novel (Boston: Houghton & Mifflin, 1989), p.16. Much ink has been spilt on the cursing Caliban, the displaced and legitimately angry native slave whose mother, Sycorax, was an Algerian witch (Duff, recounting childhood trauma, uses this term for his mother, Kuia Raimona: “Even in my dreams she’s a witch. Chasing me, wanting to murder me”[out of the mist and steam, p.36]).The best assessments are: Octave Mannoni, Prospero and Caliban:The Psychology of Colonisation (London: Methuen, 1956 [trans. Pamela Powesland]) ; Paul Brown, ‘”This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine”: The Tempest and the discourse of colonialism’; in (eds.) Jonathan Dollimore & Alan Sinfield, Political Shakespeare: New Essays in Cultural Materialism (Manchester: Manchester UP, 1985), pp.48-71 and Alden T. Vaughan & Virginia Mason Vaughan, Shakespeare’s Caliban: A Cultural History (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1991). Also highly pertinent are: K.M. Abenheimer, ‘Shakespeare’s “Tempest”: A Psychological Analysis’, Psychoanalytic Review, Vol.33 (October 1946), 399-415 ; Peter Hume, Colonial Encounters: Europe and the native Caribbean, 1492-1797 (London & New York: Methuen, 1986) and Trevor R. Griffiths, ‘”This Island’s mine”: Caliban and Colonialism’, Yearbook of English Studies 13 (1983), 159-180. The reference to Chowbook refers to a Ngai Tahu guide in Samuel Butler’s satiric novels, Erewhon: Or, Over the Range (1872) and Erewhon Revisited (1901), set in the Canterbury-Westland High Country. The old Maori guide, Chowbook/Kahabuka, was a native chief and a cunning fellow who did not work much around the shearers but who delighted missionaries and enjoyed alcohol. Butler’s narrator, John Higgs, described Chowbook as an ugly man with a malevolent scowl who deserted Higgs (the Prospero figure seeking new lands and experience) once they made their way across the high range of the Southern Alps of New Zealand. In his great fear of this alpine region Kahabuka is not akin to real Ngai Tahu who criss-crossed the alps on trails used to seek pounamu (a jade stone) from the West Coast. That Butler had the Caliban idea in mind is confirmed by his earlier publication of a slight Antipodean sketch, ‘Note on “The Tempest”’ in (ed.) Rev. G. Cotterill, Literary Foundlings: Verse and Prose, collected in Canterbury, N.Z. (Christchurch: “Times” office, 1864), pp.12-13. Chowbook later turns up in Erewhon Revisited where he is a native evangelist on the English lecture circuit and is deemed by Higgs a con man who later gains a Bishopric in territory adjoining Erewhon (Erewhon Revisited). Paul M. Bradwell, ‘A Publisher’s View’, “Letters to the Editor”, North and South [magazine], June 1993, n.p. Thompson, ‘In Whose Face?’, op. cit., 403. Ibid., 407. Ibid., 408. James Baldwin, ‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ (1949); rpt. in The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction 1948-1985 (London: Michael Joseph, 1985), p.28. See also Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White from Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton UP, 2001). Ibid., p.30. Ibid., p.33. Ibid., p.42. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘Strivings of the Negro People’, The Atlantic Monthly 80 (August 1897), 194-198 at 194. See Arnold Rampersad, The Art and Imagination of W.E.B. Du Bois (1976; rpt. New York: Schocken Books, 1990), pp.81-85. Duff has frequently emphasized that Afro-Americans have had a far worse battle against a truly oppressive system than Maori ever have (see, for instance: Duff, ‘Some races ARE hard done by’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 9 March 1995,7). Douglas Brinkley, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: The Life of Rosa Parks (2000; rpt. London: Phoenix/Orion, 2001),pp.16-18 summarizes Washington’s remarkable career, his success in founding the Tuskegee Normal Industrial Institute in Alabama and how Rosa’s mother, Leona McCauley, schooled her influential daughter on Washington’s ‘self-help’ principles such that Rosa Parks later conceded the positive influence of this philosophy of high moral character, personal hygiene, hard work and thrift in her own crusade for civil rights (p.18) as the steely ‘Mother of the Civil Rights Movement’ in the American South. As a minor aside, I count it as one of my greatest excitements to have met the gracious and highly principled Mrs Parks when she was being honoured by the city of Philadelphia in April 1995. As Democratic Senator John Conyers has said, the discongruity about Mrs Parks “was this: she had a heavy progressive streak about her that was uncharacteristic for a neat, religious, demure, churchgoing lady” (cited by Brinkley, p.189). Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1967), p.36. Ibid., p.28 Ibid., pp.33-34. For an incisive account of the doctrinal underpinnings of the Western colonialist ideological paradigm, see Richard Waswo, ‘The Formation of Natural Law to Justify Colonialism, 1539-1689’, New Literary History, Vol.27:4 (Autumn 1996), 743-759. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, op. cit., p.39. See James Belich, Paradise Reforged: A History of the New Zealanders From the 1880s to the Year 2000 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2001), ‘Introduction’ (pp.27-31). Fanon, op. cit., p.47. Leonard Bernstein, ‘What I Thought…’, The New York Times, 24 October 1965; rpt. in Bernstein, Findings (London & Sydney: Macdonald & Co.,1982), pp.232-233. ‘High Definition’, Listener, 16 January 1999, 34. This cruel definition of Alan Duff was intended as satire and was part of a two-page listing of Kiwi celebrity names with (rather cowardly) no author identified, doubtless to keep zealous litigants and litigators at bay. Bernstein, ‘Charge to the Seniors’ (Commencement Address at Rockford College, Illinois, 5 June 1966); rpt. in Findings, op.cit, p.254. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1981), p.3. Abdul R. Janmohamed, ‘The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature’ (1985); rpt. in (eds.) Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths and Helen Tiffin, The Post-Colonial Studies Reader (London & New York: Routledge, 1995), p.23. Alan Duff, ‘Time to put a sock in it…’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 21 April 1994, 9. W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘The Souls of Black Folk’; cited by Felicia R. Lee, ‘A Challenge to White Supremacy, 100 Years Later’, New York Times, 15 April 2003 [www.nytimes.com]. Alan Duff to Elizabeth Alley: “I felt I was doing the right thing when I was saying it, but I thought I’d be the Salman Rushdie of New Zealand really.” [Interview broadcast, Concert FM network, Radio New Zealand, 28 March 1991.] Ibid. In this interview with Alley, Duff pointed to the need to celebrate cultural and intellectual hybridity without erasing Maoriness: that the frozen traditional culture “is very limited” and that there is space to acknowledge other knowledges (e.g. the Persian, Arabic, Chinese)—“we’ve got to start dragging in a few other influences I think. We can still be Maori.” Alan Duff, ‘Perchance to dream in Gisborne’, “A Maori Perspective”, The Christchurch Mail, 27 May 1993, 6. Duff, Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge, op.cit., p.69. Duff, ‘One night out stealing’, “Opinion”, The Christchurch Mail, 2 October 1997, 9. Duff, ‘Instilling a love for books’, “Opinion”, The Christchurch Mail, 23 October 1997, 7 and out of the mist and steam (1999), p.149. Duff to Harding, Personal Interview, August 1991. Meredith Anne Skura, ‘Discourse and the Individual: The Case of Colonialism in The Tempest’, Shakespeare Quarterly, Vol.40:1 (Spring 1989), 42-69 at 57-58. Ibid., 64. Ibid., 65. Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act 4, scene 1, lines 211-213; The New Folger Library Shakespeare (eds.) Barbara A. Mowat & Paul Werstine (New York: Washington Square Press/Pocket Books, 1994), p.135. Act 5, sc.1, lines 330-331, ibid. at p.165. Act 5, Sc.1, lines 351-352, ibid., p.167. Duff, ‘Proud parent surveys his labour’, “Opinion”, The Press, 10 November 1998. Ibid. Witi Ihimaera; cited by Christina Thompson, ‘In Whose Face’, The Contemporary Pacific, Vol.6:2 (Fall 1994), 399 . Thompson quotes Ihimaera (not citing the source) as describing Once Were Warriors as “the haka, the rage” of Maori and “a kick in the guts to New Zealand’s much vaunted pride in its Maori/Pakeha race relations.” It was probably written as a bookcover blurb. Thompson, ibid., 411. Ibid., 412. Leslie A. Fiedler, The Stranger in Shakespeare (1972; rpt. Frogmore, Herts.: Paladin, 1974),’The New World Savage as Stranger: or “’Tis new to thee”’, pp.169 & 175. Ibid., p.193. Ibid., pp.199 & 204. Ibid., p.209. Edgar Allan Poe, ‘William Wilson’ [1839]; in (eds.) Stuart and Susan Levine, The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Edition (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Educational Publishing, 1976), pp.271-283. See Alan Duff, ‘Growing up half-caste’; in (ed.) Witi Ihimaera, Growing Up Maori (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1998), pp.226-230. Karl Popper, 24. ‘The Open Society and The Poverty of Historicism’; in Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography (1974; rpt. London: Fontana/Collins, 1976), p.116. Popper, 40. ‘The Place of Values in a World of Facts’, ibid., p.196. Duff to Harding, Personal Interview, 1991 Alan Duff, ‘Open eyes and ears to the wide world’, The Evening Post [Wellington], 25 June 1991. Witi Ihimaera, ‘He Mihi’ to Andrew Vercoe, Educating Jake: Pathways to empowerment (Auckland: HarperCollins Publishers (NZ) Ltd., 1998), p.ix. Duff recycled the missing the bus idea in What Becomes of the Broken-Hearted? (1996) which may have prompted this particular polemic. Denese Henare; cited, ‘Preface’ to ibid., p.xvi. Douglas Brinkley, Mine Eyes Have Seen The Glory: The Life of Rosa Parks (2000; rpt. Orion Books/Phoenix, 2001), p.2. Alan Duff, Once Were Warriors (Auckland: Tandem Press, 1990 [1st edition]), p.8. all subsequent references to the novel will be made in the main body of the text. Duff to Harding, PI, 1991 George Steiner, ‘Real Presences’ (1985); rpt. in Steiner, No Passion Spent: Essays 1978-1996 (London: Faber & Faber, 1996), p.34. Andrew E. Vercoe, ‘Preface’, Educating Jake (1998), p.xiii. Admittedly in his third ever newspaper column, Duff wrote “That the Maori are, chiefly, responsible for their own woes….The finger points at us” (‘Who I am and where I’m coming from’, The Evening Post, 2 July 1991). Alan Duff, ‘Viewpoint’, Listener & TV Times, Vol.130 (1 July 1991), 7. Duff, ‘The confusion of a violent inheritance’, The Evening Post [Wellington], 18 June 1991. Vercoe, Educating Jake, op. cit., p.3. Ibid., p.10. Ibid., pp. 118 & 119.[‘A Letter to Alan’] Angus Calder, ‘From Post-Colonial Settlement Studies: On the consequences of buying land in Old New Zealand and The Piano’, New Literatures Review [New Zealand Issue], No. 38 (Winter 2002), 5-18 at 16. Vercoe, Educating Jake, p.134. Ibid., pp. 137-138. See Augie Fleras and Roger Maaka, ‘Reconstitutionalizing Indigeneity: Restoring the “Sovereigns Within”’, Canadian Review of Studies in Nationalism, Vol.XXVII, No.1-2 (2000), 111-130 at 111 &113. Ibid., 115. Ibid., 123. Otto Heim, Writing Along Broken Lines: Violence and Ethnicity in Contemporary Maori Fiction (Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998), p.42. To be fair to Heim, he does later write of “the individualistic project of social correction the book proposes” (p.45).He expands usefully on this at pp.174-175. Ibid., p.51. Heim blatantly misreads Duff’s view, stating that “For Duff Maori violence is genetic propensity, obeying the unrefutable [sic] logic of a natural law…” (p.54.) Duff’s whole project is a refutation of such genetic determinism even as his fictions do suggest a degree of atavistic response in haka and other traditional warrior behaviours. George Steiner, ‘Totem or Taboo’ [1988]; rpt. in No Passion Spent, op. cit., p.232. Ibid., p.234. Ibid., p.237. Samuel Johnson, ‘The Young Author’ [poem, unattributed], The Gentleman’s Magazine, 1743 ; cited by James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson (London: George Routledge & Sons, 1891), p.6. Lynne Loates, ‘More on Books’, More magazine, Issue 90 (December 1990), 174. John Summers, ‘Taken into Maori confidence’, ‘Literary Views and Reviews’, The Press, 2 March 1991. Alan Duff, ‘The confusion of a violent inheritance’, The Evening Post [Wellington], 18 June 1991. Jill Ker Conway, When Memory Speaks: Reflections on Autobiography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), p.180. F. Allan Hanson and Louise Hanson, Counterpoint in Maori Culture (London & Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983), p.20. K.J. Brown, Ch.16 ‘The Maori Problem in New Zealand’; in (ed.) Colin L. Knight, Liberal Studies: Ideas and Opinions (Christchurch: Secondary Division, Christchurch Teachers’ College, 1970), p.92. Citing the Hunn Report, Brown produced statistics for 1963-67 (broadly the span of Alan Duff’s secondary school years): School Certificate: Maori 1/28 Pakeha 1/7 University Entrance Maori 1/87 Pakeha 1/9 (ibid.). Josie Duff; quoted by Anthony Hubbard, ‘Angry Alan Duff’, Listener, 9 July 1994, 28-32 at 30. Kuia Wrigley; quoted ibid., 31. Ibid. Colin Macintosh to Bruce Harding, September 2001. All subsequent quotations derive from this interview. Macintosh edited the Christchurch Boys’ High School Magazine of 1965 (Vol.133) with some students, including one R.J. Paerata, which problematizes the Headmaster’s belief that there were no other ‘Maori’ students at his school in 1965.Duff recalled Pete Woods as another Maori contemporary at the school. Alan Duff, ‘Winery promotes poetry’, “Opinion”, The Christchurch Mail, 13 March 1997, 6. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, ‘ Color-blind Dreams and Racial Nightmares: Reconfiguring Racism in the Post-Civil Rights Era’; in (eds.) Toni Morrison and Claudia Brodsky Lacour, Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O.J. Simpson Case (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), p.131. Leola Johnson and David Roediger, ‘ “Hertz, Don’t It?” Becoming Colorless and Staying Black in the Crossover of O.J. Simpson’, in ibid., p.200. Ibid., p.217. Davinia Thornley, ‘White, Brown or “Coffee”? Revisioning Race in Tamahori’s Once Were Warriors’, Film Criticism, Vol.XXV, No.3 (Spring 2001-02), 24.Thornley wrote this as a doctoral candidate in media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication Studies at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ibid., 29. Anthony Adah, ‘Post-and Re-Colonizing Aotearoa Screen: Violence and Identity in Once Were Warriors and What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?’, Film Criticism, Vol.XXV, No.3 (Spring 2001-02), 56. Ibid. The West essay is ‘Nihilism in Black America’; in (eds.) Manfred B. Steger and Nancy S. Lind, Violence and Its Alternatives: An Interdisciplinary Reader (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1999), p.178. Bryn Somerville, ‘Duff’s hard lessons in survival through change’, The Press, 5 December 1998, 15. Chris Prentice, ‘Articulations of Violence and Ethnicity’, Journal of New Zealand Literature No. 17 (1999), 159-160. Ibid., 160. Ibid., pp.160 & 162. David Eggleton, ‘GROWING UP disOWNED’, “Books”, Listener, 16 January 1999, 42. See Robert Bigelow, The Dawn Warriors: Man’s Evolution Toward Peace (London: Hutchinson, 1969), esp. Chapter VII: Prehistoric Peace (pp.183-216). Eggleton, op. cit. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton UP, 1957), p.223. Ibid., p. 224. Ibid., p. 231. Buddy Mikaere, Chapter One, Te Maiharoa and the Promised Land (Auckland: Heinemann Publishers, 1988), pp.10-16. (I have been in a social situation in which Alan Duff met Mikaere. ) Cf. also Harry C. Evison, The Long Dispute: Maori Land Rights and European Colonisation in Southern New Zealand (Christchurch; Canterbury University Press, 1997), Chapter Three (‘Te Rauparaha’), pp.46-67. Evison explains that Te Maiharoa was eventually (in late 1830) captured, tortured and eaten (p.53). Harry Evison placed a useful map of the scene of the Kai Huanga feud (1824-1830) on p.42 of The Long Dispute. K.R. Howe, ‘The Fate of the “Savage” in Pacific Historiography’, New Zealand Journal of History, Vol.11:2 (October 1977), 137-154 at 141.Howe adds that John Macmillan Brown adhered to the neo-Darwinian ‘Dying Savage’ /innate degeneracy thesis, arguing that a slide into degeneracy took hold of Pacific Islanders, delivering them into “a state of slothful decadence and decay before Europeans arrived”(p.144). Howe cited Brown’s Peoples and Problems of the Pacific (Vol.II [London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1927), p.159, in which the venerable Scot asserted that Pacific cultures “disintegrated” once their long voyaging had ceased; their racial heart had declined and a “slow phthisis” set in. Duff seems to share a similar vision of his tipuna, awaiting revivification and new enlightenment from the Pakeha Prosperoes, the Pomegranates of Albion (Captain Cook, et al.). Alice Walker, ‘I Am Salman Rushdie: Standing Where We Can’; in Anything We Love Can Be Saved: A Writer’s Activism (1997; rpt. London: The Women’s Press, 1999), p.173. Albert Wendt, interview with Marjorie Crocombe, The Mana Annual of Creative Writing (Sydney, np,1976), p.46 (cited Howe, NZJH 11:2, 153). Alice Walker, ‘Treasure: If We Are to Be Treasures, Let Us Demand to Be Treasured’ [1994], op. cit., p.144. J.M. Barrington, ‘A historical review of policies and provisions’; in (eds.) J. Ewing and J. Shallcrass, Introduction to Maori Education (Wellington: NZ University Press, 1970), p.28. That assimilation was a Eurocentric construct may be seen in Robert Park’s cyclical model of four ideal types: first contact, inter-ethnic competition, accommodation and victorious (‘melting-pot’) assimilation/amalgamation. See Stanford M. Lyman, ‘The Race Relations Cycle of Robert E. Park’, Pacific Sociological Review, Vol.11 (Spring 1968), 16-22. Ernest Barth and Donald Noel have defined assimilation as “the biological, cultural, social, and psychological fusion of distinct groups to create a new ethnically undifferentiated society” (‘Conceptual Frameworks for the Analysis of Race Relations: An Evaluation’, Social Forces, Vol.50 [March 1972],336). Nicholas Thomas, ‘Gender and the Politics of Tradition: Alan Duff’s Once were warriors’, Kunapipi, Vol.XV:2 (1993), 57-67 at 57-58. Ibid.,58. Ibid., 59. Ibid., 62 & 64. Ibid., 64-65. Ibid., 66. See Nicholas Thomas and Mark Adams, Cook’s Sites: Revisiting History (Dunedin: University of Otago Press with the Centre for Cross-Cultural Research, ANU, 1999), p.10. The quotation from natural historian George Forster was reproduced in this book on p.17. Of course Professor Thomas and Oliver Berghof edited an edition of Forster’s A Voyage Round the World in his Britannic Majesty’s Sloop Resolution (1777) which was published in 1999 by the University of Hawai’i Press. Professor Anne Salmond has usefully explored the warrior world of early Maori in her work of contrapuntal and anthropological history, Two Worlds: First Meetings Between Maori and Europeans (Auckland: Viking Penguin Books, 1991). Peter Simpson, ‘Powerful “Stealing”’, The Press Weekend, 12 December 1992, 13. Sylvester Monroe, ‘Nothing Is Black and White’ [interview with Steele], Time, 19 August 1991, 26 & 27. Dan M. Davin to Gordon McLauchlan, ‘Kaleidoscope’ (Television New Zealand, 1984). Producer: Jillian Ewart; Director: Kerry Fowler. Duff to Christina Thompson, ’Alan Duff: The Book, the Film, the Interview’, Meanjin, Vol.54:1 (1995), 13. Duff, ibid., 8. Christine Tremewan, Ch.6 ‘Maui: Trickster and innovator’, Traditional Stories from Southern New Zealand/He Korero no Te Wai Pounamu (Christchurch: Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies, 2002) ,p.73. [Texts translated and edited with commentary by Dr Tremewan.] Ibid. Cf. Donald M. Stafford, Te Arawa (Auckland: Heinemann Reed,; 3rd ed. 1991). Spiro Zavos, ‘Maori wars rage on literary front’, “Books”, The Sydney Morning Herald, 23 September 1991. K.O. Arvidson, ‘Cultural Interaction in the Literature of New Zealand’; in (eds.) Guy Amirthanayagam and S.C. Harrex, Only Connect: Literary Perspectives East and West (Adelaide & Honolulu: Centre for Research in the New Literatures in English [CRNLE] and the East-West Center, 1981), pp.279-280. Ibid., p.280. Kimberle Crenshaw, ‘ Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color’, Stanford Law Review, Vol.43 (July 1991), 1242. Ibid., 1256. Crenshaw insisted that “Suppression of some of these issues in the name of antiracism imposes real costs”. Duff would agree with this assessment. Cornell West, ‘Foreword’ to (eds.) Kimberele Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller and Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: The New Press, 1995), p.xxiv. Ibid., p.xxv. Domett and Trimble cited by Tony Simpson, ‘Waitangi: The Treaty that Never Was’, Insight, Vol.3:2 (January/February 1983),18. Kimberle Williams Crenshaw, ‘Race, Reform, and Retrenchment: Transformation and Legitimation in Antidiscrimination Law’, Harvard Law Review, Vol.101:7 (May 1988), 1371. Linda Williams, Playing the Race Card: Melodramas of Black and White From Uncle Tom to O.J. Simpson (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.7 & 237. Linda Tuhiwai Smith, Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples (London and New York: Zed Books & Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999), p.91. CAN A LEOPARD CHANGE HIS SPOTS? CAN A SAVAGE REMAYNING A SAVAGE BE CIVIL? Bruce Harding Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies University of Canterbury 2005 CAN A LEOPARD CHANGE HIS SPOTS? CAN A SAVAGE REMAYNING A SAVAGE BE CIVIL? Bruce Harding Macmillan Brown Centre for Pacific Studies University of Canterbury 2005