Cultural Wounds and Physical Scarring in Once Were Warriors

This essay won the 2007 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Twentieth Century & Contemporary Section. How does the wounding and healing of the Maori body in the book and film versions of Once Were Warriors work to construct a national narrative for New Zealand race relations? This essay compares the book and film versions of Once Were Warriors, examining how they work to construct a national narrative for New Zealand race relations. It looks at the popularity of Lee Tamahori's film adaptation of Alan Duff's novel and argues that New Zealanders have incorporated the story of Pine Block as a certain kind of national narrative, arguably a national narrative that works against constructions of a mutually beneficial settlement process. To read or watch this particular construction of national identity is an experience that New Zealanders find almost unbearably painful, yet Once Were Warriors became the most successful film in New Zealand box office history. It is interesting that as a nation we feel prepared to take on these representations, rather than dismissing them as the reactionary perspectives of a specific group of people as so often happens with Maori portrayals of oppression and colonial violence. The trauma in Once Were Warriors arguably acts as a form of collective cultural catharsis, allowing New Zealanders to work through a somewhat repressed history of forceful settlement. The book and the film resolve these issues in different ways, but both incorporate physical trauma, domestic trauma, and trauma associated with marginalisation which allows us to experience the pain of that particular form of violence and then take pleasure from the healing of that wound. These wounds are created in both narratives through tattooing, gang violence, domestic violence and rape. However, the book and film construct and heal these wounds in very different ways and, in doing so, perhaps create different narratives of national identity. This essay examines whether these dual narratives deposit the viewer/reader back at the site of conventional racial unity or suggest a new way of representing ourselves as a nation.