Emiel Martens,
Once Were Warriors: The Aftermath. The Controvery of OWW in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Amsterdam: Aksant, 2007.
ISBN: 978-90-5260-236-3.
€24.90 (pb)
184pp
(Review copy supplied by Aksant Publishers)

How does one describe Once Were Warriors? In Aotearoa New Zealand it was originally a surprisingly successful first novel by Alan Duff, a man of no particular fame or standing at the time (1990). Then in 1994 it was an even more successful first feature film for director Lee Tamahori, producer Robin Scholes, and scriptwriter Riwia Brown. Internationally, it’s the film, of course, that is better known, and reaction to it around the world has been quite extraordinary.

My own favorite anecdote about its reception comes from the Screen conference in 2001 when a US scholar just returning from a Fulbright in Poland, upon hearing that I live in Aotearoa New Zealand, informed me that she had recently seen the film. What a wonderful documentary, she said.

She was by no means the only person to respond to the film in this way, which is curious for various reasons, not least of which is the film’s visual style. As Rochelle Simmons wrote in “Driving Force: Narrative in Lee Tamahori’s Television Advertisements and Once Were Warriors” (Media International Australia 80 [1996]: pp. 27-31), Tamahori brought his training in making successful television commercials to bear on Once Were Warriors. It is disconcerting that his manipulation of images could go unnoticed.

Yet here in Aotearoa even folks who realized that Once Were Warriors is a fiction film often treated it as though it documented the life of New Zealand Maori. And on that basis the arguments that had begun with Duff’s novel continued.

These are not arguments about the film qua film; they are arguments about social policy and, most especially, about Maori identity, and they originate as much within the Maori communities as within the national community encompassing all ethnic groups living here now. This is what interests Emiel Martens about Once Were Warriors. The ‘aftermath’ of his title may not be the right word, because what Martens examines is a phenomenon that predates Warriors and continues after. Within the context that Martens sets up, the argument about Maori identity is larger than the debate over domestic violence. From living here, I’d say that most people think ‘domestic violence’ when they hear Once Were Warriors; while Martens doesn’t neglect this aspect of the phenomenon, it’s subsumed within his discussion of a debate between what he refers to as the ‘cultural brokers’ and ‘elitist Maori traditionalists’ (pp. 114, 123, e.g.), on the one hand, and what he implies are pragmatic realists like Tamahori and Duff, on the other.

As Martens notes, the novel was bought and consumed primarily by Pakeha New Zealanders (i.e., of white European ancestry), who would be primarily middle class by definition as readers and buyers of books. The film, on the other hand, on the basis of box office and later television screenings statistics, was seen by pretty much everybody, especially Maori, who embraced it despite serious objections raised by Maori cultural leaders who spoke against it for what was described as a racist depiction of Maori. During this same period, Maori politician John Tamihere was chief executive of the Waipareira Trust, an Auckland-area local social services organization, arguing that urban Maori needed a fairer distribution of government support for its sort of work. What Tamihere objected to was a distribution to Maori on the basis of their ability to whakapapa to rural marae, which would effectively eliminate urban Maori who had lost touch with their genealogical ties to their rural origins.

Tamihere was arguing for the validity of this urban Maori experience as part of a modern Maori identity. As Martens presents his research, Duff’s novel was a significant contribution to this argument, in that Once Were Warriors presents an alternative to the ‘traditional’ concept of Maori identity, which originates with The Young Maori Party, formed in the early twentieth century by such giant figures of Maori culture and politics as Te Rangi Hiroa, Maui Pomare, and Apirana Ngata (p. 117). Relying on the work of Toon van Meijl, Martens describes these men as having led a movement against “the rapidly progressing westernization of Maori society” (Van Meijl 1996, p. 313) developing instead “a timeless notion of pre-colonial Maori society” as a form of resistance (Martens, p. 117).

To put it briefly, Once Were Warriors, both novel and film, engages in an ongoing argument between younger, urban Maori and older, rural Maori about what it means to be Maori; this is also a struggle over power, in that government funds are involved, as well as the ability to influence the future of Maori as individuals and as a community. As Martens puts it,

Duff disapproves of the politics of biculturalism because he does not believe in the binary opposition between Maori and Pakeha and condemns the exclusionist polarity model of cultures which prescribes the Maori people their “real” identity . . . . Instead, Duff propagates modernisation, education, self-help and individualism to develop a strong Maori community, both economically and culturally, yet multi-faceted, dynamic and hybrid. (p. 123)

Although director Tamahori largely agrees with Duff about Maori identity, because he set out to make a commercially successful movie – a point that Martens stresses (e.g., pp. 50, 79-80) – the film adopts a more traditional conclusion, in which a return to the marae and the values that it represents will bring about a happy end. (Indeed, in the wake of Warriors, several New Zealand films appeared to advocate much the same resolution, that is, a return to the land if not exactly to the marae – this at a time when urban Maori who returned to Northland were dying in astonishing numbers because of house fires caused by inadequate heating.)

So Martens’ book provides context for all of this material: Duff, the novel, response to it within Aotearoa and New Zealand, Tamahori, the film, response to it both internationally and domestically. In addition, he also provides some context for the development of concepts of Maori identity in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, along with exponents of different points of view on the subject. Martens himself, through his labels and otherwise, identifies with exponents of a nontraditional definition of ‘Maori’ that includes the urban Maori experience. His support is perhaps slightly less clear for Tamahori as a role model of Duff’s call for Maori to assimilate into Western culture sufficient to be financially self-supporting while retaining some sense of oneself as Maori.

Once Were Warriors: The Aftermath. The Controversy of OWW in Aotearoa New Zealand is thus something of a curiosity in that it is written by a lecturer in media studies at the University of Amsterdam who is not a native speaker of English but is nonetheless passionate about an argument within New Zealand Maori culture over identity, leadership, cultural production, and economic security. My apologies for any essentialism that just leaked through, but, given that much of cultural significance goes on in te reo (the Maori language) talk shows, surely whether one can comprehend written and spoken Maori is something of an issue if one wishes to survey Maori responses to Once Were Warriors. In Martens’ survey of ‘a wide diversity of texts’, radio is conspicuously absent (p. 14).

Truth told, I disagree with Martens on a fundamental aspect of our understanding of the world. Martens writes: “Postmodern theory has convincingly shown that the realist model is no longer tenable” (pp. 58-59). As Martens understands the world, if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, then it does not make a sound. Although, according to Martens’ argument his book would be what I make of it, I needn’t go into my personal beliefs about philosophical riddles – but then, Martens does seem to feel so very strongly about the truth and rightness of the picture he constructs. And he is so very careful to outline all the steps that prove that his construction is right, at the same time that he is explaining that constructs are only constructs and not reality itself.

Martens is definitely not a native speaker and he has not had much help with editing this book. Its lack of an index is annoying and the bibliography is full of mistakes. One could quibble over small factual details and other bits and pieces. One must, though, question the extent of Martens’ reliance on one particular source, Toon Van Meijl, no matter how important Van Meijl’s research is in the field, especially when such reliance leads him to reject various indigenous sources on the same research material. Is there even so much as a fine line between, on the one hand, rejecting self-definitions provided by an indigenous people in favor of definitions constructed by outsiders because one prefers postmodernism to traditionalism – and colonialist imposition, on the other?

This is also a curious book because it is hard to pick its audience. At one point Martens thoughtfully provides a footnote to explain ‘epistemology’ (p. 72), and throughout his opening chapters he helpfully clarifies what he means when he refers to ‘cultural studies’, ‘postcolonial’, and other such terms. The book reads at times much as though we have gotten the complete notes for an undergraduate course Martens has taught. At other times, as when Martens quotes an obscure source stating the obvious in bland language (eg, pp. 27, 69), one wonders if this isn’t some version of his MA thesis or doctoral dissertation. Yet the linguistic and rhetorical awkwardnesses of the book are mitigated by the information provided and the engagement with a large and complex argument. Martens’ book is in a fair way toward continuing the argument he describes, and that is a part of its fascination. It will be a ‘must-read’ on bibliographies in several disciplines.

Harriet Margolis,
University of Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand.

Created on: Thursday, 11 September 2008