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Alan Duff
34 quotes
“They're so monumentally stupid, these people who call me a Maori basher. When they're so hyped up about my agenda they read between the lines when it isn't there. One Night Out Stealing is a little crack at my critics. "So what are you going to call me now? White basher?" My main point is to say that it's a universal human condition. You know, if you're an asshole, it don't matter what color you are, as simple as that. In fact, I think my second book is a superior work in terms of technical skill and everything else.”
“My work deals with universal problems - they not just Maori or New Zealand problems, but Australian, American .... it's a male problem.”
“Love, and lovelessness, are at the heart of all my books. I know what happens when people grow up in a loveless background. It's just the end, the effective end. It's particularly so among Maori - it shouldn't be but it is. As a society, they all fucked up. Their concepts are never a maturing thing, they stay fixed. If you're a non-reading, non-consciously advancing people, it will inevitably be the same tomorrow as it is today.”
“I'm not Jake, (the hero of Warriors/Broken-Hearted). That's not me. I was Grace, the daughter who hanged herself. Or in One Night Out Stealing, I was sort of Sonny, he's a little fulla, very sensitive. I'm very sensitive, I've got to be sensitive, that's my job. But when I was growing up - you had to be tough. What a lot of shit that was - that's why I like to go to schools and tell them it's good to love, you've got to tell your buddies 'I love you man'...”
“The manhood image that Jake portrays is passing away but I'm not entirely optimistic for the future. The sad thing is those violent men have inherited that mentality from their fathers, uncles, and grandfathers. The only way to stop the cycle? You use the kids' heroes like rugby players Jonah Lomu or Zinzan Brooke and you say get out there and push this message across. You need to change the thinking. It can only be a gradual process, unfortunately.”
“So many of the settings and characters of my novels are from my childhood. It was not difficult when writing Once Were Warriors to recall myself spying on that Bertram family, the Tramberts in the novel, and like the character Grace Heke I have at times throughout my life considered suicide. A little part inside me knows the feeling of that grey blanket coming down and turning to the blackest black that engulfs reason. You just have to be stronger, if that's the way your mind and emotions get inclined at times.”
“I thought about writing "What Becomes of the Broken Hearted?" immediately after completing the novel "Once Were Warriors" ... But it wasn't until some time later that the story all came to me. I can now confess that I wrote the book in just three weeks. Three crazy, wonderful weeks.”
“This is definitely not "Once Were Warriors 2" ... I'm sure there'll be inevitable comparisons, but people will quickly see that it's a story that exists in its own right. And I think they'll find it more complex and in many cases more subtle.”
“I've always been a big fan of Tem's and believe he's one of the genuine stars of this country ... I was determined to see him return as Jake and I also thought it was important that the country, and indeed the world, see this character grow up.”
“Nobody goes to see a film about the IRA and believes all Irish are in the IRA, in the same way as nobody sees "The Godfather" and believes all Italians are in the Mafia ... It's nonsense if people say this is portraying New Zealand as anything – it's simply telling a story.”
“I wasn't pointing the finger at Jake, ... Jake didn't know. You don't know what you don't know.”
“He [Jake] had an important part in his time when I wrote him, but no longer.”
“I wrote the story on behalf of the Beths, and the Graces, and the Boogies, and everybody else in that situation.”
“I wrote about Jake's inner despair in his moments of self-reflection in his quiet moments. I then unjustly accuse him of raping his daughter because I was saying, on Grace's behalf, she suffered unjustly and wrongly, and now you are going to suffer wrongly and unjustly for something you didn't do.”
“I didn't want too many Māori names, I wanted it to travel internationally. I knew that Americans might get Two Lakes, but they wouldn't get Rotorua.”
“My book was suggesting that there is no such thing as a successful society that it is not literate and without a culture of reading. That point as important to the entire Warriors story as anything. The movie failed to cover that. But, boy, it was some movie.”
“The Māori New Zealand I wrote about nearly 30 years ago still exists and yet it many ways most of it doesn't. Māori have advanced.”
“The movie and the book travelled internationally, which took us all by surprise. Goes to show that Jake "The Muss" Hekes are in near every society. But so are the defiant Beths who push back, and how she pushed back. There's a tragic Grace in every society, yet in Grace Heke's instance she became a symbol of shame at the human causes behind her suicide. Dead in body, but of elevated memory in all our minds.”
“... my Maori chief character, Te Tupaia, was a model of exemplary traditional Maori, steeped in his culture. Through him, I expressed my love and gratitude to that part of my own upbringing, the traditions, the singing, the humorous, lateral way of thinking. I based this character on a man called Irirangi Tiakiawa, whose formal farewell of my oldest brother in our Tuhourangi wharenui in Rotorua is an unforgettable memory of Maori culture at its finest.”
“I did not write anything negative about Maori culture. I painted a portrait of urban Maori, a sub-culture, how a typical family on the unemployment benefit in a state house lived; a canvas broadened, in collective form, caught in a cycle of wretched drunkenness, violence, wife and child abuse. Not a pretty picture, indeed at times quite hideous. But just ask any Maori how close to the truth it is.”
“... in Once Were Warriors I exalted Maori culture. I 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. So I knew that some of them would be upset. My own Maori people from my tribal group love the book. When we had the premiere of the movie a few weeks ago, they traveled all the way from my home town, a four-hour drive ... all my elders, all my kupuna to bless their boy. So I have always been very strong with my people. I am a strong supporter of Maori culture, but I have also questioned certain aspects of my culture. A healthy culture should subject itself to questions. My questioning upset a lot of people because we had one of those rigid cultures that did not allow questions, and I came along and said things like Why can't women be chiefs? Why can't women have equal right of say? My tribe in particular is very strong on that. They don't believe that a woman has a right to own what they call a paepae, a seat of power. And we also have another system which privileges the eldest son of the eldest son and the line goes down. I say we're limiting ourselves, because often a leader will appear who might be the sixth eldest and it might be a woman. This natural leader might be lost to the people because we have this stupid tradition.”
“We were a nation of warriors. War was our culture. That's how we evolved. ... There was a certain warrior pride. Today, most of that is totally misplaced. We have gang members covering themselves in tattoos and thinking that it's okay to go and beat up a woman, then gang-rape her. Or they think it's okay to spend every single penny they've got on booze and crash head on into families while traveling on the roads. A warrior doesn't go and fight somebody smaller than himself. A true warrior would never hit a woman. But that's what we have done, what we have been doing for too long. So I'm saying get back that warrior ethic, but channel it.”
“... of course discipline is one of the many things that we're lacking, and it's certainly not coming from our leaders. So I'm telling our leaders, you'd better start talking discipline and education and reading. Instead of going to the pub to drink beer with your fifty dollars, why not say I'm staying home and I'm going to take my child and buy fifty dollars' worth of books, or take my wife out to dinner, or buy some flowers. Or let's go for a walk in the park or go sailing. There are lots of things to do. I'm dealing with Maori kids that live eight miles from the beach yet have never been there. I'm paying for the buses to take them to the beach, 'cause their parents are all smoking cigarettes and it costs six dollars a day for a packet of cigarettes. Their parents are all boozing up. They start boozing on a Thursday night; it doesn't finish till Sunday, and half the time it ends in an all-out brawl. And I'm saying why haven't we pointed this out? And as for these idiots telling me "Don't hang out our dirty washing," if I waited for them to hang out our dirty washing, it would never get hung out, and the washing would get dirtier.”
“Racism is far less institutionalized in New Zealand than in any other country in the world. That's why we Maori have made the most advancement for all our claims. That's why the Treaty of Waitangi has been enshrined now in our legislation by the highest court in the land, by the Appeal Court, which says this is a binding contract. Now we're able to do all sorts of things like that. You couldn't get that from an entrenched racist people. We have always played alongside each other in sport. We have fought alongside each other. We have lived life together as New Zealand citizens. In the last fifteen years, there has been a divide there. Some of it has been good because it has raised the consciousness of everybody, in particular certain whites, the smug element, or the ones that didn't want to know. So, I'm not dismissing everything that some of these political activists do. On the other hand, it has turned us into a race of people that says it's okay to be a loser, it's okay to beat my wife, it's okay to go and get drunk three or four times a week with the last of my money instead of paying someone to look after my kids, because the whites have colonized me and dispirited me. Well, you know the answer to that? The answer is to respect yourself, to say, well, I'm not going to have a beer. I'm going to take my children somewhere. I'm going to stop hitting my wife. I'm going to stop blaming the world for my problems. I know it's harder for me to get a job, so I've got to try twice as hard. Don't cry about it. Someone's got to be the minority.”
“... I think we need the Beths to show the way. The Jakes are never going to show the way. I have said in my book, Maori: The Crisis and the Challenge, that women will lead the way because they care about the kids. I've never seen a group of women fighting in a bar with a beer or talking about who they hit yesterday and how big their muscles are. Women are saying, "Oh my little Johnny came home yesterday and he, oh I couldn't believe it, he can spell the word 'everything'!" You know, things like that. This never occurs to those idiot males. The movie version of my novel is slightly idealized, although I'm very happy with the movie. And the person who took over writing the screenplay is a self-described politically correct person who thinks I'm very radical, for some odd reason. She seems to think that our culture and only our culture will save us. I don't believe that. Culture by itself is not enough. I went to a prison two days ago and talked to a group of guys in there and by the time I finished with them, they said "Oh we'd like you to come again, Mr Duff."Because I'm relevant to them. And I said "What's wrong? If I was able to give you the secret now, what is it? Is it culture? Is it your language?" And they said, "No man, just how to pay the bloody rent." That's what they want. They want to be functioning citizens. And these people are saying, "We'll teach you how to do bone carving," or "We'll teach you how to do flax weaving," but these things don't pay the rent. When the landlord comes along and says "Where's my rent?" you can't say "Oh but I've been on this course and, you know, I don't have my rent." You can't do that.”
“I have seen the kind of people I write about in prison. I have seen them in the streets. I have seen them in the boxing gyms. I have seen them in various places. But you've got to get down there and say, "Well, I'm one of you, but, you know, I ain't here to pay your bills. I ain't here to say 'If you've got a hangover that's alright, just have another couple hours of sleep.' I'm here to say, 'Maybe you've got to reduce the number of hangovers'." That's what I'm saying. And I'm not there to say "You only have hangovers because of the white man," that "It's white man's drink and therefore it's not your fault." As I say, I've never seen a Maori being led into a bar in handcuffs, but I've seen heaps of them coming out in handcuffs, under arrest for breaking up the joint. Because they turn into supermen once they've drunk ten jugs of beer. What do professors know about people like this, who have never had more than a hundred fifty dollars a week in their hand?”
“I despise left-wing people. Despise them. They are contemptible because they're dangerous - they want to put a lid on everybody's ambitions, to punish people for working hard and making a success of their lives. They want a level playing field because they can't compete otherwise. They're filth. Left-wing welfare ... destroys people. I do however admire business people. Most of my friends are self-employed, probably 98 per cent. They take a risk, are generally more dynamic, more interesting and more interested in the world. They're always pushing into new areas. I'm like that. I'm learning how to fly a plane, then I'll learn to fly choppers; I want to learn how to play golf properly, I want to do everything, I'm just greedy ... greedy for experience, for knowledge.”
“The Hamilton Boys Home made one of the biggest impressions on my life. Perhaps thirteen was the right age to have impressions stamped on me. ... One day I get a letter from my mother, a nice letter. She names a date and time when she's coming. I'm surprised at how excited I am. I feel as if I can show my mother off, as she's still an attractive woman and she has a lively, confident personality, not afraid to crack a joke, make an irreverent but good-humoured remark in front of anyone. Surely she wouldn't come drunk? I wait and I wait. The manager tells me not to get my hopes up. But I have and I won't be dropping them. I am convinced. 'She'll come,' I tell the man who only thinks he knows wiser. But she doesn't come. I am in my locked bedroom that night staring out my window at a sliver glimpse of stars and I cry: This memory found its way into Once Were Warriors with the character Boogie waiting in vain for a visit from his family, doomed by Jake's diversion to a pub.”
“I knew a lot of Maori parents didn’t do things with their children, as I knew well that being read to as a child is not a Maori thing, so they start school already behind non-Maori kids who have been read to, and from then on it is the despondent realisation that you’re never going to catch up. So why bother trying? The word ‘hiding’ for such kids did not mean concealing yourself in a fun game. It meant being beaten up. ‘The bash’ in the other, real Maori world is horrific to receive, even just witness. ‘Smack’ is not a slap on the hand. It’s someone being ‘smacked over’. And I thought, if Maori are so big on whanau, then how come the majority of child runaways and penal-institution incarcerates are Maori? I know: I was one of them.”
“I started to form the idea of a novel, the title born of my pondering about a race that were once warriors now living in a society not their own that punishes what they used to gain all their meaning and precious mana from. I do not use the word precious sarcastically. For Maori, mana starts before everything, especially in pre-European times and in a warrior culture. Our men went from gaining status and mana for every enemy they killed in battle to being jailed just for assaulting someone. They once were warriors, all right. And there’s something poignant about that, a race of men having to reject all that they’ve known for 800 to 1000 years and adapt to another race’s laws and behavioural code; to become a nation, no longer a proud member of a tribe. I am in no doubt that this enforced cultural change left a gaping hole in the Maori male psyche.”
“To make sure I wasn’t going to disrespect my Maori people, in 1989 I sought the advice of a highly respected Maori elder based in Wellington, Dr Huirangi Waikerepuru, a renowned orator and ardent advocate of the Maori language. I told Huirangi that the book would be hard-hitting, and finished by saying that if he thought the story would hurt Maori then I wouldn’t write it. ‘Write what your heart says,’ he told me. ‘And nothing else.’ I did. Twelve drafts of it, ultimately. In the middle of writing I was told in no uncertain terms by Chris Else to keep my authorial voice out of it, my political opinions to myself, to write in the immediate and just cut loose.”
“He was a man who attracted his own drunken, violent ilk, brawled in pubs, beat his wife, traumatised his children, chose the pub and parties ahead of his family. A man, it has to be said, only too typical of too many Maori adult males. And, on that count, I can attest to virtually no dissenting voice among Maori. How do I know? From massive feedback generated by the movie adaptation of the book. Being stopped in the street by gang members, by women, Maori parents and grandparents, saying thanks for exposing it. At heart, though, Jake is just another abused, traumatised child with no idea how to come to terms with his own brutal upbringing. The story looked at the damage Jake’s kind of unthinking, heavy-drinking, violent sub-culture does to the children, who suffer along with their mothers, while the culpable mostly get off scot-free. I was also hinting that Jake ‘The Muss’ Heke was not entirely guilty, more a man who doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. If any of us had had his upbringing, what else would we have turned into other than someone like him, or way worse? 20 with hardly a mention of the style or the sensitivity required to paint these pictures. Yes, some critical praise did come and was much appreciated, along with second prize in the national Book Awards and a generous cheque. Any first-time writer will tell you how much a positive reaction means to his/her confidence. But adverse reaction also poured forth. A line-up of critics, mainly from the left, publicly declared me an enemy of the Maori people, with no mention of any literary merit. In trying to open the country’s eyes to this social malaise of state-house neighbourhoods, out of sight and definitely out of mind, I was hit by a collective backlash of outrage on a surprising scale.”
“Through invoking political correctness, the moral high ground and supposedly ‘showing respect for others’, certain members of our populace try to control the language we can use, our behaviour and our outlook. Ironically, they show no respect for others by trying to curtail what is acceptable in our society. And, as I discovered, writing about the world of Once Were Warriors was not acceptable. I dared to say Maori should be fixing Maori problems. And, boy, did some people not like hearing that, not least white liberals, along with some Maori with faces in the government trough. Stir people up the book well might. But have them lashing out and being irrational, telling lies about what I had written? I expected more tears than anger, but received comments like: ‘Duff down on his own Maori people’; ‘What a disgrace, to hang out dirty Maori washing’; ‘Totally disrespected Maori culture’. I started to realise the criticism was not coming from Maori everywhere, just a sector of Maori academics and cultural figures who considered themselves Maori spokespeople. From people in positions of power and/or influence, and certainly of social standing within their own peer group, of the same complexion as those they defended but living entirely different, prosperous lives.”
“I started to discover there were social agencies on nice government contracts. Consultants would write reports and do studies on the perennial Maori social problems, which always concluded with blame heaped on colonialism, white racism and the system, and soon another government contract followed. They weren’t happy with this half-Maori coming out of nowhere daring to say differently, not echoing their ‘we’re-victims-of-colonialism, we-were-oppressed’ rhetoric. I was saying Maori males were oppressing our females, that our wives and daughters were the victims — of untaught Maori men. To think I went even further and said, since the problems are Maori, then Maori should fix them. Sacrilege! How dare I? The Duff upstart threatened to turn their boat over.”