Warrior-matriarchs’ retrotopia and democracy: Searching for the lost tribe in Alan Duff’s Once were warriors

Abstract

Alan Duff’s novel Once Were Warriors (1990) demystified the Māori grand narratives of the past previously romanticized by writings from the Māori Renaissance of the mid-1970s and 1980s. In contrast with the negative portrayal of Māori subjectivities and the political immobility generally perceived by critics, the present study aims to reconceptualize male tribal models in Duff’s novel: on the one hand, the Rangatira (or male elders) and Māori urban gangs engage in tribal patterns echoing utopias of male domination; on the other, female characters such as Beth Heke, her daughter Grace and the singer Mavis Tangata—as examples of warrior-matriarchs—retrieve an alternative communitarian proposal that, resembling Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of retrotopia, but far from its dangerous nostalgia, proposes recuperating ancestral warriorhood through open democracy and the hybridity of a revised version of tribalism and the Eucharist.