![]() ![]() ![]() Grace’s spirit may be seen to travel from the metaphoricity of an interstitial tree where she hangs on the Tramberts’ estate, through the depths of her drunken parents’ subterranean world, eventually to emerge onto a Pine Block that is partly reclaimed, for a tentative collective reuniting with Maori ancestors. Her suicide may be read as a piece of Maori cosmogony revisited, a modern variation on the founding myth of Hine Titama/Hine Nui te Po’s flight from her incestuous father into the night. A close examination of the liminal character of Grace suggests that her pivotal suicide may result from the accretion of these Oceanic memories. Maori collective memory, in the shape of myths and traditions, also weaves a powerful framework to this first part of the narrative. ![]() It claims that the first part of the novel, culminating with Grace’s suicide, invokes Oceanic memory by revisiting several key stages in Pakeha-Maori relationships. An exercise in symptomatic reading, this paper studies Alan Duff’s Once Were Warriors (1990) from a postcolonial perspective. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |