[All citations from Duff refer to the Vintage International edition.]
Like Deven and Stevens, Jake Heke constructs a mask to hide behind; he hides behind his toughness, which he links to his Maori ancestry, the same ancestry which he knows little about. As the embodiment of a Maori warrior who is out of place in 1990, Jake struggles to create himself within colonized New Zealand. Without a reputation of toughness, Jake crumbles. He values what people think of him more than what he thinks of himself. He creates himself as "Jake the Mus (for muscles)" because he wants to represent the past glory of his people:
Jake greeted people in Maori, the language of his physical appearance, his actual ethnic existence, and yet they could be speaking Chink-language for what it mattered. Course a man understood kia ora, who doesn't even the honkies do, but as for the rest. Made him uncomfortable if they spoke it to him, so Jake always replied in emphatic English, and sometimes a speaker might explain, Aee, the Pakeha took away our language and soon it'll be gone. (58)
Ironically, he knows little about the Maori culture other than their great warriorhood.
Jake unknowingly contributes to the Pakeha (European) dominance which he resents. While drinking, violence, and bad faith reduces his dignity, it augments that of the Pakeha. Just as the printing shop authenticates Deven's existence, beer and violence authenticate Jake's: "Beer and happiness -- ?? Happiness? For me it is. Beer and culture. Culture? Beer and Maori culture. It's our lifeblood. We live for our beer. My parents did, and as for Jake's, the stories he's told me how they drank" (35). Jake fears that without his mask of toughness nobody will recognize him, making him invisible to himself and others.
Jake Heke exemplifies a Maori's attempts to receive recognition from a white dominant world using mimesis, the ancient Greek notion of a replica, a perfect copy; mimesis is a form of bad faith because the imitator hides from his (sic) true self. He longs to have enough money like the Pakeha to be able to surprise his wife, Beth, with treasures of the sea. Ironically, he buys the seafood on the very day he got fired from his job, hiding from his impoverished economic situation. The family trip to visit Boogie, one of their six children, in juvenile prison also exemplifies his Pakeha imitation. Driving around in a rental car, Jake makes sure as many people see him as possible: "People did double-takes, they waved, winked, frowned, stared with naked jealousy at the sight of the big Ford Falcon rental cruising so slow down Rimu Street they may as well be walking" (89). For a few hours, they pretend that they can afford a car, which makes them better than their neighbors. Also the picnic food they buy is Pakeha food: "most everything they ate was food introduced by the dreaded white man Pakeha" (88). Even their home is a replica: "but I guess every home in Pine Block is a replica" (143). Jake and his people not only imitate the white man, they also imitate their ancestors. The Brown Fists, a gang in Pine Block, tattoo their faces in the style of Maori warriors: "Design a replica of olden-day moko, which the tattooist'd copied out of a book from a photograph of a real Maori head" (175). Although Jake, his family, and his neighbors do not recognize that they imitate the Pakeha customs, they mindfully replicate the Maori traditions as a source of pride. Both imitations represent their hopes to become the things they imitate.
Alan Duff portrays contemporary Maori as people who lack the hope to lift themselves above the beer and the violence; Jake and his peers believe that their colonizers (Pakeha) live unattainable lives. Whereas their efforts to imitate the Pakeha indicate a desire to relinquish their heritage for white man's power, their imitation of Maori tradition suggests a desire to cling to tradition: "Bad faith can hence also be shown to be an effort to deny the blackness within by way of asserting the supremacy of whiteness. It can be regarded as an effort to purge blackness from the self and the world, symbolically and literally" (Gordon 6). Jake does not recognize the tragic consequence of their bad faith, as it encourages them to let their culture fall into ruin.
The narrative ends with the hope that the contemporary Maori will derive strength from their culture and history. Beth recognizes that "we [the Maori] should never forget our past or our future is lost. . . . wondering if perhaps that was what ailed her people: their lack of knowledge of the past. A history" (118). Beth promises herself and her children that she's "gonna do my best to give you kids your rightful warrior inheritance. Pride in yourself, your poor selves. Not attacking, violent pride but heart pride (161). With knowledge of their culture, Beth believes her people will rediscover the meaning of pride. Cornel West argues that "the genius of our black foremothers and forefathers was to create powerful buffers to ward off the nihilistic threat, to equip black folk with cultural armor to beat back the demons of hopelessness, meaninglessness, and lovelessness" (West 23). Unlike Beth, Jake barely wakes up to see human needs. He does not know who to identify with: "Jake never completely sure who he was one of�he thought he was one ofem alright. If not the one" (56). Jake briefly recognizes his failings but he cannot maintain his mini-epiphany.
Like Jake's epiphany, those of Deven and Stevens do not survive. Although these short-lived epiphanies create a hopeful mood, the reader hesitates to trust the character's self-realizations. Overwhelmed by their bad faith, the reader feels frustrated with the characters' inability to recognize their failings. The characters cannot acknowledge their wasted lives because they create themselves as projections of their cultures. If they recognize their lives as wasted, then they must recognize the faults of their cultures. The protagonists of Anita Desai, Kazuo Ishiguro, and Alan Duff illustrate these shortcomings. Deven portrays India's inability to maintain tradition, exemplified by the decline of the Urdu language. Similarly, as Heidie Joo points out in "Rushdie, Ishiguro, and the Art of Story-telling,"
the British political practices of the twentieth century and in particular, its system of colonialism. . . Ishiguro further comments that the effects of such a society zaps the individuality out of the individual . . . The servitude which colonialism breeds leads to the denial of the self.
Unlike Ishiguro, Alan Duff uses other characters to show a successful convergence of past and present to his protagonist in bad faith. Although Desai, Ishiguro, and Duff masterfully characterize their protagonists as inauthentic and weak beings, the colonized are not always in bad faith, but these authors focus on the conflicts and contradictions that accompany life in a Postcolonial state.
Last Modified: 15 March, 2002