Once Were Warriors 2 Full Movie

[Maximilian Lozano]

BethHeke: Our people once were warriors. But unlike you, Jake, they were people with mana, pride; people with spirit. If my spirit can survive living with you for eighteen years, then I can survive anything.

I don\u2019t think Alan Duff meant to write Once Were Warriors. Not as such. I think he was writing to write himself out of a hole, to save his own life. His book lifted him up and out of that hole and made him our new bestselling author. It made him a big deal \u2014 he was awarded a syndicated column in several national and regional newspapers (these were a thing in the 90s. Oh, I meant syndicated columns. But so too were newspapers\u2026)

Duff went to the well more than once too often, his follow-up novel, One Night Out Stealing mined similar themes albeit not as memorably, it might actually have been better written though. And then we got the Warriors sequels. First What Becomes Of The Broken Hearted? - which, from memory, was quite good. Then Jake\u2019s Long Shadow. The character of Jake Heke and the remaining family members cast a long shadow over Duff\u2019s life and writing career. He had put out a novella which I enjoyed at the time (State Ward) and a book or two of non-fiction (based around his columns) and, by far my favourite Duff book, 1999\u2019s memoir, Out of the Mist and Steam.

Over the last 20 years or so, since the long shadow of Jake and indeed Jake\u2019s Long Shadow (published 2002), Alan Duff has tried his hand at internationally-set fiction, historical, and many miles \u2014 literally \u2014 from the Kiwi stories that started his career.

A Conversation With My Country is almost a meta-prank, apart from the fact that Duff alleged to have very much meant every word. He appears on these pages as an out of touch, out of date, old man. His thinking so far beyond right wing, which is fine, that\u2019s his position \u2014 but his authority completely undermined as he comes in from his hiding place on the other side of the world, and tells us all what is wrong and how to fix it (without really telling us how to fix it). He was throwing stones at the glasshouse, and that can sometimes be a writer\u2019s job. But he had borrowed the stones and was lobbing them on behalf. It felt phoned in, when it didn\u2019t feel completely stupid. It felt like Winston Peters, Author. Basically.

Anyway, that\u2019s Duff\u2019s bibliography in a tiny wee nutshell, and if I\u2019m being reductive that\u2019s for time and space, it\u2019s not to say that there aren\u2019t some other books he\u2019s written that are worth your reading time and spending money \u2014 I have not read them all, so cannot comment on the ones I chose to skip.

I have always thought the movie was \u2014 in this instance \u2014 better than the book. This barely ever happens. But to me this felt completely, profoundly obvious. The tension there of course is that the movie couldn\u2019t exist without the book, and though it feels like faint praise, or some such, Duff\u2019s unique talent with Once Were Warriors was his timing. His book arrived at the right time. It started many conversations. And the film picked up on that, and put it in front of even more eyeballs; the film is confronting but ultimately tells a story of real power. A journey. I feel it does a better job of putting this all out and across than the book.

That\u2019s really all I wanted to say. Just a reflection on the power of this film \u2014 see the link above for more on that \u2014 and the fact that such films will always still need the books as the source. This is not me saying Alan Duff was ever either a bad or good writer. But he was the right writer for the right time. And maybe he only really ever had one trick. At least someone helped to turn that trick into something bigger. Something lasting. That still speaks to the success of the book; its adaptability.

It was impossible to not run into Alan Duff in Havelock North in the 90s. He was one of our celebrities. There weren\u2019t many then. It was him and Paul Holmes. And you had a much better chance of seeing Duff in the wild. He even came to see my band play one time. Well, he was in the same bar where we happened to be having our very first gig. We were a nervous trio. And when we saw him, I joked during one of our breaks that we might end up in his column the following week. Well, fuck me, but we did. The following week, in the Saturday paper, we got what we called our first (and later only) review. Alan Duff might have said something about \u201Cgentle melodies\u201D. Alan Duff definitely said something about \u201Cdeeper meaning lyrics\u201D. We wore that like a badge. A strange thing to do really, since we were a covers band, and the entire set was comprised of songs we did not write.

On October 17, formal negotiations commenced in Oslo between the Colombian government and the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). They will be followed by further peace talks in Havana in mid-November. In the press, much has been made of who will be present to represent each side at the negotiation table. Yet the cornerstone of any eventual deal -- the demobilization and reintegration of FARC rebels -- has been curiously missing from the debate. Notably, there has been little public dialogue about the Colombian government's nine-year-old disarm, demobilize, and reintegrate (DDR) program and whether it is equipped to process and successfully incorporate thousands of remaining FARC guerrillas into society should a peace agreement be reached.

Recently, I met with one former FARC commander who was not invited to the negotiation table. Elda Neyis Mosquera, also known as Karina, demobilized in 2008 at age 45, after 24 years with the FARC. The only female to reach the rank of front commander in her day, she is accused of killing some 200 military officials, police, and civilians. She is also charged with conducting dehumanizing treatment of prisoners and dismembering corpses. In popular rendition, she is an ugly, one-eyed, crazed-killer negra. Given the undercurrent of machismo, racism, and classism in Colombian society, Elda's being black and "unattractive" has made it easy for the Colombian press to portray her as a monster. Perhaps that is why Elda's alleged cruelties are the stuff of legend, whereas those of her male equals and superiors are not.

When I met Elda, I found her to be neither ugly nor crazed, although she did lose an eye during combat and wears a glass replacement. Her physical description, however, is woefully beside the point. Without excusing her crimes, she, like many minors who were recruited, was a child of the FARC. And Elda's superiors clearly approved, if not encouraged, her actions. Otherwise, she would have been promptly relieved of her post and would not have climbed so high in the chain of command. More important, her infamy distracts from the fact that she, like other former FARC fighters with whom I have spoken, has invaluable insight into how the DDR, and any other demobilization program, should be improved.

In August, I visited Elda in the modest, sparsely furnished house she lives in with two other demobilized FARC combatants. It is located within the confines of the army base so as to protect her from assassination attempts. The colonel in charge of the group graciously granted my request for a private interview with her. He led me to her house, made introductions, and left. Elda invited me to sit down at a small kitchen table. The sound of chickens squawking outside competed with the rhythmic chop of helicopters.

At the age of six, Elda's parents, both of whom were members of the Partido Comunista del Colombia (PCC), sent her to sell arepas on the streets of her village in the department of Antioquia. With the proceeds, she bought herself notebooks and pencils for school. When she was 12, her father bluntly told her that, given her race and bad looks, a man would never have her. She would therefore need to work harder than men in order to survive. To toughen her up, and in accordance with the family's ideology, Elda's father sent her to a finca (farm) for JUCO (Juvenil Communista) training, thinking that she would make something of herself. And so when the FARC, then closely tied to the PCC as its military wing, recruited Elda from the finca at age 15, it was with her parents' blessing.

Haunted by her father's advice, Elda strove to become "the best guerrilla" and was constantly terrified of being accused of weakness or sloth. At 17, her commander, Efrain Guzman (nicknamed Friopacho) sent her to Meta, a district in the center of Colombia, just east of the Andes, to enroll in military and officer training. Elda excelled at the FARC's curso de commandantes and was given command of a 12-man squad three months after she arrived.

Whatever pride she felt, however, was short-lived. Soon after her promotion, Friopacho called her into a meeting and asked her if she had ever killed. She replied that she had not. "You're useless for war, then," he told her. He continued, "There's a suspected spy among us. You must execute him." As Friopacho knew, the "spy" was a close friend of Elda who often bunked with her. I asked her if she shot him. "No," she said, "they made me use a machete. They pointed to his neck and instructed me to cut only the artery so that I would have to watch him bleed out." For weeks after the incident, Elda hid her panic attacks and sobbing fits. Of all the things she did as a FARC combatant, the execution of her friend is the one of which she is most ashamed. "His ghost still visits me today," she told me.

But there was no turning back, and certainly no time for self-pity. For the next 22 years, Elda rose up the ranks. Her troops and commanders regarded her with a mixture of respect and resentment. Many male commanders did not think a woman, especially a black woman, should have power over men. So Elda constantly struggled to prove herself. She figured that she would never win respect, so she would rule out of fear instead. Her alleged crimes during that period include ordering prisoners to be sodomized with various objects, having men under her command play soccer with the heads of executed prisoners, and burning a woman alive for the crime of being the wife of a policeman. Although she denies being guilty of those things, Elda admitted to me that during her 24 years with the FARC, she had "no idea of how many men were killed" by her bullets.

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