Blog texts

Blogpost Week 5 Poetry

James Baxter, ‘The Māori Jesus’

(Health warning: I am not religious myself. My knowledge of religion comes from reading
about it)

This provocative poem poses a number of painful questions for Pākehā to ponder. It shakes
the traditional image of white people’s Jesus and the core of their beliefs. But it also shows a
deeply divided class society.

Baxter’s poem is an extended metaphor which equates a Māori man with Jesus. The poem
chooses moments/episodes in the New Testament story and finds parallels in modern New
Zealand life, (creating a new New Testament?). Jesus is the white man’s prophet, so most
people probably imagine their Jesus as white. But he was from the Middle East, therefore he
only became ‘white’ in the European imagination much later in history. The Māori man in the
poem probably looks more like the Middle Eastern original, though this is not stated clearly.
But once we have a mental image of a Māori man with a long beard and long hair, it is a
composite image of a Māori face and a long-haired Jesus typical of religious paintings and
crucifixes.

In stanza one, Baxter portrays the Māori Jesus as larger than life in everything he does, and in
fact the reactions of the world to his actions are exaggerated, for instance in “When he
frowned the ground shook”. This connects him to Jesus, whose actions are also portrayed as
larger than life (that is to say, as miracles). But this stanza also ‘explains’ New Zealand’s
geological features such as earthquakes. This idea is similar to common features of religious
texts and legends whose task it is to explain the world to their audience (e.g. the story of
Noah’s flood has a similar purpose in a pre-scientific age). Māori people also have their own
stories to explain earthquakes and volcanoes.

Originally Jesus was a member of a downtrodden and oppressed community, not of the ruling
elite. He is said to have been the son of a carpenter. The Māori man of the poem wears blue
dungarees so he is likely to be working class. He also chooses other downtrodden people to
be his disciples, just like the Middle Eastern Jesus did. Stanza two starts a set of Māori
portraits, each an image of personal misery and hopelessness.

In stanza three the Māori Jesus decides to make the sun shine on his people. Instead of
miracles he wants to cheer people up with music. This conjures various images in my mind:
the stereotype of Māori people playing the guitar and singing, but also the US musical Jesus
Christ Superstar, which retells the life of Jesus from a hippie perspective with rock music
(this is not likely to have been familiar to Baxter though, as the musical came out in 1973). It
also introduces the theme of protest songs so popular from the 1960s onwards when the civil
rights movement in the USA gained momentum.

His singing draws the attention of Pākehā authorities and a series of incidents ensue in stanza
four which tell the sufferings that a Māori man typically endures. This stanza creates
associations in two directions: first of all, the 7 days refer to the creation of the world in 7
days in Genesis, the biblical creation story, but beyond that his sufferings recall the stations
of the cross, Jesus on his way to crucifixion. Each of the offences the Māori man is charged
with is aimed at indigenous people in New Zealand society, which becomes obvious by the
third day, when he is charged with nothing more than "being a Maori". He is beaten,
imprisoned, and finally sent to an insane asylum for his beliefs. Of these beliefs we get a
glimpse in the line “I am the Light in the Void”. This is a traditional religious notion of Jesus
today (but only after he became the icon of Christianity). However, if any normal person says
anything like this, he is automatically considered insane. As the old saying goes: No one is a
prophet in his own country. Provocatively, it also suggests that you need to be
crucified/sacrificed before you can become divine.

The question emerges: is a modern-day prophet likely to face lobotomy, the erasure of
personality by society? Does God even exist in modern society?

The poem ends on a bleak note: after the world in this poem was created in 7 days, it was also
simultaneously destroyed. Although the Māori Jesus wanted the sun to shine, it never shone
for him again. With lobotomy, all light went out of the world, “civilized darkness / Sat on the
Earth from then till now”. He was ‘civilized’ into more proper and less insane behaviour
(which was the usual reason given for this extreme measure in psychiatry), but it also killed
him as a human being.

Beyond telling the tragic story of the Māori Jesus, this poem also suggests associations in
another direction. Māori people weren’t Christians originally. It was Pākehā who brought
Christianity, which by then was the dominant religion in Europe. Therefore Māori and Jesus
are originally an oxymoron. When Māori adopted Christianity, they had to give up their
original spiritual beliefs. Thus the lobotomy undergone by this Māori man links in my mind
to the erasure of Māori spirituality. It cuts his brain in half and severs the connections
between the two halves: his Māori and his Christian halves. But it makes the light go out: this
probably means that all spirituality dies.

Another association arises from Jesus’s role in Christianity. Jesus is said to have paid with his
life for the sins of every believer. Thus the story of Crucifixion is supposedly a story of the
redemption of Mankind. In the terminology of anthropology, he played the role of the
traditional scapegoat: all the sins of the world were heaped on him and his death obliterated
these sins – at least for a while. The scapegoat is generally a weak member of the social
group, often already marginalized in some way. This position is given to the Māori in
contemporary New Zealand. In anthropological theory it is clear, however, that scapegoating
only works for a while. Once tensions in a social group mount again, they need to find a new
scapegoat through which they can ease the tensions again.[1] If we transfer this concept onto
the Māori Jesus, then a story with a new meaning emerges. Māori people are the scapegoats,
all the sins of the world in New Zealand are blamed on them. They are needed (again and
again) to pay the price for insurmountable tensions in contemporary society. They are
sacrificed/crucified (i.e. mistreated) in New Zealand. Marxist theory would claim that the
tensions mounting in 1960s New Zealand have a lot to do with growing inequality: Godzone
is not such a perfect paradise after all. From the point of view of psychoanalysis,
scapegoating can be interpreted as a Freudian defence mechanism: whatever is painful and
unacceptable in one's psyche/behaviour/desires is projected onto someone else.

So my interpretation of this scapegoating is the following: Because Pākehā people cannot

accept blame (i.e. sin) in themselves, they want to see it in someone else and want that person
to be punished for it. Pākehā took away the land (i.e. the livelihood) of the Māori,
Christianity could not accept a rival belief system and thus denigrated Māori spirituality,
Māori (communal) social practices were erased and ultimately Māori identity as well. All the
while, all the misery of Māori people was and still is considered their own fault, rather than
the result of Pākehā policies over 160 years. And still, Pākehā are not happy. However, their
own problems are not caused by Māori but by their own political, economic and social
system. They are also oppressed due to the exploitation endemic in capitalist society.
Unfortunately, they do not see it this way, so they will go on blaming their problems on
others, as the history of discrimination against ethnic others in New Zealand shows. There
will be many more Māori (and other indigenous) Jesuses because this story is not unique to
New Zealand. It has happened over and over again and is ongoing wherever British settlers
decided to colonize the land of indigenous populations.

The bleak ending of Baxter’s poem shows the devastating consequences of thoughtless
policies and prejudices in “civilized” societies. It also shows that ‘history repeats itself’, and
daily. The ‘crucifixion’ of blameless (Māori and indigenous) people continues, darkness and
the void descends on them and fighting it is perilous. Baxter died before the Māori revival,
thus he could not experience a more positive ending to the story of the Māori Jesus. Will New
Zealand develop in a more positive direction?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scapegoating