Jimmy Santiago Baca
By R.W. French
Jimmy Santiago Baca's breakthrough book has to be his first, "Immigrants in Our Own Land" (1979). Other notable books followed, including "Martín & Meditations on the South Valley" (1987), "Black Mesa Poems" (1989), and "Set This Book on Fire!" (1999), but the first book is the landmark, if only because its existence is so unlikely. Like the works of, say, Melville, Whitman and Dickinson, there is no way that Jimmy Santiago Baca's poems could have been expected or predicted.
Born in Santa Fe in 1952, now a resident of Albuquerque, Baca learned to read and write while in prison. Between birth and the publication of "Immigrants in Our Own Land" twenty-seven years later, the author was transformed: not leaving behind what he was, but subsuming the past into a large vision of the present. Somehow he became a poet. Such changes defy explanation.
It could have been otherwise. Many of the poems in this book tell, in one way or another, of the constant threat to identity. There are forces, keenly felt, that seek to tear down and destroy:
Like an Animal
Behind the smooth texture
Of my eyes, way inside me,
A part of me has died:
I move my bloody fingernails
Across it, hard as a blackboard,
Run my fingers along it,
The chalk white scars
That say I AM SCARED,
Scared of what might become
Of me, the real me,
Behind these prison walls.
This poem, one of the shortest in a book where most fill a page or more, is characteristic in the terse, concrete and direct qualities of its style. Typically, Baca confronts his situation with an unflinching eye. Beauty has nothing to do with it; understanding is everything, and understanding demands total commitment to honesty. Despite the lyric impulse central to the poems of "Immigrants in Our Own Land," Baca's work avoids the merely "pretty" or "poetic." It is apparent throughout that efforts toward formal aesthetic pleasures would be evasive, a betrayal of the forces that have brought these poems into being.
This book might be seen as a pilgrimage, a journey toward realization and fulfillment. It struggles toward affirmation, which is achieved, when it is, with difficulty:
The third day of spring,
and four years later, I can tell you,
how a man can endure, how a man
can become so cruel, how he can die
or become so cold. I can tell you this,
I have seen it every day, every day,
and still I am strong enough to love you,
love myself and feel good;
even as the earth shakes and trembles,
and I have not a thing to my name,
I feel as if I have everything, everything.
(from "Cloudy Day")
While Jimmy Santiago Baca writes in a mode of narrative directness, often the poetry derives its power from an awareness of other modes, including romantic lyricism, as in, for example. "The sun on those green palm trees, lining / the entry road to prison." The pastoral imagery of the opening clashes with the harsh ending of the word "prison." There is throughout the book a search, a quest, for that innocent world of the green palm trees, a place of repose, a place where the soul is at rest:
Here on this island of death and violence
I must find peace and love in myself, eventually freedom,
And if I am blessed, then perhaps a little wisdom.
Writing poems from prison, Baca is concerned with liberation: an escape, yes, but not necessarily out of physical confinement; rather, an escape into the self. The primary (but not sole) mission is to save oneself; in the words of Paul: "Work out your own salvation with fear and trembling" (Philippians 2:12).
The fear is real enough:
When Life
Is cut close, blades and bones,
And the stench of sewers is everywhere,
Blood-sloshed floors,
And guards count the dead
With the blink of an eyelid, then hurry home
To supper and love, what saves us
From going mad is to carry a vacant stare
And a quiet half-dead dream.
Half-dead is half-alive. And in the dream there lies the possibility of salvation. Essentially, and perhaps paradoxically, Baca is a dreamer, a romantic. While the poetry is filled with realistic details, often grim and startling, "Immigrants in Our Own Land" is not, finally, a work of realism, although it would seem to be so. Rather, it falls firmly into the prophetic tradition of Blake and Shelley, both in its fierce social protest and in its quest for that ideal world of justice, peace and love where one can be truly free.
Like Blake and Shelley, Baca writes at times in the tones of one who has seen the light and preaches the Word to those who have not. First, he preaches endurance. In the poem "How We Carry Ourselves" (subtitled "To Others in Prisons"), Baca writes:
I mean to say, you can turn away from this:
if you can take the hammering, they will give,
if you can hold on while they grip you
and hurl you ragefully at the ground,
if you can bite your teeth when they bend you,
and still, you do not fit,
you can be who you are.
You can see the morning and breathe in God's grace,
you can laugh at sparrows, and find love
in yourself for the sun, you can learn
what is inside you, you can know silence,
you can look at the dark gray machine around you,
souls going up like billows of black smoke,
and decide what you will do next….
It sounds paradisal, a place of peace and light where the soul has attained autonomy and self-knowledge and abiding joy. Such attainment is not what the authorities had in mind. As Baca knows, prophets of liberty have generally fared badly at the hands of the ruling powers. One must endure, yes; but one must endure with courage. In tones suggesting Whitman or Neruda, Baca shouts defiance:
Big men, gun-toting sheriffs, Cadillac-cruising gents, slick-skinned ladies, you do not intimidate me, I do not hold you higher than the next man convicted of murder, or the next woman believed to be bad.
I am dangerous. I am a fool to you all.
Yes, but I stand as I am,
I am food for the future,
my thought will blossom tomorrow,
today, I plant roots, and god help me,
I will not sell out, in the face of death,
and that is saying something so large, so very large,
it scares me.
Prison has not done its job. It has not been a place of "correction," but, rather, a place of liberation. The poet is not subdued. He threatens to come forth like John the Baptist, denouncing the powerful and preaching liberation.
