raped, suppressed, written out of the record. I have noticed throughout your essays and
poems that you do look back to the Indio grandfather as a source of great strength.
BACA: I do. What’s interesting about a people who have been colonized is that the
dominant society does such an extraordinary job of taking away their rituals. Because once
you can take away those rituals, you really have done ninety percent of the work. Keeping
these rituals alive is where poetry then becomes very important. There’s been this huge
reaction in academia, especially in the English departments, this incredible backlash that
says black literature, brown literature, and red literature is no good, any you must stay
with our literature, now the white European literature.
KEENE: As if those other literature’s were not our cultural inheritance as well.
BACA: I was privy to these notions in tow outlandish cases, one in San Diego and one in
Santa Fe, where two tenured professors had written letters saying that black culture and
brown culture and red culture and Asian culture were nothing but backwash swamps better
left alone. And those professors who sent those letters were given tremendous amounts of
money to go around the country on the lecturing circuit. So, you see, an awful lot of
people supported these views. These two were held up as heroes. All of this is really
extraordinary to me!
KEENE: Such scenes become typical, especially with the current reaction against
"political correctness." You ask that you and that your culture receive respect,
you ask that these authorities examine more closely what informs their own world view, and
people become hysterical.
BACA: Yes. Many of their criticisms are based on the European, Eurocentric view
that the works of a writer like Toni Morrison or of indigenous people deal heavily with
heritage and family and roots and culture.
KEENE: These texts are only sociology and history, not art; they’re too
political.
BACA: These critics say that writers such as Morrison, such as the indigenous writers,
are simply invoking the maudlin sympathy of their not-very-smart readership. It’s not
really literature: this is what Mark Strand intimated when he was here at a talk, that
women in the Southwest are not really writers. In a recent London Times, there is a
piece by a writer who had just visited the Nuyorican Poets’ Cafe on the Lower East Side.
He talks about this hoopla of indigenous writers, of people of color reading poetry, and
asks if this is supposed to make us think that they’re poets! It was a real bubblebath of
humorism. The guy ended up saying that the only poets that America has ever had and will
ever have are Ginsburg and Burroughs. He broke down the rest of American poetry with
statements like, "the blacks, they make people cry but they’re not poets," and
so on. Now two weeks after I read this, I’m invited to the University of New Mexico to
speak to a writing class. Most of the white kids in the class are saying to me, "I
can’t published because I’m white." So I ask them, "Does that mean, because
you’re white, you should get published?"
KEENE: That’s a twist in perspective!
BACA: And they said, "Well, yes!"
KEENE: [Bursts into laughter].
BACA: Then the professor herself tells me, "I change my last name to a black name,
you know, so that I can get published."
KEENE: A black name?
BACA: That’s what she said. So I said, "Does it work?" And she replied,
"Yes, it works." I thought, is this what you’re teaching your students? I’m
astounded by what’s going on in the English departments, what professors are promoting; on
the one hand, that you would have to take people’s names to get published, but on the
other hand, you have to be white to be a good writer. Now the interesting thing about all
of this as I was going to say was that, when we as poets and writers go deep into our
past, number one, it’s extraordinarily difficult to deal with the pain, because it all has
to do with revelation, and when I dig deep into my past and go to my roots to try to
uncover the metaphors that are going to sustain me spiritually and emotionally and that
are going to put me in the center of the universe feeling comfortable, what’s happening is
that I have a history and a heritage and a culture that I’m reaping so much from, and I
realize that in doing that there are some people who have NO heritage, who have no
culture, other than the culture of money. You know what I’m saying?
KEENE: Exactly.
BACA: This amazes me. It’s so sad, in a way, because I don’t ever want to disrespect
the gift of poetry. When writing a novel, I know what God has given me is an enormous
journey that is so enriching and I don’t want to mock or criticize those who don’t have
it; but, I don’t understand why, if someone can’t buy something with money, then they must
try to destroy it. In other words, poetry in the Chicano world, in Chicanismo, is such an
inherent part of one’s living that it does not consist of extracting the sympathy of
anyone. It’s a part of one’s living as much as a bull in a field and a rainbow in a sky
and the woman in the morning who’s singing. All are the different threads in the weaving
of one’s life, you know?
KEENE: Chicanismo then is an essential part of the fabric of your poetry and
life?
BACA: Right. When you live in this Chicano world, poetry is what we speak to each
other.
KEENE: Your poems and essays often feature startling images–and "startling"
at least to me–of the sort that in Neruda or Paz have been called "surreal" but
that, as you have just said, are really not "surreal" but which actually arise
from the life that you have lived and are living.
BACA: Yes! It comes out of the hands that people work with and the language that they
speak with and the food that they eat. All of the poetry that Neruda wrote was not so much
"surrealism" as it was "hyper realism." In other words, Europe called
it " surrealism" because of the Europeans minds bent to hide things within
something. Neruda came from Chile, and people there have a tendency to show things, as the
ocean shows things, because they share their land with the ocean. It’s a hyper realism
where "here" is the abundance of who we are.
KEENE: Which is how Garcia M?rquez has described the mythopoetic reality of Macondo,
of the Patriarch’s rule, of the return of the most beautiful drowned man in the
world.
BACA: You know. And when you can live this and not have somebody exploit this
abundance, then you feel trust, you trust enough to show people this; but when you show
people things and they begin to exploit, then you’re forced to hide it. It’s funny how
literature is a meandering stream that comes out of this large lake that’s called society,
which means that you cannot divorce literature from society. One of the most interesting
examples of the recent trend to do just this involved Carolyn Forche’s anthology Against
Forgetting. W. W. Norton had asked her to do an anthology of world poets. Well,
she put it together, and some people were very, very disturbed that she had included as
America’s foremost poets many people of color, and many people who had done prison time.
Forche has gone on to say that, in every single instance, every single poet that she
picked from other countries had been in prison, and many of these poets were considered
heroes, to some extent, by the people. Except in America, where those hailed as great
poets usually have never walked within a planet’s distance of prison.
KEENE: But she was not saying that one has to go to prison to be a great poet, nor
championing imprisonment, was she?
BACA: Not at all. She said that the condition of who constituted great poets in America
was very disturbing for her, because ultimately the people that she did pick were people
who had prison experiences, not because she went for that but because that was just part
of the information that the poet carried in his bank.
KEENE: Well, the people who have told us what we should and should not read and have
created these various curricula and great books programs have always sort of championed
writers who have been men of means, of leisure, who really didn’t even have to work, let
alone serve any prison time. Oh, we have Oscar Wilde, Antonio Gramsci, Martin Luther King,
Jr., and others, but not too many. Perhaps the imprisoned were not writing years ago, but
to dismiss their experience out of hand is perverse, because there has always been all
this other experience out there, much of it up until recently unexplored. Perhaps it was
never even reaching the page; or if it was reaching the page, it was suppressed; or, as
you say about Santa Fe, it was exploited so that the people who actually live it and write
it receive no credit while other people are coming along and claiming these elements,
these experiences as their own.
BACA: Yeah, it’s a funny thing, and people should know that there’s no turning back
now. Because, what little these writers from indigenous cultures have, there’s no stopping
their writing now; and anybody who proposes to try to stop black writing or proposes to
try to stop Indian writing or Asian writing is really clinging to a very threadbare coat
that’s going to tear, you know?
KEENE: Right. We’re not going to turn back, no matter what.
BACA: It’s just not going to happen. Suddenly you have a very unsettling kind of
tragedy that’s set into those people that believed the lie for so long, and it’s my belief
that poetry in its ultimate sense really tries to go for the pulsating vein of reality in
the landscape or society. You can’t write poetry unless it’s the kind of poetry that sings
and praises truth.
KEENE: As your poetry does. I have really just two further questions I want to talk out
with you. The first is that, with the publication of Black Mesa Poems, and with Martin
and Meditations on the South Valley, you have become a famous poet, so to
speak. You are asked to read all over the country, and younger poets and writers recognize
your name: you have what we might call " marquee value." How has this fame
affected your sense of being as a poet, your poetic sensibility, and also how has it
affected the way that you approach poetry? Has there been any effect?
BACA: Okay. Well, let me just say that we constantly find ourselves having to
compromise ourselves for society. Our society says we’ll give you this, but you have to do
that. You want a position in this department, you have to move here, you have to do this:
we constantly have to give up things and that’s okay. I can understand that give and take,
I can understand that. On the other hand, as a poet I realized very, very early on that I
would love to have been able to teach at a university…
KEENE: Like most well-known American poets…
BACA: I would love to have been able to have medical insurance and so forth; but I, as
the poet that I am, I really had to stay home with my two children, write poetry here, and
endure poverty in the cruelest sense of the word. I really had to beg, borrow, and steal
dimes to get enough gas to make it, to buy milk and so forth, for many years. But that was
the playing field that I had chosen for myself, my terms. When I was cold and my baby was
cold, we were cold together. And when my baby and I walked out in the snow in the morning,
we did it together: I wasn’t somewhere teaching, I wasn’t cashing a check, I was there,
and we had enough apples stored away and potatoes that we were going to eat supper. The
thing about poetry is that early on I came to it in prison in such a way that society was
not going to accept me, so I then had to bring society to me through my poetry. I had to
write the kind of poetry that was accessible and yet which would not compromise my
experience, so that society would say, "Oh we understand what he’s writing about, and
we think that the poetry’s okay."
KEENE: This is how it happened.
BACA: Yes. So once I was able to set that up, I went on this journey where I began to
just write from my own voice, and the strange thing is that when I encountered offers
along the way–like with the film Bound By Honor when I was immediately offered
other films, for millions of dollars–I turned them all down to come back to my farm.
Basically, I was penniless. I had said in Bound By Honor what I wanted to say, and
I had made enough money on that to do some of the projects that I wanted to do. But when I
came back home, I was basically broke and I had to start over again.
KEENE: With your poetry and other film scripts and projects?
BACA: Yes. I’m currently finishing a novel and working on a book of poetry, but all of
those things have been done on my terms, not out of pride or arrogance but mostly because
I am so interested in the journey of self-discovery that I’m on. Despite the demands I
encounter, I still find myself pretty much out here on this farm alone, and I can devise
my own journeys, pick the tools I need, and go after things other people wouldn’t go
after. So I guess what I’m trying to say is that what has occurred over these past few
years hasn’t changed me much. What it’s really reaffirmed is that the work I was doing
before is the work I should be doing and I’m doing it now.
KEENE: So many people would love to be able to say what you are saying and mean
it.
BACA: You know, it’s a very hard way to go and it’s not heroic in any sense of the
word, but it is fulfilling. You do get up in the morning and feel a real power sense of
the tree and the yard and the grass growing and the sun coming up, and you feel yourself
very much a part of that whole, tenuous existence in the world, and it’s not structured
around a paycheck or insurance or tenure or grades or a new car. It’s really sustained by
a sense of appreciation for one’s breathing and getting up and saying, "Hi, how are
you?" and "Let’s have a cup of coffee": the real small, simple pleasures in
life.
KEENE: These small, simple pleasures run like motifs throughout all your poems, all
your writings.
BACA: Yeah, the real, small pleasures in life. The idea of just seeing a man in prison
who’s condemned to die: I come out of the shower and it’s 9 o’clock and I see him napping
and I look at his face, and there’s a look on this man’s face, on the face of a man who’s
going to die, that I think is more important for me than to go to work in a prison system
and get brownie points. I would much rather go back to the cell and write about what I saw
on the man’s face. You know?
KEENE: Sure.
BACA: And my life has always been sort of like that, about unendingly learning
about all the mistakes I made and never being so stupid as to not try to learn something
new from my children or from the earth or from friends. And then sort of translating all
of that into a book.
KEENE: Would I be wrong in assuming that to be your philosophy of writing?
BACA: Well, I really don’t think much about the poetry that I write or much about my
writing except that if it feels really good to me, if it feels like I’ve hit on a
jugular– ’cause I’m around a lot of sheep and bulls and horses, and I know blood, I know
hearts, I know a horse’s eyes, I know a dog’s tongue, I know those things very intimately,
I know those things. And when I feel a poem, I feel for that: I feel for the dog’s tongue
and the horse’s eye or the bull’s chest, you know, and if I feel, if I can feel it in the
poem, then the poem’s okay.
KEENE: You’re underscoring in different words the charge you gave to other poets, to
"reject the killing safety of literary workshops and universities, and don’t fear the
jagged emotion."
BACA: In a nutshell, the indication of a good poem, I think, is very emotional; every
jagged emotion has a song all its own. You know the Navajos have a tradition: when a man
or a woman go traveling, they come back home and they stand in the center of the teepee or
the hogan where they live, and they repeat their names seven times. And if the repetition
of the name is clear, then they’ve come back with their name intact– no one has stolen
their name. No one has stolen their souls, so to speak. And in a society that thrives on
stealing souls, I feel pretty good that I can stand up in my little place and repeat