, Research Paper
Originally published in Callaloo–A Journal of
African-American and African Arts and Letters,
Winter 1994, Volume 17, Number 1
"POETRY IS WHAT WE SPEAK TO EACH OTHER"
An Interview With Jimmy Santiago Baca
By John Keene
This interview was conducted by telephone from Charlottesville, Virginia, on August
2, 2993.
KEENE: Mr. Baca, in your book of essays, Working in the Dark: Reflections of a Poet
of the Barrio, you speak at length and eloquently about how the school system
completely failed you–and how it fails so many young people, especially so many young
people of color–and how you had to teach yourself, as a young adult and while in prison,
first to read and then to write. Reading and writing, especially writing poetry, were
vital to you in the beginning: you were using poems to survive, to barter for things among
your fellow prisoners. Would you please tell me more about your early development as a
poet?
BACA: Well, with a question such as yours everything seems to overlap like in a
philosophy class when you start talking about life. In terms of my development, I’m not
sure whether I needed to breathe more, or to write poetry more: you see, that’s the kind
of urgency that was upon me. I sometimes don’t know if I would have been able to continue
to breathe had I not been able to read poetry, because I came upon poetry in much the same
way that an infant first gasps for breath.
KEENE: I see.
BACA: I don’t know if I would have lived had I not found poetry. When I began to read,
I began very slowly, and a religious man had sent me these books that had English and
Spanish on opposing pages. The material was very rudimentary, elementary, kind of
religious teachings. Now what happened was that I would read most of the day and into the
night, and I would pronounce the language aloud. I pronounced adjectives and adverbs and
nouns and prepositions and so forth aloud, and then early in the morning I would wake up
and begin to write in a journal.
KEENE: What sorts of things were you recording there? Mere words, thoughts,
feelings, memories?
BACA: I was writing things that I remember doing as a kid and as an adult and so forth.
And what happened was that, in a place like prison where all sensory enjoyment was
deprived, language became more real, more tangible than bars or concrete, than the
structure of buildings in the landscape. So I began to read, to read and write in the
sense that, metaphorically, I wrapped myself in this cocoon of language, and when I came
back out, I was no longer the caterpillar: I was a butterfly.
KEENE: I am interested in that caterpillar stage: what were those first poems like?
When you would write letters for other convicts or recite these first poems for your
fellow prisoners, what were the effects on them and on you?
BACA: Well, when I would read to the convicts, there was a sense of awe, my awe, their
awe, and at the same time a sense of vulnerability, of my, our vulnerability. In other
words, language had such a tremendous power, and then, in many instances with convicts,
language was the very tool that had been used to destroy them and their families.
KEENE: How?
BACA: For example, when their mothers and fathers had gone into offices to ask about
taxes and didn’t know how to speak English, they were assaulted with English, by this same
language. It was their mothers and fathers who had gone to courts and not understood the
English language and were too proud to ask for interpreters. You see, the pride of these
people comes from the fact that they had been living on this land for anywhere from 500 to
2000 years. They had a direct family lineage of living on the land, and of the many
catastrophes and tragedies that occurred in their lives, one could trace most directly to
their inability to understand the English language.
KEENE: In a way your circumstances as well?
BACA: Absolutely. And then, years later, here’s this man in prison who’s reading poetry
to these convicts, and it’s cosmoses away from how they understood it, how they had
encountered it before. Now it was celebrating who they were and their hearts and their
heritage and their languages and their culture.
KEENE: In what languages were these early poems? Were they primarily in either English
and Spanish or were they a more complex mixture, a reflection of your background, your
community? I remember reading somewhere of your mentioning some songs that passed down to
you that were a mixture of Spanish and Tewa.
BACA: I was trilingual. I was writing phonetically the Indian language, Spanish, and
English. I was writing phonetically because the furor of my thoughts boiling over mandated
that I just write from sound.
KEENE: And so now the convicts looked at the function of language, at poetry,
differently, coming from this fellow convict, this young poet?
BACA: Exactly, they looked at it with a sense of awe, that it was an amazing gift that
God had given me. It was something that few of them could fathom and that all of them
praised. Interestingly enough, I get letters from time to time from convicts who were in
prison with me, and the one underlying current that travels through all of their
correspondence–and that I was blind to at the time, because I was consumed and absorbed
by the language–is that whatever it is I was doing was tremendously inspiring for
them.
KEENE: You do realize this now, don’t you?
BACA: Sure, now that I’m a bit more seasoned and have put some distance between that
time and this time, I look upon it very pleasantly that I was able to fulfill that role
through language, through poetry, and really inspire those who were lacking all faith and
hope.
KEENE: Earlier you said that your first journal entries were of memories of your
childhood. You say in one of your essays that "I draw my poetry from the night, from
the culture of night where our daily selves are transformed." Would you discuss this
quote with me and talk about how you went from simply writing poems to assembling your
early chapbooks and selecting the work that comprised Immigrants in Our Own Land
?
BACA: Well, Immigrants in Our Own Land was the first book of my poetry that was
published by a larger press, by Louisiana State University Press at first, and now by New
Directions. But let me talk about it this way: there are two sides to life. There’s the
side of life that is mandated by the mores and etiquette of society, and that particular
life is extremely simple to understand and define. You know, you buy a new car, you get a
good job, you have a nice car or house, and you try to become a family man if that’s your
bent, and it’s very simple how that whole thing is structured. That whole system is
structured such that within it are these long veins of racism and bigotry and injustice,
and they’re very simple to pick out. You can simply sit in any courthouse in the United
States today, sit in any courthouse and all day the judge sees cases, and at the end of
the day you’re going to say, fine, there were two hundred people that went through court
today, one hundred were black, and they were all sent to prison.
KEENE: Right.
BACA: Ninety were brown and they were sent to prison. Ten were white and they were
freed. It’s easy to figure all this out. So then you go to another place, to a banker, and
then you realize that he has some suspicions about you because you don’t fit the mold that
he comes from, and so you’re not given the loan that you would like to have to put an
addition on your house. So it’s very simple if you go about society to the various
institutions and sit and witness it. The other side of life, however, is a bit more
complicated and concerns what happens in our souls, what constitutes all the cosmic and
spiritual clashes that rearrange the plates of our spiritual landscapes. To me all of this
is much more interesting than what happens during the day. And so I really try to pay very
close attention to the intuitive voice that travels through the canyons of the bone. I
don’t try to harvest my poetry from what happens in society’s institutions as much as I
try to reap the poems from what’s happening behind the boundaries of society.
KEENE: Please elaborate.
BACA: In other words, while Clinton may stand up and speak about the tremendous freedom
that we have in this country, there has never been a time that we’ve had more writers in
the United States who are in prison and who are kept incommunicado. Their tablets and
pencils and everything have been taken from them. There’s never been a time when there
have been more of these people in solitary confinement, in the dark, than there are today.
So that’s sort of what I’m talking about by "darkness"; I’m really interested in
the things that happen in the dark, in the culture of the dark, meaning that, of their own
power and force things are bound to come up like the wheat in the sidewalk.
KEENE: How would you relate this to what you have also written, which is that one
should not place inordinate trust in critics, nor give oneself over to academic mindgames,
but instead believe in a poetry, that follows the "maddened drum of one’s own
passions"? How too does myth fit in here? What is its role for you? How is background
structured around metaphors that may or may not have been lost and how have you used those
metaphors to bring yourself into humanity, into humanness, as a man, as a poet, as a
Chicano?
BACA: I firmly believe that there are those myths that pertain to a society, and then
there are those myths that pertain to an individual. One of the interesting things,
though, is that either type of myth never dies. And the interesting thing about myths is
that there are psychological and spiritual and emotional myths that are just as real and
buried as the dinosaur bones we’re discovering today. We’re having to redefine the history
of the evolution of who we are. Those same myths are very, very alive in us and the more
that we discover them, the more we discover our own journey.
KEENE: As human beings, people, poets?
BACA: All. Where we come from and where we go. And I also strongly believe that when
you discover a myth in yourself, you cannot approach it with a formulated or prefabricated
critique, you cannot template it. What’s going to happen is that you discover a myth or a
symbol, in the same way that a child discovers its mother, not so much through the mind,
but through the sensors, through the mouth and the nose and the fingers and hands; this
personal mythology really does sustain one, as much as infant’s discoveries enable breast
feeding. Myths and symbols, we never become adults in their presence. We’re always
children in awe of them, and those are the things truly that give us insight into the
darkness that we go through. It’s strange because we live in a society that says myth and
symbol have been replaced by science. You really see it at a place like Los Alamos here
and at other science centers around the country.
KEENE: Science has assumed the former sway of myth, religion?
BACA: It’s all being replaced by scientists who are pursuing the ultimate, who want to
crack the ultimate secret, and it’s strange because if you go visit Los Alamos–and in Los
Alamos you can visit a lot of them–when you go to the houses of many of these scientists,
you realize that these are people who have lost their myths. These are people who have
lost their symbols, you know. The way that you can tell this is simply by walking through
their homes. You see that they’ve created their lives out of order, in revenge against the
mothering symbol.
KEENE: You seem to be saying that science as seen through the lives of these
scientists, through the world that they structure, becomes a masculine entity. Opposed
perhaps to the feminine, the humanities. Science in this sense is hard, clean,
perspicuous, rational.
BACA: Well, the atmosphere is very antiseptic and sterile, an abysm that you walk
through when you visit their lives. Everything is interpreted through science, and you’re
sort of left with a dryness in your mouth, as if you’d just taken a tablespoon of castor
oil.
KEENE: For this sort of world-view, we might speak of its binary opposite as that which
is soft, shifting, blurring, emotional: the arts, humanities, poetry. In both your poems
and your essays, you talk about the duality of yourself as a poet, about the feminine side
that informs your writing of poetry. Your discussion of this interested me because I don’t
very often hear men talk about this idea of their duality. Will you say something more
about all of this, as it sort of relates to this whole notion of having lost the notion of
myth and mothering, and these signs and symbols that really go back to the beginning of
humankind?
BACA: A remarkable thing occurred to me when I came upon language, and I really began
to provoke language to decreate me and then to give birth to me again. What I experienced
was this: when you approach language in this being-reborn sense, you approach language in
the way that the Hopis approach language, which is that language is a very real living
being. That’s how I approach language. I approach it as if it will contain who I am as a
person. Now, when language begins to work itself on you and make certain demands of you,
it begins to ask you to risk yourself and walk along its edge. When it does that and you
do that, the Yoruba people in Africa have a symbol that they create, and it’s made out of
bamboo-leaves, gold, and rosary beads on it and so forth, and it curls up on itself. This
symbol has a thick base so that it’s almost like a gourd. It curls all the way around
itself and goes back into the thick base, this is the gift that they give men who have
given birth to themselves.
KEENE: Which is what happened with you.
BACA: Which is what happened with me–I gave birth to myself. You have to understand
that what I’ m saying, it came before Robert Bly’ s Iron John, it comes before all
of this mainstream computer-chip valley stuff that they’re putting out for the male white
corporate executive. All of this birthing and the femininity in the men is a very
indigenous characteristic I’ve seen practiced since I was born. I’ve seen men do it. And
simply, what happens is that they begin to nourish themselves. They begin to nourish
themselves, taking their sustenance from mother earth and all the things that they see
about them. In other words, direct observation of the world around them comes into them,
and they may not be as smart bookwise as most people…
KEENE: Which does not matter.
BACA: … But there’s a tremendous feminine characteristic in them that is directly
geared toward nourishing and sustaining generation after generation of people who are
threatened from all sides. I can distinctly remember when we didn’t have anything to eat,
as a child, when my grandfather would begin to sing all these songs. And the songs surely
but surely would end up taking our hunger away. Or, I remember that we had windstorms that
were so terrible they would come and knock barns down, knock houses down, and my
grandmother would hold me against her chest where I could hear the vibrations in her
bones, in her chest, because she was a small Apache woman. She would begin to hum these
deep, deep hymns, and the vibrations in her bones were a male song that was sung to me as
a little child: do not be afraid of the wind, the wind will not come in here. And then we
also believed in different gods outside, the wind gods and the wind spirits and stuff. And
so I was terrified, but when her singing began, I was being given masculinity through my
grandmother’s singing and femininity through my grandfather’s singing. And then when we’d
go to the fields to work, my grandfather would always tell me how beautiful it was for a
man to be gentle with mother earth, how she was our mother and how when we handled the
plants we were handling a young woman.
KEENE: If only this were our usual view of things! Society has lost much of this,
however. Would you say that the people of your generation–and I am thinking here of
Chicano, Indian people–would you say they received this knowledge and passed it on or is
this something that needs to be retaught among the younger people?
BACA: I think it needs to be retaught because I think, for all of us, our history is