A Place to Stand
Jimmy Santiago Baca
Grove Press, 2001
US$24.95 (available at <http://www.amazon.com>
REVIEW BY BILL NEVINS
Jimmy Santiago Baca loves good food. He has eaten in the finest restaurants of Santa Fe, LA and Europe. He still relishes a deep bowl of South Valley Albuquerque chile roja stew. But the man also has known hunger so deep it never leaves him.
Baca has felt the unfair pains of poverty, the defiant bite of self-imposed hunger strike and the horror of watching his brothers, sisters, parents, lovers, friends and comrades starving for lack of nourishment, lack of honour, lack of love and lack of respect. Most of all, he has felt the agony of voicelessness.
Jimmy Baca is a strong man. Strong enough to emerge from years of brutality, imprisonment, despair and loneliness with a voice as finely honed as a lethal prison shank. To such a man, the silencing of the poor is the most unforgivable crime committed by a very cruel society. To be such a person in America today is to know, as Baca admits in these pages, that there is a duty to speak out on behalf of all those who can't.
"I was a witness, not a victim... My role as witness is to give voice to the voiceless and hope to the hopeless, of which I am one", he writes in A Place to Stand.
Swept up in the narco-police madness which swirls in the barrios and ghettoes of the United States, and nearly illiterate, Jimmy Baca went to jail in his early 20s and served hard, flat time — with no parole and no cooperation with his jailers. After years of hellish suffering, he emerged a voracious reader and a skilled, self-taught writer.
Jimmy Santiago Baca is now a world renowned, widely lauded poet (titles include Martin and Meditations on the South Valley, his latest, and Healing Earthquakes)), screenwriter (Blood In, Blood Out), journalist and public speaker/teacher. He has helped steelworkers, working mothers, children, the imprisoned and the illiterate to discover ways to speak, to put down their deepest cries and their brave laughter on paper. Many of his students have gone on to become published poets themselves, to their pleased surprise.
The section of A Place to Stand where he finds his own writer's voice is one of the most powerful passages in a stunning autobiography: "Through the barred cell window I saw lightning and thunder and rain and wind and sun and stars and moon that mercifully offered me reprieve from my loneliness. There I dreamed and kept intact my desires for love and family and freedom."]
A Place to Stand is this poet's prose autobiography. It answers many questions fans of his poems may have, and it is a fine introduction both to Baca's writing, and to the reality that forms the world of so many of the poor, non-white and outlawed in the US.
Jimmy Santiago Baca's candour is enough to make the reader wince as Baca details the abuse and abandonment he experienced in childhood. He is no less straightforward in describing the horrors of prison life and his own horror at the violence it produced in himself.
By his own admission, he is no saint. But Baca is undeniably a proud survivor. A Place to Stand is one of the great prison writings, and one of the great spiritual-literary stories of our time. We all need to know Jimmy Baca's story. It is so sadly true, so beautifully told.
[Bill Nevins is a resident of New Mexico, USA. He has written on Irish politics and cultural topics for a number of progressive publications.]