Liberated by language
Incarcerated and illiterate, Jimmy Santiago Baca found freedom by teaching himself to read and write.
“Once you learn to read, you will be forever free.”
— Frederick Douglass
When I turned 16, something happened that transformed my small-town world: I got my drivers’ license.
It wasn’t that fact in itself, but where it allowed me to go.
When school would let out, I would often drive straight to my local library. For an hour or more, I would peruse the shelves, exploring the new and different ideas, people and worlds now at my fingertips. From UFO and paranormal investigations to historical nonfiction to poetry and classic literature, my interests evolved the deeper down the proverbial rabbit hole I went.
I was no longer limited by transportation or my English teacher’s required reading; I was now free to explore both past and present, real and fantasy worlds at my leisure — with time my only limitation.
It was during these long hours, discovering new writers – from Vonnegut and Fitzgerald to Sinclair and Hesse; diving into deep corners of history – from D-Day to the Dust Bowl; and discovering new ideas, religions and philosophies, that I began to comprehend the vastness of the world and the complexity of human experience. Through books, I was exposed to the best and worst of humanity, to the depths of despair and the kindness of strangers, to the greatest innovations and our greatest mistakes.
I could sense the defiant optimism of our founding fathers, I could see the bloodied beaches of Normandy, I could feel the quiet clash of anguish and hope among Jews in the concentration camps.
Sitting amongst those stacks of books, I felt privy to a new world – a world of language and stories and ideas that felt all my own.
Just as my drivers’ license had given me the freedom to explore the physical world, language gave me the freedom to explore the world through books — as well as through writing.
As Chicano poet and writer Jimmy Santiago Baca said, “Literacy is freedom, and everyone has something significant to say.”
Baca knew very well literacy’s ability to liberate a person from their real-world struggles. Illiterate into adulthood, Baca didn’t discover the power of language until a five-year prison sentence led him to pick up a book for the first time.
Growing up in the 1950’s in Santa Fe, New Mexico,
Baca’s childhood was characterized by hardship and instability. He was placed in an orphanage after his parents abandoned him at a young age, and by his mid-teens, he had run away and was living on the streets.
With little formal education, Baca became involved in crime and was eventually arrested. He was sentenced to five years in a maximum security prison for possession of drugs with intent to sell.
It was then, with his freedom taken from him, that Baca found independence through reading and writing.
With a desire to understand the letters sent by family and friends, Baca began to teach himself how to read and write. He began by studying the dictionary, teaching himself one word at a time, until he was able to read not just his personal letters but full books.
Once he learned to read, he consumed everything he could get his hands on, including poetry anthologies and works by major literary figures — Pablo Neruda, Walt Whitman, Federico García Lorca, William Blake and others — who helped him see that language could be a tool for self-discovery and self-determination. It was then that Baca’s passion for reading blossomed into a love of writing.
He began writing poetry in secret, often on scraps of paper.
“With a stub pencil I whittled sharp with my teeth, I propped a notebook on my knees and wrote my first words. From that moment, a hunger for poetry possessed me,” Baca wrote in his essay “Coming into Language.”
He eventually sent some of his poems to literary journals — a few of which published his work, validating his new-found passion.
In prison, where he felt stripped of his humanity, reading gave Baca a way to reclaim his mind, while writing gave him a voice.
“I realized that I could write and that I could create something that gave me a sense of freedom,” Baca said. “I could live in that world of words and imagination, and nobody could take that away from me.”
Upon his release in 1979, Baca devoted his life to writing. In 1983, he published his first collection of poetry, Immigrants in Our Own Land, which he had largely written during his time in prison. His work draws heavily on his experiences with poverty, incarceration and cultural identity.
Today, Baca is widely regarded as one of the most important Chicano poets of his generation. But perhaps more important than his literary work, he has dedicated much of his life to helping others — especially at-risk youth and prisoners — discover the transformative power of language.
I first discovered Baca in a graduate creative writing class. My professor had assigned his essay “Coming into Language,” in which Baca describes his journey of self-discovery through writing. The following excerpt is one that has stuck with me ever since …
When at last I wrote my first words on the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet like the back of a whale. As more and more words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place to stand for the first time in my life. The island grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited by people I knew and mapped with the life I lived.
I wrote about it all—about people I had loved or hated, about the brutalities and ecstasies of my life. And, for the first time, the child in me who had witnessed and endured unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impotent despair, but with the power of language. Suddenly, through language, through writing, my grief and my joy could be shared with anyone who would listen. And I could do this all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no longer a captive of demons eating away at me, no longer a victim of other people’s mockery and loathing, that had made me clench my fist white with rage and grit my teeth to silence. Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucidity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and now I could say it.
Through language I was free. I could respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an endless journey without boundaries or rules, in which I could salvage the floating fragments of my past, or be born anew in the spontaneous ignition of understanding some heretofore concealed aspect of myself. Each word steamed with the hot lava juices of my primordial making, and I crawled out of stanzas dripping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from the chaos of my life. The child in the dark room of my heart, who had never been able to find or reach the light switch, flicked it on now; and I found in the room a stranger, myself, who had waited so many years to speak again. My words struck in me lightning crackles of elation and thunderhead storms of grief.
How has reading transformed your own life? What books have had the greatest impact on you, and why?
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