Master of Inhabiting, Master Shape Shifter, Master Escape Artist

Master of Inhabiting

Santiago Baca constructs a memoir that he observes unfold in the same time that we do as readers. He simultaneously disassociates from his story and completely inhabits it. This starts immediately, on page 15:

“I wanted to hit him and take control of the situation somehow, but how does a seven-year old do that?”

The author casting himself as an outsider from the normal “Them” with a capital T begins early in his life and early in the narration as well:

“They were the kind of kids my mother pointed to, saying I should be like them”(24).

“These were the kind of people I had a grudge against…”(28).

“I’d begun to feel early on that the state and the society at large considered me a stain on their illusion of a perfect America”(29).

“Since Martina’s insular white middle-class life had no room for problems like me…”(90).

This technique shows his reader what he was up against as a young boy and how this struggle followed him into adulthood. It also creates a clear distinction between narrator and character; as we’ve seen this semester, a hard thing to do. Santiago Baca the narrator, breathes life into the sometimes breathless Santiago Baca the character. This complex technique reifies Santiago Baca as a person finding a place to stand in multiple worlds.

Master Shape Shifter

Santiago Baca shows that one way to relay trauma is to tell the story as if you were watching it happen, instead of being an active player. If Baca speaks of himself as not part of the action, and he doesn’t identify with the action or the other characters, maybe, just maybe he prevents himself from becoming entrenched in his current environment:

“I watched the whole scene: bullets shredding the house, battering ram shattering the door”(86).

“They were sunburned from working under a blazing sun and looked exhausted in faded jeans and T-shirts and scuffed prison brogans. Even though there were hundreds of them, their withdrawn hardness made the yard eerily vacant and quiet”(114).

“It was a world within a world, the difference being that you lived in a cage with a thousand other caged men”(117).

“I can still see myself. I’ve gone over and over it. All I remember is hearing myself yell, ‘I know what I was! But I’m trying to change! I’m just asking for a fucking chance!”(163).

“It was my third time in the hole, but no matter how many times you go in, you never get used to it”(169).

“I could almost hear them give a collective sigh as they swallowed their pills and reclined on bunks or shuffled back and forth in bare feet in a forlorn daze, in another world far away from prison”(211).

“Was I in my cell, imagining all this?”(215) <---a poem

By dis-identifying with his state at the time of his remembering, Santiago Baca prevents his reader from seeing him as someone who is currently being described; he prevents himself from becoming that person. We fall further in love with the character, not distanced from him. We know through the articulate telling there’s no way he stayed in that environment, no way he fell deeper into a self-description that he loathed.

Master Escape Artist

Through all of this, Santiago Baca escapes. He escapes through his body, through memory, through poetry, and mostly by narrating his own story:

“I was drifting in a reverie when I was jolted back to the present by a door creaking open above me”(8).

“…Even through my stoned haze I’d feel the same welling of contempt with a weird measure of satisfaction that I had already surpassed him. I was going farther than he’d ever dared”(35).

“I got behind a dumpster, hugged my knees to my chest to keep warm…”(41).

“Escaping from the D-Home, I’d crawl over security fences, belly and arms cut by barbed wire; the pain was worth it to be walking happily along a winding dirt road in the South Valley”(104).

“I would revisit places and people from my past for longer stretches of time”(134).

“…I knew that my imaginary life was reviving my defenses against the numbing effects of isolation in the hole, which usually numbed a prisoner’s desire to fight to stay human”(149).

“Sprinting hard for a long time, I’d fallen into running reveries, my mind soaring above the prison…”(219).

By using these three techniques, Santiago Baca creates a man and a story that falls toward us as readers, the last thing we would expect a prison narrative to do. He was cast away into the farthest depths from mainstream society, but through his crafting we become more human alongside him.