no words

In the prologue of A Place to Stand, Jimmy Santiago Baca sets a clear expectation for the reader.  He states clearly that poetry saved his life.  Becoming literate provides for the narrator, Jimmy, a means to cope with the brutality of the state penitentiary:

“Language gave me a way to keep the chaos of prison at bay and prevent it from devouring me; it was a resource that allowed me to confront and understand my own past, even to wring fro it some compelling truths, and it opened the way toward a future that was based not on fear or bitterness or apathy but on compassionate involvement and belief that I belonged.”(5)

What Baca doesn’t say directly, but demonstrates throughout the novel, is that Jimmy is imprisoned from an early age; traumatic events in his childhood and adolescence force him to choke back his feelings, until his unable to truly express them.  His coping mechanisms, namely running and fighting, bring only temporary relief.

Baca describes with brilliant clarity key events that shape Jimmy's dysfunction.  As a very young child, he witnesses and is paralyzed by the shocking scene of his mother’s infidelity.

“I wanted to race into the shack and seize him, but fear disabled me.  I scratched at the ground with my fingers and shook my head to blur what was happening.  Dizzy and terrified, all I could do was brace my knees to my chest and hug myself in fear as their bodies bucked back and forth and the iron legs of the bed scratched on the wood floor.” (8)

Jimmy’s father, after fierce confrontations with his mother, takes him on aimless drunken car rides late at night.  He escapes by denying his reality:

“I looked at the stars, I listened to the Mexican music on the radio, I glanced at him swigging from his whiskey bottle, and I tried to pretend that none of it was happening.” (13)

In each case, Jimmy experiences emotional trauma physically and is incapable of forming words of pain or protest.  From this point forward, when confronted with an emotionally charged situation, he is often mute.  When his coach offers him a new home, Jimmy knows that he cannot accept it, that in doing so he would lose his identity.  When the coach and his wife ask Jimmy what is wrong, he can’t say.

“My silence aggravated their confusion, and they appealed all the more for an explanation, imploring me to say something.  Even if I could’ve expressed myself, I was confused about what I was supposed to say or not say, and my response to any question was always 'I don’t know.'"(30)

He silences himself and seeks out quiet spaces.  He runs away, escaping often into the surrounding wilderness.

“When I really needed to feel safe, I'd go out to the mountains and hang out with nature… I resented the way I was treated, and when someone would call me a dumb spic or insult me another way, I’d storm off or get in a fight.” (36)

When confronted by his girlfriend, Theresa, he responds once again by fleeing into nature.

“She gripped my arms and screamed, ‘Hit me back!’

            But I was at the trailer door already.  I fled…  I was running to the foothills of the Sandias.  The mountains would make me forget what happened.”(40)

The only other way he knows to express his feelings of anger, shame and resentment is with his fists.  By fighting, he combats the powerlessness that always threatens to crush him.

“Crouching down and protecting my face and ribs, I’d lash out with jabs and kicks on street corners and alleys; the difference was that now my fighting was fueled by my rage at the world.” (33)

Jimmy’s first years in prison are about survival.  All of the events that have led up to his incarceration can’t be processed in the face of daily violence or threats of violence.  To show emotion is to show weakness, and to show weakness is to invite catastrophe.  His friend Macaron sums it up neatly: “In the joint you live by the convict code, no gray areas: fight or get punked, step out or be turned out, cash in the wolf tickets or be eaten – it’s real.”(119)

Once he finds his footing, however, he creates a goal, to toe the line, earn the right to go to school and get his GED.  When this opportunity is cruelly and arbitrarily taken from him, withdrawal from prison society, a kind of non-violent protest, is his only recourse.  Yet his withdrawal is not premeditated, but a natural response to trauma.  He doesn’t know why he is shutting down, but is unable to do anything else.

“I didn’t shower, I didn’t speak, I just lay on my back and stared at the underside of the top bunk, deciphering the graffiti and trying to explain my behavior.  I tried to look at tit from different ways, feeling the greatest desolation and hoping to understand why I just sat there.” (164)

Again, Baca describes a moment in which language fails Jimmy.

His correspondence with Harry is his first real attempt to learn to read and write in an attempt to truly communicate.  Jimmy paraphrases the response of his pious pen pal in this way: “[He said] we are all in one cage or another, him in a wheelchair, me in a cell, but the most serious cages were sins.  Obeying God’s will, even though his body was in a wheelchair, allowed his spirit to soar.” (188)

While Jimmy resists Harry’s religious ideas at face value, written expression becomes, in a sense, Jimmy’s religion.  While he asserts that God is the nature which he finds refuge, it is through expressing his thoughts and feelings in writing that Jimmy finds not only refuge, but also freedom:

“With every word I was gulping fresh air and filling my lungs.  I felt I was writing for my life.” (188)

When his father dies, Jimmy's grief again turns inward, but this time, he finds writing saves him from himself and his darker tendencies:  “My writing became a receptacle for my sorrow.  I wrote even when I didn’t want to, because I knew that if I didn’t, my sorrow would come out in violence.” (234)

Jimmy realizes that his inability to express himself is, in all likelihood, an inherited trait, one that was passed down from his father and uncles to him and his brother.  He realizes, at his brother’s funeral, that the alternative to expression is depression, a crippling depression that leads to drug and alcohol abuse, despair and death.

 “What went through my mind was how he had never been able to express himself.  Like my father, he was shut down emotionally.  And didn’t know even how to think about this, the three most important people in my life, with no linguistic skill to express themselves.”(263)

Baca describes a character who discovers a channel for emotions that threaten to overwhelm him.  In doing so, he draws a direct comparison between the man-made prison, external oppression, and the cages men create for themselves, cages that few are fortunate enough to escape.