Writing about certain situations in his life and others' life, Jimmy Santiago Baca, through poetry, gives his audience a taste of the culture that surrounded him as a child. In
"As Life Was Five" he talks about his innocence being robbed from him in one moment. In one moment he was left with a scaring memory that changed his attitude completely, but eventually led him to a revelation.
Unlike Baca, I learned about racism not through the way others were treated, but instead through the way I was treated. Although I have never been rejected because of the color of my skin like Baca's grandfather, constantly I receive comments from people of another ethnicity explaining how I'm not like the
rest, or from fellow African Americans explaining how I speak
white. Because I've dealt with this most of my life I have learned to embrace my differences, like Baca, and to rise six feet higher instead of being struck down two feet lower. Therefore, as I relate to the lines of "As Life Was Five," some of the same emotions from my own experiences run through my veins.
Knowing that
"[Baca's] heart [was] a wet-feathered bird growing but never able to crack out of the shell," takes me through the mental process of Baca up to "[his] behavior shattering." Step one I see Joy. Step two I see Confusion. Step three I see Comprehension. Finally, step four arrives arrives and we see Flames. Because Baca uses an intense metaphor portraying the heart as weak and uses the action verb, shattering, my emotions were ignited. Shattering was an interesting word choice because, by using that, Baca seemed to change so abruptly. When glass shatters it is a very quick process, and because they hurt him so badly, I wanted him to seek revenge. I didn't mind if he hurt innocent people, because like shattered glass, guilty or not guilty, if one grazes the mess they're going to get hurt. This feeling took me back to a time where I was at the lowest point in my life. I allowed others' judgement to burden me, not only with racist insults, but also beauty and personality insults, and eventually I began to seclude myself away from the people who did me wrong. Showing them my dramatic shift in attitude, I soaked in satire while they sunk from guilt. Through the process of releasing comeuppances on everyone, I realized I wasn't helping myself by becoming the insults they threw at me. As "a song ...[makes] his heart into an eagle," I began to feel like I was finally making progress up a mountain and the weather was clearing up. My jaw unclenched my grinding teeth. I started to stand up straighter. Now that I could clearly see that I had to embrace my differences in order to rise above, I felt like I was Baca transforming from a bird barely out the egg to a soaring eagle.
