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found myself handcuffed to a chain gang of ecstasies of my life. And, for the first time, the
inmates and bused to a holding facility to await child in me who had witnessed and endured
trial. There I met men, prisoners, who read unspeakable terrors cried out not just in impo- conversation
aloud to each other the works of Neruda, Paz, tent despair, but with the power of language.
Sabines, Nemerov, and Hemingway. Never had I Suddenly, through language, through writing,
felt such freedom as in that dormitory. Listening my grief and my joy could be shared with /
to the words of these writers, I felt that invisible anyone who would listen. And I could do this
threat from without lessen — my sense of teeter- all alone; I could do it anywhere. I was no
ing on a rotting plank over swamp water where longer a captive of demons eating away at me, Language and Power
famished alligators clapped their horny snouts no longer a victim of other people’s mockery
for my blood. While I listened to the words of the and loathing, that had made me clench my fist
poets, the alligators slumbered powerless in white with rage and grit my teeth to silence.
their lairs. The language of poetry was the magic Words now pleaded back with the bleak lucid-
that could liberate me from myself, transform ity of hurt. They were wrong, those others, and
me into another person, transport me to places now I could say it.
far away. Through language I was free. I could
And when they closed the books, these respond, escape, indulge; embrace or reject
Chicanos, and went into their own Chicano earth or the cosmos. I was launched on an
language, they made barrio life come alive for endless journey without boundaries or rules,
me in the fullness of its vitality. I began to learn in which I could salvage the floating fragments
my own language, the bilingual words and of my past, or be born anew in the sponta-
phrases explaining to me my place in the neous ignition of understanding some hereto-
universe. . . . fore concealed aspect of myself. Each word
From that moment, a hunger for poetry steamed with the hot lava juices of my primor-
possessed me. dial making, and I crawled out of stanzas drip-
Until then, I had felt as if I had been born ping with birth-blood, reborn and freed from
into a raging ocean where I swam relentlessly, the chaos of my life. The child in the dark
flailing my arms in hope of rescue, of reaching a room of my heart, who had never been able to
shoreline I never sighted. Never solid ground find or reach the light switch, flicked it on
beneath me, never a resting place. I had lived now; and I found in the room a stranger,
with only the desperate hope to stay afloat; that myself, who had waited so many years to
and nothing more. speak again. My words struck in me lightning
But when at last I wrote my first words on crackles of elation and thunderhead storms
the page, I felt an island rising beneath my feet of grief. . . .
like the back of a whale. As more and more I withdrew even deeper into the world of
words emerged, I could finally rest: I had a place language, cleaving the diamonds of verbs and
to stand for the first time in my life. The island nouns, plunging into the brilliant light of poet-
grew, with each page, into a continent inhabited ry’s regenerative mystery. Words gave off rings
by people I knew and mapped with the life I of white energy, radar signals from powers
lived. beyond me that infused me with truth. I
I wrote about it all — about people I had 10 believed what I wrote, because I wrote what
loved or hated, about the brutalities and was true. My words did not come from books or

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