“Who Understands Me but Me” first appeared in Jimmy Santiago Baca's Immigrants in Our Own Land (1979). Baca is a native of Santa Fe, New Mexico, who has Chicano and Indigenous American roots. The poem is a semi-autobiographical depiction of Baca’s time spent in solitary confinement in the penal system. The poem explains how he had everything taken from him, including physical comforts like water for drinking and bathing, and psychological elements, like his tears and heart. Yet the speaker repeats, “who understands me when I say this is beautiful?” (Line 15), suggesting that he discovered something redeeming in solitude. After leaving prison, Baca continued to write books and work as a poet and activist while leading writing workshops for incarcerated persons. His other poems focus on autobiographical experiences with drug use and incarceration, and on giving voice to silenced Chicano people he has known. Many of these poems relay messages about social justice and injustice but also contain messages of empathy, understanding, and love.

Poet Biography

Jimmy Santiago Baca is a poet, memoirist, and screenwriter from Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was born on January 2, 1952, and was abandoned by his parents at the age of two. He and his siblings lived with his grandmother until she abandoned him to an orphanage at seven years old. At 13, Baca ran away from the orphanage, living as a houseless individual until he was convicted of a crime at 17 that he did not commit. Baca escaped after a short time in a youth correctional facility, then ran a lucrative marijuana distribution business in Yuma, Arizona. At the age of 21, he was caught in a drug raid and sentenced to prison for five years. Looking for an education behind bars, he was instead transferred to Death Row, where he spent four years of his five-year sentence in a one-room cell.

Baca used the time to learn reading and writing, and he began authoring poems, which he sold to fellow inmates in exchange for cigarettes. He corresponded with poet Denise Levertov, who submitted his work to Mother Jones magazine. She eventually helped him publish his first collection, Immigrants in Our Own Land, in 1979. Baca considers Walt Whitman and Pablo Neruda to be among his influences. He recounts a story where a disembodied voice told him to stop a fight with another inmate, speculating it might have been one of those two famous poets.

He also published his semi-autobiographical memoir in verse, Martin & Meditations on the South Valley (1987), which was awarded the American Book Award for Poetry. In 1989, he was awarded the Hispanic Heritage Award in Literature.

Other works by this author include I Am Offering This Poem, A Place to Stand, and Immigrants in Our Own Land (poem).

Poem Text

Baca, Jimmy Santiago. “Who Understands Me but Me.” 1979. Poetry Foundation.

Summary

The speaker describes the experience of being incarcerated and placed in solitary confinement. The speaker lists the actions of the guards, who the speaker refers to as “they” in the poem, followed by the speaker's reactions. Water, the view, and sunlight are all physical objects that the guards deny the speaker in the first part of the poem.

The next series of lines are metaphorical. The speaker describes how the guards “take each last tear” (Line 5). They take his heart and “rip it open” (Line 6), and they take his life and “crush it” (Line 7). The speaker therefore lives without tears and a heart, and when they take his life, he lives “without a future” (Line 7).

Next, the speaker describes what the guards say about him and what they give him:

they say I am beastly and fiendish, so I have no friends,

they stop up each hope, so I have no passage out of hell,

they give me pain, so I live with pain,

they give me hate, so I live with my hate (Lines 8-11).

This list of abuses results in the speaker’s transformation: “[T]hey have changed me, and I am not the same man” (Line 12). Next, the speaker asks a set of questions: “who understands me when I say this is beautiful? / who understands me when I say I have found other freedoms?” (Lines 15-16).

The poem then changes tactics, from listing what the guards did to the speaker to explaining what the speaker can and cannot do. The speaker “cannot fly” (Line 17) or enact other physical signs of power over the earth, but he can “live with [himself] and [is] amazed at [himself]” (Line 19). He discovers that he has love and beauty, as well as stubbornness and childishness. In his confinement, he practices being comfortable with himself.

As a result of being incarcerated—having everything else taken from him—the speaker becomes self-reflective. Though the guards have told him he is “beastly” (Line 8), the speaker finds other truths about himself in solitude.

The speaker also describes how he taught himself important lessons in Lines 33-37, such as, "water is not everything" (Line 33).

At the end of the poem, the speaker describes how he began relating to himself in a new way, a way that made him feel like a child, able to laugh, and wanting to be loyal to himself. He ends with the question, “who understands me when I say this is beautiful?” (Line 38).