Jimmy Baca: His Story

Jimmy Baca’s Life

Jimmy Baca was born in Mexico’s Santa Fe County in 1952. His parents abandoned him when he was ten years old, leaving him to live with his grandmother for several years before being placed in a children’s home. Jimmy made his first departure from his home in order to improve his life’s never-ending tragedy. He began with a horrible trip when he was five years old, when he went to visit his drunken father in prison. Before long afterward, his mother deserted her children, and he was taken to a children’s home, then to a confinement center (Baca, 11).

Abandoned and Facing Bigotry

Abandoned by his family, Baca run away from the children’s home to face bigotry and violence. He disregarded anyone who presented a way out. Thus, he used his talent to fight to stay strong on the coarse and dismissive streets. Without a job, Baca tried out criminality and lastly turned to dealing with drugs. Baca is arrested and confined in a maximum-security jail in Arizona. He both observes and participates in terrible, violent acts. He was sentenced to imprisonment of six years and a half, spending three years in segregation. Moreover, he expressed an interest to join a school, but the prison wardens considered him as dangerous. At times, he was placed in the same region of the jail with death row prisoners before he was let free.

Discovering Poetry in Prison

During this time, Baca trained himself how to read and write, and he started composing poems. He traded these poems to colleague convicts to change them for cigarettes. He managed to learn a deep affection for poetry that turns to be his saving refinement. While in jail, Baca describes the dangerous actions he takes to endure, from thrashing another prisoner with a pipe to cutting an assailant’s stomach using a knife. Even though he was defending himself, he frequently landed in private detention. His period in isolation was envisioned to halt his spirit. This fact ensures that the author made an unusual series of memoirs and admissions that awarded him with a stubborn will to counterattack the dehumanization of the custodial life. Poetry was a vital component of this new established sense of consciousness, with the art of writing, offering an influential means of outdoing his environments (Baca, 57).

Reflection and Redemption

Eventually, Baca looks back at himself and his family with clemency. It comes to his consciousness that the life he lived is not the when he could have chosen. He instead views it as the one that made him the way he was and as a lesson to all.

Lauren Slater’s Memoir

Lauren Slater, who is a French-Canadian author, describes her tussle with epilepsy and her ultimate treatment through psychiatric therapy and medication in her newest memoir. With the very name of her new biography, Slater vociferously publicizes that it is not factual. She also describes how her dishonesty is fundamental to her character, and thus, by deceitful, she is right for herself, or at slightest, factual to her disorder, whatsoever it might be. Readers may be exonerated for sensation not only mixed up, but a little influenced (Slater, 16).

Embracing Deception for Self-Expression

What this account expresses is a sense of desolation. Through her unproven link with the truth-telling, Slater provides a robust impression that she does not reasonably recognize who she is. Slater tells lies because using words offer her a sensory preference. Her explanation of what she is undertaking is that she is expressing a story certainty, going outside the imprudent facts and emphasizing something more imperative. Perhaps, it is indeed the sense of blankness that she desires to express.

Reasons for Hiding the Truth

There are sufficient motives when writing an account to hide the reality. One does not wish to offend people by expressing own evidence about them or rupture privacy. Other than that, the inscription about oneself involves a massive personality, and a definite enthusiasm to misrepresent the truths recommends a healthy humility. It is also terrifying to disclose oneself in public since it makes one intense, and to embrace an escape section claiming that one’s self-portrayal is untrue allows one to hide. Even though Slater does not claim so, it is cool to conceive that these explanations are dynamics in her choice to lie.

The Complexity of Truth

However, there could be a bottomless indication behind Slater’s try out. It is unmanageable to articulate the full reality in a biography, the very ultimate of the indispensable individual truth is deceptive. The notion of the reality behind despair or the reality behind marginal character condition may trade books. However, it requires to be observed with unlimited mistrust. Slater recommends that not only diversity of truths is given, rather than one dominant fact, nevertheless, more imperative (Slater, 178). The ordering of one stand or information over the other in the expressing a story is at all times ideologically encumbered. The principle of a rational illness is, in logic, an ethnic concept, and to accept into any specific narrative methodology is to give that concept greater firmness or confidence. It is more authentic to stress uncertainty. Both I and The A place to stand present the reality of oppression, but from different perspectives. Also, both I and Lying use direct suggestion to manipulate the emotions of the readers through interpretation of the reader’s events.

Struggles in Life

Both Baca and Slater struggled in life just like Rigoberta Menchu in the memoir I. Menchu struggled to survive and was seen at one point anticipating to live in separation due to mistreatment by the Ladinos. This is similar to the case of Baca who was isolated from other prisoners.

Works Cited

Baca, Jimmy S. A Place to Stand: The Making of a Poet. , 2001. Internet resource.

Slater, Lauren. Lying: A Metaphorical Memoir. New York: Random House, 2000. Internet resource.