19 pages • 38 minutes read
Who Understands Me but Me
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Symbols & Motifs
Water
In the list of deprivations, the first item the speaker names is water: “They turn the water off, so I live without water” (Line 1). If a reader interprets this literally, it signals how dehumanizing the system is. Water is essential to life. Next to air, it is the most important component a person needs to stay alive. To turn the water off means to slowly kill a person. The guards also turn the showers off, and so he will need to “live with [his] smell” (Line 13). Depriving a person of water dehumanizes, while it also dehydrates. Yet the speaker says he can “live without water” (Line 1), which emphasizes his own enduring spirit. A person who can survive without water shows the strength of will to survive despite dehumanizing and potentially fatal conditions.
The speaker later notes that he “followed the blood-spotted path, / deeper into dangerous regions, and found so many parts of myself, / who taught me water is not everything” (Lines 31-33). The speaker does not specify what he found, but by implying it is more important than water, he conveys the message that it is a greater source of nourishment. Water sustains the body, but there is something more important than the body, which implies the spirit and its nourishment.
Walls and Windows
After taking away water, the guards build higher walls and paint the windows black. The speaker must “live without treetops, / […] live without sunshine” (Lines 2-3). The speaker effectively lives inside a sensory deprivation chamber and learns to live without beauty or wholesome pleasures. Most people have access to these things, and as with water, denying him sunshine and treetops shows the dehumanizing experience of incarceration. The guards take away the basic elements of being a human being. Isolated from other human beings, from nature, and from light is what forces the speaker to turn inward for deeper nourishment.
Sunshine
The sun illuminates the darkness and causes plants to grow. In poetry, the sun often connotes intelligence, knowledge, or a higher power. It can stand for anything that helps a person see better, understand something, or encounter growth. When the guards block sunlight, it is equivalent to blocking intelligence, love, and spiritual guidance.
Yet, in the second half of the poem, the speaker says:
[I] found so many parts of myself,
who taught me water is not everything,
and gave me new eyes to see through walls,
and when they spoke, sunlight came out of their mouths,
and I was laughing at me with them (Lines 32-36).
These lines indicate that the speaker finds sunlight inside the lost parts of himself, giving the speaker a metaphorical sunlight. When the speaker says that sunlight came out of his mouth, he suggests he found things inside of himself by listening to his inner voice. The inner world replaced what the guards took from him in the outer world.
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By Jimmy Santiago Baca
