When news broke of immigrant Latino children being held in cages on the southern border of the US, I remembered Wendell Berry’s poem, “Questionnaire,” and its especially resonant last stanza:
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes,
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.
The poem presents itself “as if” it were a questionnaire, a bureaucrat’s dream of order, each of its four stanzas framing for us a set of questions in a pattern, a form, that is familiar.
Berry’s questions, however, are not a request for information from a specific audience for a specific audience. The poem captures how language can be used to divide us from one another; and how easy it is to deny the humanity and the rights of others. By the time we reach the fourth stanza, the questions amount to a difficult interrogation: are you willing to value things over children? We are meant to doubt the degree of consciousness with which we respond to the world.
To understand the brutality that drives the questions framed in Berry’s poem, we need a sense of irony–the ability to see the distance between what is and what should be; that and a willingness to interrogate the values built into the frame of the questionnaire, the assumptions and the rationalizations at play.
Imagine, if you can, a white supremacist at the helm of a powerful government putting in place a policy that blocks Latinos from claiming asylum, an established legal concept, insisting that these refugees of US foreign policy are murderers, rapists, and thieves. If that same white supremacist then generated political slogans and told out-right lies in order to mold and mobilize public opinion–those slogans and lies would amount to agitprop.
The term, short for the Russian agitatsiya propaganda and associated with Marxism, is a powerful tool whether in Communist or Corporate Capitalist hands because it keeps an already fearful public in a state of near panic. And when we are fearful, we are less willing to see and question the frame of any given policy.
Berry’s poem is decidedly not agitprop. How to tell? The bare, naked quality of the language is something Orwell would point to immediately. Remember that for Orwell euphemism is dangerous because it is meant to keep us from thinking clearly.
For Orwell, vicious arguments are made palatable, normative by euphemism, which creates an enormous schism between act and representation; between filling out a questionnaire and killing children–whatever the degree of melanin in their skin.
“Questionnaire” pushes us to think about the role of the writer, poet and storyteller, in the present moment, as well as the difference between art and agitprop.
Writers, whether of poetry or prose, ask difficult questions, tell stories that demand a conscious response to the way in which issues and ideas are framed.
What difficult question does your work ask?
What difficult question does your favorite writer ask?
About Elizabeth Huergo
Elizabeth Huergo was born in Havana and immigrated to the United States at an early age as a political refugee. A published poet and story writer, she lives in Virginia. The Death of Fidel Perez is her first novel. You can learn more about Elizabeth on her website, and by following her on Twitter.
Provocative essay, Elizabeth. I followed the link to the poem and read the other stanzas and it seems like we’ve already checked them off: poisoned water, evil deeds presented as necessary policy, faux patriotic flag-hugging… the works. And it’s not been via Orwellian euphemisms (well, not all of it), but by the boiled frog theory—slowly add heat until we’re too cooked to jump.
I think all good writing poses questions for its readers. Thanks for this opportunity to do just that!
Starting some years back, via my stories, I sought to explore not only the gaining of a societal “willingness” to reject abiding by lawfulness, but the necessity of rejecting it, at the hands of a cult of personality. And via the fear, resentment, and (ultimately) hatred of the lawful (their decadence, their elitism) by the aggrieved. There’s been much examination of the rise of 20th Century European fascism and its current parallels, and I didn’t ignore it. But it turns out that the fall of Ancient Rome provides a pretty fertile foundation for the exploration.
I had considered it the framing of not just the question of how it has happened, but whether it can happen again. I’ve found it distressing that, during the years it has taken me to write my epic, I’ve been overrun and outdone.
Thanks, Elizabeth, for the stirring reminder that this is nothing new or all that unique (unfortunately). And that the power of our words and our stories matters. It provides a framing of hope.
THANK YOU, Elizabeth, for this moving piece. And for reminding me how much I love that poem. Thank you.
I wonder sometimes why more people do not speak truth to power. Is our fear of offending (even when the offense given is enormous, sadistic, racist and cruel) THAT daunting? Do we not feel qualified to address such behavior? Is it because we wrongly believe we have no power?
There’s a lot that puzzles me about this world. But the thing I find most disheartening is when we, for whatever reason and in whatever context, refuse to do what’s right.
How sad that fear makes cowards of us all.
Elizabeth, I’d never seen this poem before, and I thank you for introducing me to it–I’ll definitely be teaching it to my college students next semester. (And your points about agitprop are so good, too–I may have to link this entire essay to my syllabus!)
Elizabeth, this is exactly what is happening right here, right now. Your words are powerful and succinctly describe the border drama every day. Thank you. Now, how do we grow a pair of balls and fix this!
Elizabeth, thanks for this essay, for your words of warning. As writers, we need to pull from our souls words and characters that offer positive solutions to eternal problems–or at the very least expose them. Writers have that power, sometimes subtle, sometimes blatant. But if we don’t use it–who will? Answer: writers and others who want to convince us that children of color belong in cages and that we can turn away and not worry about it. My novels might not be great literature, but they are built on morality.
Thanks to all of you! I am so happy to see we have the courage to speak the truth of what is happening to our country. My latest novel was centered around our American Indians, who today, get very little mention.
What difficult question does your work ask?
Among the many interwoven themes are questions:
Under what circumstances are disabled and chronically ill people allowed the full range of aspirations of the able, including love, parenthood, and productivity?
How does society make us/them internalize the feeling of being ‘not good enough’ or ‘not worthy.’
How does gender-based ageism complicate the situation further?
And the most difficult question:
How do you get the general reading public to read a novel with these themes embedded in it?
The more difficult the premise of a novel, the better the writing must be to not give readers an excuse to stop reading.
Elizabeth–As I’m sure you know, your post could not be more timely. The corrupting effect on language produced by agitprop is every day more evident in this country. Punditry and “daily outrage” reporting notwithstanding, the severity of what’s going on is still not fully appreciated. Whether privileged or deprived, most Americans, consciously or not, see their country as elected for better things. This makes many–millions as we now see–easily persuaded that their delusion of chosen status is being threatened by The Other. We are actually witnessing how easy it is to destroy truth by simply denying it with nonstop lying. Dr. Goebbels, stand up and take a bow.
Frighteningly, the latest resurgence of agitprop is not exclusive to the U.S. The same sentiments of fear, prejudice, and hostility are being stoked in Italy, Poland, and England. Baser instincts transcend national boundaries.
What a powerful poem.
I find the stories – true or fictional, told or untold – which send the blood coursing most strongly through my veins are those wherein people find themselves faced with an impossible task… and do it anyway, because it’s the right thing to do.
How well my own stories so far have reflected that, I cannot say; but certainly they celebrate perseverance in doing what you believe to be right – regardless of the threatened outcome or the likelihood of success.