Brecht’s The Courage to Write the Truth
"It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint, in a part of the world where complaining is still permitted, about the wickedness of the world and the triumph of barbarism …"
– Bertolt Brecht (1934)
There is a tired, bone weary humor here. I am chuckling, the way you might too when you are too tired and sore from a long day of changing diapers to pay attention to the complaints of others. We all take issue with circumstance; as the old teaching goes, "if the peasants have no bread," Marie Antoinette was supposed to have said, "let them eat cake." It doesn't really matter if she said it or not. It holds true today. Marie Antoinette is alive and well.
I am a certified nurse aide. I work in a nursing home in Lansing, MI. I take care of other people's dying grandparents. There aren't a lot poems written about nurse aides. In fact, Judy Grahn might be the only one to have written about this job, as far as I know. I found this stanza years ago form her A Woman is Talking to Death (1978):
when you are a nurse's aide
someone suddenly notices you
and yells about the patient's bed,
and tears the sheets apart so you
can do it over, and over
while the patient waits
doubled over in her pain
for you to make the bed again
and no one ever looks at you,
only at what you do not do …
It is so true. Though the poem is set when Grahn was in the military, we are still an occupation under siege. There is no job security for us; we can and are fired at will at the whim of an administration that has little contact with what we do, little emotions as to the plight of its staff, save a drunken irritation and a need to meet budget by any means necessary.
We are subject to abuse not only by our residents who can be deranged and violent, but by the families of our residents. Machiavelli might not have known about rest homes when he came up with his blue prints for power, but his ideas are in full effect here. And goddess save me from the adult children of the elderly and all their emotional distress they have not worked out in their own psyches. Guilt? Fear? Shame? Fine, go and see a therapist. Please do not come in here and vent your spleen on us simply because you feel powerless. You see, everyday I meet adults who might be caring and wonderful somewhere else and turn their furor and misery and helplessness upon the care staff that works with their parents. A resident breaks his hip and his son wants him to finally feel what its like to be alive so he refuses to have his father have pain killers of any kind. Nothing but a broken hip on a 90 year old man. This adult child doesn't visit his father save once a month, so he doesn't listen to his father scream all night in pain. But I do. All night long. And the family call the shots, they pay our bills and the customer is always right. For every poster my administration puts up saying we work as a team, I've had good team members fired because a relative has complained about some minor infraction that in other occupations wouldn't even be complaints. There are a million tasks to do and a million ways to get into trouble.
Our job is all about preventing disaster in all its forms. Changing adult diapers? Feeding those who cannot? Bathing and putting people to bed at night? These are all part of our responsibilities, yes. Preventing residents from falling, from hurting themselves, from hurting each other; residents who are out of their minds with pain and fear and there is nothing you can do but be present and try not to get hit too much or cursed at or ground down. For this job pays poorly. It is manual labor; I lift and transfer and strain under those who can no longer bear weight. A recent 2005 poll found 3/4 of all CNAs in Michigan had criminal records of some kind. It is a strange world I have found myself in.
I tell you all this, this world that to me is both strange and frightening and a million miles away from my sonnets and translations and villanelles that you read on this blog because it is very difficult to admit that my friends and coworkers and myself are in such a weak and powerless position, and because it is the truth. Bertolt Brecht wrote: "It is, of course, very hard not to cringe before the powerful, and it is highly advantageous to betray the weak … it also takes courage to tell the truth about oneself, about one's own defeat." It is this idea I am getting at, the idea of speaking the truth of the situation, of speaking of my own disillusionment and failures, but turning the failures into hope. That is why I am chuckling (laughing with rue might require a bit more energy than I have just now); to say what I need to say requires me not to be bone weary. I might not be there just now, the way Grahn was able to voice what needed to be said, but goddess, let me try.
Here is the section on having the courage to write what needs to be told from his Writing the Truth: Five Difficulties
It seems obvious that whoever writes should write the truth in the sense that he ought not to suppress or conceal truth or write something deliberately untrue. He ought not to cringe before the powerful, nor betray the weak. It is, of course, very hard not to cringe before the powerful, and it is highly advantageous to betray the weak. To displease the possessors means to become one of the dispossessed. To renounce payment for work may be the equivalent of giving up the work, and to decline fame when it is offered by the mighty may mean to decline it forever. This takes courage.
Times of extreme oppression are usually times when there is much talk about high and lofty matters. At such times it takes courage to write of low and ignoble matters such as food and shelter for workers; it takes courage when everyone else is ranting about the vital importance of sacrifice. When all sorts of honors are showered upon the peasants it takes courage to speak of machines and good stock feeds which would lighten their honorable labor. When every radio station is blaring that a man without knowledge or education is better than one who has studied, it takes courage to ask: better for whom? When all the talk is of perfect and imperfect races, it takes courage to ask whether it not hunger and ignorance and war that produce deformities.
And it also takes courage to tell the truth about oneself, about one’s own defeat. Many of the persecuted lose their capacity for seeing their own mistakes. It seems to them that the persecution itself is the greatest injustice. The persecutors are wicked simply because they persecute; the persecuted suffer because of their goodness. But this goodness has been beaten, defeated, suppressed; it was therefore a weak goodness, a bad, indefensible, unreliable goodness. For it will not do to grant that goodness must be weak as rain must be wet. It takes courage to say that the good were defeated not because they were good, but because they were weak.
Naturally, in the struggle with falsehood we must write the truth, and this truth must not be a lofty and ambiguous generality. When it is said of someone, “He spoke the truth,” this implies that some people or many people or least one person said something unlike the truth — a lie or a generality — but he spoke the truth, he said something practical, factual, undeniable, something to the point.
It takes little courage to mutter a general complaint, in a part of the world where complaining is still permitted, about the wickedness of the world and the triumph of barbarism, or to cry boldly that the victory of the human spirit is assured. There are many who pretend that cannons are aimed at them when in reality they are the target merely of opera glasses. They shout their generalized demands to a world of friends and harmless persons. They insist upon a generalized justice for which they have never done anything; they ask for generalized freedom and demand a share of the booty which they have long since enjoyed. They think that truth is only what sounds nice. If truth should prove to be something statistical, dry, or factual, something difficult to find and requiring study, they do not recognize it as truth; it does not intoxicate them. They possess only the external demeanor of truth-tellers. The trouble with them is: they do not know the truth.