Lina Meruane: "Are we bringing children into the world to witness genocide?"

A leading feminist and pro-Palestinian activist , Chilean writer Lina Meruane stated in an interview that there is "growing alarm" over the low birth rate affecting many countries, especially Chile, and questioned the meaning of "bringing children into the world to witness genocide ."

" Motherhood is a topic that resurfaces from time to time . There are times when the demand for procreation intensifies and other times when it decreases. This is a time of upswing," said Meruane (Santiago 1970), hours before the premiere of her first play, Esa cosa animal, at the Teatro La Memoria in Santiago.

The work is based on her famous feminist essay Against Children (2014), a publishing phenomenon that questions the mandate of motherhood and the cultural discourses that promote the preeminence of the child, while warning against the return of a conservative model that, in her opinion, "aims to return women to domestic confinement."

A decade later, directed by Chilean director Rosa Monasterio and starring Lorena Carrizo, Daniela Jacques, and Daniel Parra, Meruane revisits procreation as a political and economic tool during the rise of the far right around the world. It locks three siblings in their childhood home to debate whether or not to have children.

"It's the question that always defines us as women, whether we are mothers or not," she acknowledged.

After its first premiere in Barcelona last year, the play is coming to Chile for the first time at a time when the country has the lowest fertility rate in the region and one of the lowest in the world (1.16 children per woman).

The demographic crisis has entered the Chilean political debate, and even President Gabriel Boric, who recently became a father, "appears holding his baby," trying to encourage young people to have children, "but in a much kinder, more affectionate way, and with men as protagonists, or at least as participants," Meruane said.

In the United States, she noted, "the Donald Trump administration is also making huge efforts to increase the desire for reproduction," but with a conservative and pro-natalist approach , "organizing large conferences with women to encourage them to have children."

"I think that since they're getting rid of migrants, they need to increase their population to meet the demand for labor," added Meruane, one of the most recognized voices in current Latin American literature and winner of the José Donoso Ibero-American Prize for Literature in 2023.

For the writer of Palestinian descent, the underlying problem is that "no one" dares to speak clearly about the causes behind the lack of desire to have children , among which she highlights "precarious work," "job discrimination," "the planetary crisis," and, now, "extermination, war, and genocide."

"Are we bringing children into the world to witness genocide? That's a really important question," said the essayist, who is also a professor of creative writing, literature, and Hispanic American culture at New York University.

"It's an open genocide, visible and boasted about online, and unpunished, but it has a very long history," added Meruane, whose non-fiction work, " Palestine in Pieces ," was published two years before the Hamas attacks and the indiscriminate Israeli offensive in Gaza, which has already left more than 60,000 dead, almost half of them women and children.

The writer, who is part of the large Palestinian community living in Chile, the largest outside the Arab world, said she agrees with the thesis of the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Palestinian Territories, Francesca Albanese, and that, in her opinion, "the genocide is not over because there are economic interests involved: Money rules ," she added.

The war in Gaza and the global geopolitical context, he concluded, demonstrate that " there are still powers that are much more permissive in attacking their citizens , their migrants, and in breaking the law."