Lina Meruane has published books such as “Blood in the Eye”, “Against the Children”, “Palestine in Pieces” and “Blind Zone”, among others. / Isabel Wagemann
In recent years, if we talk about Lina Meruane, we talk about Palestine, about the books that this Chilean has written about the dramas and problems that, perhaps with a validity that many had not noticed, are still present.
However, on this occasion, Meruane visited Bogotá and the Book Fair on the occasion of the launch of Avidez, a book of stories published under the Páginas de Espuma label, which portrays hunger, the body, pain and motherhood in several stories. .
Throughout these two weeks we have been interviewing authors based on some characters from their literary works. We could well have talked about Palestine and taken advantage of the situation, but without ignoring the importance that Meruane has had in the studies and analysis of this territory in the last decade, but on this occasion we wanted to address his other concerns and hobbies.
“For me it is a bit mysterious why certain obsessions come out and are repeated,” said the Chilean writer, who also said that the stories that make up Avidez were written in different years, and that by bringing them together, thanks to her editor Juan Sotomayor , he realized that several had points in common, which indicated again that writers, or better, human beings, have themes that obsess us and accompany us over time, perhaps mutating in their forms, but maintaining the concern about its origin and its manifestations in our lives.
In Avidez there is an exploration of certain limits of the human condition. Hunger and pain are some of these. Some of the stories fall into that possible literary trend of recent years in Latin America towards science fiction, due to a certain tone of suspense that we have seen in other writers such as Samantha Schewblin, Mariana Enríquez and Liliana Colanzi, among others.
Regarding the concept of hunger, Meruane stated that “I couldn’t say that we have all been a little hungry at some point, not at least to a level so great that it becomes a psychic pain. So, I’m not sure why the hunger reappears, but several things stand out that are connected. One is orphanhood, another is survival and another is the human condition, and to survive you have to eat, and in those orphanhoods that are in this book there is not always enough to eat. I believe that the social inequality, poverty and hunger that I saw in the Chile of my youth must have left some significant mark to return to the scene of hunger again and again.”
However, more than a concept, which is addressed from there, in this book mothers are also repeated as characters, so on this occasion we wanted to address motherhood and the meanings that the Chilean author has found in her work and in her experience also as a reader.
Why the reiteration of motherhood in the stories of “Avidez”?
It’s just that these mothers show up or are so planned. The thing is that I have written a lot about childhood. And in one way or another, childhood is always linked to the mother or father. Now, when I wrote my first book of stories, which is The Infantas, there was not even a mother there. It is rather the father figure that appears explored with great intensity. The mother was not what she was thinking. I suppose that this figure appears in these others because I exhausted the father as a theme. The mothers who appear are a kind of counterpoint to the children. The present and the absent mother, the painful and the obsessive mother. And look, the mothers in the stories of “Ay” and “Her skin is so precious” are in the same world, which is that of care, but they exercise it in completely different ways. One cares almost by cutting back, for what she does not give to the children, for what she takes from them. The other mother, “Ay’s” mother, is because of what she wants to give them, which is the utmost care. Then there are those from “Reptil”, to return to another story, who are also two mothers, but queer. Non-normative mothers.
And there also appears his interest in regulations…
Much of what I have written has a lot to do with an interrogation of normativity. Who builds it? Who normalizes it and for what purposes? What is also true is that people, women, have always been left outside the norm, unless they make a very explicit declaration of adherence to that norm, but they will always remain as secondary characters in the normative structure. I have been interested in exploring that place that women occupy, that non-white people occupy, that the sick occupy—which is another subject that interests me very much. Now that I’m older I’m also starting to get interested in old men and women, which are places of deterioration.
Why are you interested in the mother figure?
That is a topic that has interested me since I was very young, partly because I never wanted to be a mother, but that figure did interest me a lot, precisely because it is not my figure. I wanted to explore all those mothers who are really very different. We have a prototype for this character in literature that turns the mother into a being without subjectivity: a helpful subject who is here, who only exists as a function of her husband and, above all, her children, or the disastrous mother. and violent. The bad mother. It seems to me that in this stereotyping of this maternal figure, which in both cases is wooden, she has no subjectivity and only has one possible role. I found myself writing about multiple mothers, because that figure interested me, that which is not me. That’s why I write fiction, to look at what I am not and the things that don’t happen to me, but that worry me.
How have you seen motherhood captured in literature?
In literature written by women I see very complex mothers. I mean, I don’t want to appear like I’ve explored many complex mother figures. I think, to cite one, of Diamela Eltit, already from the previous generation, but still contemporary, who has a very interesting mother in a novel called The Watchers. It seems to me that in that generation, both in the portraits that Silvia Molloy makes of her mother, which are very interesting in non-fiction, or the portraits that Silvina Ocampo makes of mothers, end up generating that diversity. The thing is that it was a women’s literature that my generation had a harder time accessing because the books couldn’t be found, especially when they were foreigners. There has always been an interest in that figure, the thing is that she was not seen as suitable for literature, and that is what I think is being claimed so strongly now. There have been so many novels about motherhood. I think of Samantha Schweblin and Rescue Distance, Guadalupe Nettel with The Only Daughter or Brenda Navarro with Empty Houses.
How do you think the perception of motherhood has changed due to feminism?
I think that, above all, they have been concerned about questioning all those regulations that put women in a forced position. In fact, when I wrote Against Children, I realized that there had been much freer times for women in terms of the demands of their motherhood, and that it had a lot to do with the needs of the State, the economy and politics. In times of war, when it was necessary for a woman to go into industry to support the war effort, no one was talking about motherhood. But as soon as the men from the front returned and they took up their jobs, the maternal discourse reappeared with great force. There is a very interesting issue at the moment and that is that capitalist discourses tell women that they can choose whatever they want, but in countries like the United States the Roe versus Wade law has just been repealed, and that has meant that, according to The last thing I read in the New York Times, there are 65,000 new unwanted children, precisely because a woman is prevented from changing her mind or not wanting to have children at all. So there is an issue that is really linked to the economy and a certain very powerful social conservatism.
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