Lina Meruane and her childhood memories in a Chile devastated by the Pinochet regime

“Could it be that the dictatorial policy of depoliticizing the country, assumed by all institutions and by our school, our families, our country, retrospectively redeems us from responsibility?” asks Lina Meruane in one of the first pages of Signs of Us (2023), whose Portuguese version was presented at the São Paulo Book Fair.

In an interview at a hotel in the capital of São Paulo, the Chilean writer of Palestinian origin explains that she wrote this biographical essay of just over 60 pages to resolve "a minor biographical problem," the thought that her family had been on what she considered to be "the wrong side of history" at the dawn of the military regime imposed by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

While this memory exercise, which turned into a book, didn't help him "justify" anything, it did allow him to "understand" that a large part of Chilean society "responded to their fears," and that didn't necessarily make them "bad people."

"They were afraid for their own lives and their families'. And fear is a very important element of our emotions . We operate politically driven by our emotions," he acknowledges.

She recalls that, particularly in the Chilean post-dictatorship period , “it seemed that all the writers were children of martyrs of the dictatorship” or that they had occupied more “heroic” positions of resistance. She then began to reflect on how she had experienced that moment in her childhood, in which she remained “in a kind of shadow of real life,” with no insight into what was happening outside its brick walls.

“We had the signs, the rumors, the things that were said and denied , but there was no place for interpretation to put all those signs together and build a story,” explains Meruane (Santiago de Chile, 1970).

And, although he places much of the blame on his inner circles and the places he frequented —such as his training at a private British school where the anthems of all the Armed Forces were sung “every Monday”—he claims that this type of thing was done before and “hidden.”

Today, "power is operating in an absolutely 'gore' manner."

For Meruane, one of the most resonant voices in modern Latin American literature, in the last century, "power" acted in the shadows, leaving no "evidence" of its crimes.

"They were made to disappear, that is, there was no evidence of what had happened to those bodies. Whether they had been tortured, whether their throats had been cut. They were thrown into the sea, buried in mass graves. There was no narrative to understand what was happening," he exemplifies, referring to the modus operandi of Latin American dictatorships, which were characterized by their clandestine detention centers and the use of the term "disappeared."

While today, "power is operating in an absolutely 'gore' way, in an absolutely spectacular way," in plain sight.

And to explain what she means when she mentions this cinematographic subgenre that stands out for its uncensored bloody images , the author refers to Israel's attacks on the Palestinian people, in which everything has been "very visible" and "very unpunished", "as if there were a special situation of privilege in which a nation, a country, an ideology, has the right to wipe out any other population and not suffer any consequences."

And even with the justification that they happen “in self-defense,” and under the premise that the Palestinian population “deserves it for being who they are.”

This process of “dehumanizing the other and denying the other as human” allows us to “reinterpret facts as necessary facts, as positive facts, not as immoral, unethical, or criminal facts,” he describes.

The author of Palestine in Pieces (2021) reveals that she was writing a novel, but that “the acceleration of genocide” by Israel dragged her back to this terrain, which Meruane knows very well.

In this regard, he says that "probably at the end of this year" he will release in Chile a collection of articles, chronicles, and reflections on Palestine that will be called Matarlo todo (Killing Everything ).