TALTAL, the cry of a people I do not want to forget

Writing about a territory can sometimes uncover the truth of a whole nation.

Taltal is a tiny little port, a speck on the sea in the north of Chile, the merest glimpse of what parents go through when their children take their own lives. What happens when, compelled by the pain of grief, we come together for therapy? If collective suicide has become a means for expressing our discontent, what is going on? The Children of Taltal is the outcome of years of marginalization, the story of forgotten people forced to act to make themselves heard.

The characters in Taltal are ghosts, human husks who have lost what they love most, transformed into dehumanized zombies who, now their children cannot be brought back to life, must safeguard their eternal rest. We do not see their youngsters in this play. Rather, we hear their absence in those who do remain in this world: the parents who, undergoing a process for overcoming grief that has been imposed upon them, suffer with their memories.

Is a father still a father if his son had died? Is a mother still a mother if her daughter ceases to exist in this world? The answers become contradictions. We may want life to go on, but theirs has been cut short by societal disaster. In this grisly act, their children have left the best lesson their short lives could have taught us: inequality and injustice must end, for all our peoples!

I think of you just so, Taltal. I remember you to bring you into this present. To keep the young people – who die to tell us they’re unhappy in this world and see suicide as the only way to change things – from being forgotten.