Tibetan Free Jazz
Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet Edited by Tenzin Dickie OR Books `450 296 pages
In her terrific introduction to this definitive anthology, editor Tenzin Dickie (also an astute translator) writes about growing up a ‘literary orphan’: ‘There were no Tibetan films, no Tibetan short stories, no Tibetan novels.’ She seeks to fill the artistic vacuum with this collection of modern Tibetan short fiction, the first of its kind, which she describes as ‘the coming-out of the Tibetan short story’. It marks a literary moment.
These are the best Tibetan writers at work today, and they come from wherever the Tibetan-in-exile has set foot: China, India, Nepal, Canada and the US. One learns of how the Tibetan writing system developed in the seventh century, about the living epic of King Gesar, still widely considered to be the longest extant literary work.
The collection concentrates largely on the contemporary Tibetan experience. The striking cover illustration by Tserin Sherpa gives the reader some clues as to the melting pot inside: Bollywood and Bart Simpson, prayer flags and army tanks. Tradition and modernity play free jazz; nirvana competes with samsara. Some of the stories, with their petty bureaucrats and provincial government officials, tread Chekovian terrain. In the best folk-tale tradition, there are magical yarns about wandering minstrels, handsome fiddlers, pretty shepherd girls and wild yaks. The last two also feature in another story as modern-day user names, in currency among young Tibetans on China’s WeChat. We’re introduced to dodgy monks and nuns who have turned to prostitution. Two sisters watch the Indian soap Kasauti Zindagi Ki with widening eyes; we meet a boy who has seen the first half of Mr India 14 times (because the theatre in Patlikuhl only showed either the first or the second half of movies). Many of the stories are set in schools—the first point of experience in a foreign land; there is also plenty of blossoming romance and heartbreak. One minute you are at a brothel in New York’s Chinatown, and the next in one at an ancient Tibetan trading outpost. We meet shifty Tibetans trying to get to America by any which way; we also meet besottedwith-Buddhism White westerners in American retreat centres who, on meeting an ordinary Tibetan, slather on the exotic cliché.
The anthology wisely resists overdoing the Tibetan cause. Its focus is firmly on the literary as opposed to the political. These are Tibetans young and old, ‘loving, plotting, desiring, failing, enduring and simply living’. As Dickie writes: ‘These are our Tibetan lives now.’
This collection, the first of its kind, focuses on the literary rather than the political side of the Tibetan story