PARADISE LOST
Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel tells the story of Tibetans, whose nation survives in exile
TTsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies begins with a dedication to her parents and relations and “to every soul who has known, lost, and sought home”. While that applies to most people in some measure, it is particularly, and poignantly, true of Tibetans, whose nation survives in exile, removed from a territory now controlled by the Chinese.
The novel opens in the early 1960s. An oracle leads half her village to Nepal across the mountains as the People’s Liberation Army consolidates its grip over Tibet. It’s a long, icy march with few possessions. Many die along the way, including the oracle and her husband, leaving their daughters, Lhamo and Tenkyi, to be raised by relatives. Their journey and their subsequent lives in refugee camps and settlements mirror the story of many Tibetans in exile today.
The dominant mood is one of fragmentation and displacement. Tibet used to be a theocracy, a nation built around its monasteries and relics. (A young Lhamo wonders why her people had “only monks and nuns, but not an army”.) So, their uprooting in a sense is a dual one, from land as well as from the hallowed ground. The novel’s story spans the years from 1960 to 2012, and is told by multiple narrators— Lhamo, her daughter Dolma, Tenkyi and a man named Samphel —at staggered points in time.
The novel captures refugee life marked by communities of circumstance—people who look out for those they find themselves with. At the same time, people are frighteningly easy to lose across multiple camps and countries. A love story that runs through the book is continually thwarted by missed connections. Some of their mother’s oracular powers have rubbed off on Lhamo and Tenkyi, who occasionally go into a trance or see visions. It’s part of the Tibetan tradition, but in the book’s world, it seems as if a little extraordinary perception is almost necessary to hold things together.
The arc of the novel set in 2012 has a twentysomething Dolma living with her aunt in Toronto, a country behind whose welcome she finds “a national self-regard that insists on a mythic goodness”. Here she sees (and shows us) some finely-observed aspects of a globalised Tibet: as a glamorous cause; as a subject for western academics who actually get to visit Tibet; as Little Tibet, which is “the camp built anew. A copy of a copy of home”. And not least as represented by fetishised artefacts that magically find their way into museums. A small idol of a saint that appears wherever people need him pops up throughout the book, including at a collector’s.
Lama’s writing is deft without calling much attention to itself, and always in the present tense, as if inhabiting a constant precariousness. Lama manages to tell a few Tibetan stories against the backdrop of the larger story of Tibetan nationhood, which, she writes, “repeats and repeats, drowning out all of our other stories”. ■
THE NOVEL CAPTURES REFUGEE LIFE MARKED BY COMMUNITIES OF CIRCUMSTANCE— PEOPLE WHO LOOK OUT FOR THOSE THEY FIND THEMSELVES WITH