At one point in the Tibetan writer-in-exile Tsering Yangzom Lama's evocative debut novel We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, the protagonist, Dolma, says, "People find our culture beautiful … But not our suffering." She has stolen a ku – a statue – of a nameless saint from the vault of a rich white Canadian collector, an artefact that has time and again found a way to emerge whenever her family is in need of protection. Her birth-father, Samphel, who sold the statue to foreigners, tells her it was her mother, Lhamo, who gave it to him. "What I do know is that survival is an ugly game, and our objects are all the world really values of our people," Samphel says. "Our objects and our ideas. But not us, and not our lives."
Scattered like ants across the face of the earth as a Tibetan prophecy foretold, the world's 130,000 Tibetans in exile have been rendered invisible for the most part. Their histories have been subsumed within the "Tibet issue", meaning individual stories of dislocation and suffering are typically framed within the questions of politics, territory and sovereignty that followed the Chinese government's annexation of the Tibetan plateau in the 1950s.
Now, a new generation of Tibetan writers, working in English, is laying claim to the voice of exile through literature that consciously emphasises the trauma of displacement, counters prevailing narratives about Tibet, and shifts the discourse away from the hard politics of the Tibet issue. Born out of the dislocation of the thousands who came before them and crossed the icy passes of the Himalaya into alien lands, contemporary Tibetan writing rebels against the traditional fetishisation of Tibet and its culture by the West. Yet, inescapably, being a displaced person also means being performative. As the writer and translator Tenzin Dickie writes in the introduction to the groundbreaking anthology The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, "[I]n exile, sometimes it can feel as if we say too much; we are always trying to shout, trying to underscore our exile, our oppression. If Tibetan writing from the inside can often feel like code, the writing from the outside can sometimes feel like caricature. They have to conceal, and we have to perform."
In the last few years, a spate of new Tibetan writing in English has appeared. Besides Lama's novel and Dickie's edited anthology of essays, the Dharamsala-based Blackneck Books, an imprint of the collective TibetWrites, has published several original works as well as a Tibetan-language translation of John Steinbeck's The Pearl. Dickie also edited Old Demons, New Deities: Contemporary Stories from Tibet, published in 2017. This exuberant production of literature embodies a conscious shift away from the analogous Western focus on Tibetan Buddhism and Tibet, as well as a reclaiming of a Tibetan identity that has been forged in exile – an identity, which inside Tibet, is shaped by China's attempts to incorporate the Tibetan people into its homogenous nation-project. As Dickie writes in her introduction, "To speak as Tibetans, and to write as Tibetans, is to continually recreate the Tibetan nation."