Through Her Mother’s Ears: Tsering Wangmo Dhompa on Exile, Memory and Tibetan Stories

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa says she knows from her own experiences that “what we imagine as fixed is not necessarily so.” 

A trailblazer whose writing spans fluidly between poetry and prose, nonfiction and memoir, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa needs no introduction. 

Born in exile and having lived across multiple countries, she is a memory keeper. She says her mother is her “guiding star” and that she often “listens with her mother’s ears” as she explores themes of exile, diaspora, and cultural memory.

Currently, an Associate Professor at Villanova University,  her notable literary works include the poetry collections Rules of the House (2002), In the Absent Everyday (2005), My Rice Tastes Like the Lake (2011) and Revolute (2021). Beyond poetry, she has authored the nonfiction book A Home in Tibet (2014) and, more recently, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile.

In this interview, the scholar talks about her latest book, her literary journey as a Tibetan woman writer in English in exile and the importance of storytelling in preserving one’s cultural identity.  (Acronyms TE and TWD will be used in the following interview to address the interviewer and interviewee, respectively.)

TE: As someone who was born in exile and lived across multiple countries, how has your experience of growing up in exile influenced your voice and approach as a writer? What does it mean to write about a homeland you’ve never lived in?

TWD: My writing circles the themes of exile, displacement, and belonging. Even though I wasn’t the one forced to leave my homeland, my mother’s displacement has shaped my writing in both visible and invisible ways. Displacement is not just one event, but it repeats and reverberates over a lifetime and across generations. My mother’s entire family is in Tibet, so I’ve lived with a sense of separation from what could have been. My relationship to place and to nation is also shaped by that first displacement, by that I mean my mother’s, and also by her desire for a homecoming. She lived her life hoping for a homecoming and it has shaped how I view my place in the world. 

TE: As a Tibetan, a non-native English writer, what are the challenges and opportunities you have experienced?  How do you balance linguistic expression and cultural authenticity?

TWD: I began writing in English at a young age and so it is a language that allows me to meet both private and public concerns. Writing in English comes with the challenges that I imagine are also present to writers writing in Tibetan or in any language: how to get close to the skin of the story that waits to be written; questions of form; questions of audience. Your question about balancing linguistic expression and cultural authenticity suggests that authenticity can be recognized or measured. I think it depends on the subject and genre of the text, facts have a different value and stake when we’re talking about nonfiction, compared to, say, poetry or fiction. I think more about my responsibilities as a writer, which is also to say I don’t think about “cultural authenticity” in the way that your question suggests. I do think about the ethics of writing certain stories, about what I’m missing in my perspective, and these concerns are related to the specific story or subject I am writing about. While there are aspects about Tibetan culture that do feel like they’ve been there for a long time, I also know from my own experience that what we imagine as fixed is not necessarily so. 

TE: What writers or thinkers have most influenced your approach to writing? How much of an influence has your mother been on your literary journey?

The author says Milarepa, Dza Patrul Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, Edward W. Said, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Romila Thapar, and Arundhati Roy helps her think through certain questions while she says her mother(L) is her “guiding star” and that she often “listens with her mother’s ears”. 

TWD: I am indebted to many writers and thinkers so it’s difficult to select just a few but for the present moment I will say the following writers help me think through certain questions and they include Milarepa, Dza Patrul Rinpoche, Audre Lorde, Edward W. Said, James Baldwin, Marilynne Robinson, Romila Thapar, and Arundhati Roy. And yes, my mother is certainly someone who remains a kind of guiding star for me. I listen with her ears to some extent. 

TE: Your work spans fluidly between poetry and prose, nonfiction and memoir. How do you decide which form best serves a particular piece or emotion you’re trying to convey? And what has surprised you most about your evolution as a writer over the years?

TWD: I appreciate this question because it acknowledges the importance of form, craft, and techniques involved in writing. I feel most comfortable writing poetry. The genre allows me to play with language and form. For example, I can work with an inner constraint (a form like haiku) and obtain a sense of infinitude and spontaneity in meaning. I can also write in direct response to something by capturing a moment in a line or a stanza. Poetry allows a particular kind of attention; it’s like I have my ear to the ground. It allows for an intimacy that makes me connect the big and the small within a small space and with intensity and immediacy. A single poem can rip through you and live in you for a while. Poetry allows for questions, for open ended observations. I am more likely to play with ambiguity in my poems. 

While the themes of exile, citizenship, and homecoming are evident in my poetry as well as my prose, I’m building connections, temporalities, and emotions in a very different pace when writing nonfiction. I think I go a little deeper into the subject, think through the contradictions, associations, histories, and ambivalences a lot more in prose. Also, I tend to write more on nationalism and nation in prose because I feel I need to sit with the subject for longer.

There’s so much that I learn after each new work. What remains consistent is how surprised I am after drafts by how much revision is required, how challenging it can be and how delightful it can be. To see a sentence take shape to be closer to what you wish for, is a moment of joyful surprise.

TE: What drew you to write about the intersection of personal grief and political displacement? Why Politics of Sorrow?

TWD: The Politics of Sorrow is about belonging, which is both a personal and a communal or collective experience. In their effort to recuperate some semblance of what they had lost, Tibetans had to consider questions they had not had to think about while in Tibet: What does it mean to be Tibetan? How might we prepare for a return to Tibet? These are not easily negotiated especially under conditions of displacement. Your question in part provides an answer that I’ll respond with questions: Do we know how and why the Group of Thirteen were defined as “dissidents” and why is it that it was accepted by the larger community without examination? Whose accomplishments stories dominate the national narrative? Who are dismissed and who are valued? Is there such a thing as an “authentic Tibetan”, and if there is, what does that look like?

In Mourid Barghouti’s memoir, I Saw Ramallah, which I return to every now and then, he asks, “What’s so special about the land except that we have lost it?” He’s suggesting that the loss of a homeland is, among so many other losses, the vanishing of the everyday. And while this means something slightly different for every individual, the loss of the familiar is one that I watched the elders of my childhood, including my mother, struggle with for the duration of their lives. They mourned what they had left behind in Tibet: their families; the life they had known; the deities of their land; their dialects and stories of who they were. I think people wish for both small and big recognitions in their relationships with one another. Tibetans wish to be part of the community and to be accepted, they wish for their contributions, their stories to be meaningful and to be included within the national narrative. The sorrow comes from not being recognized for some. 

TE: The process of nation-building has historically been an act of separation, especially in post-colonial contexts. Your book suggests that this violence of separation was evident in the early phases of Tibetan nation-building in exile, as efforts were made to construct a unified idea of Tibet and ‘Tibetanness’. 

However, the Group of Thirteen consistently demonstrated a desire to be included rather than separate themselves as a distinct entity. How do you see this dynamic unfolding, and what unique factors contributed to this response?

TWD: Unity is incredibly important for our struggle but national unity does not arise spontaneously nor is there just one way to achieve it. The individuals I spoke with helped me understand what it means when unity is presented as an antidote to allegiances (that were important to their survival in those early years). Romila Thapar, one of the most important historians in India, has written that nationalism has a lot to do with understanding one’s society and also one’s identity as a member of that society. The past becomes very significant in this process of nationalism as in the later process of nation-building.

I ask in the book, what would unity look like if it began with an invitation to inclusion that encompasses different histories and experiences of being and feeling Tibetan? We understand dimensions of a struggle in retrospect that we might not see when we’re in the middle of it. 

It’s important to understand what a society or culture regards as history or tradition and why, and how it regards other contending beliefs or traditions. I understand the story of the Group of Thirteen to be about building community and taking care of community. It is also about recognition and about figuring out how they fit into the Tibetan society. The questions raised by them in the 1960s and 70s are important and they teach us something about how national cultures work. I think that the Thirteen were never quite invited to tell their perspective on events that marked them as opponents of unity by Chikdrel Tsokpa (United Association). The politics of sorrow is about that – the desire to be meaningful to the process of building a community and nation in exile and to be valued and seen. My hope is that the Thirteen are represented in exile history, not as a one dimensional stereotype but as Tibetans and as refugees who alongside with Chikdrel Tsokpa accomplished a great deal for their communities. 

TE: How has your position as both a scholar and a member of the Tibetan diaspora influenced your research methodology, especially considering your connection through your mother to the Group of Thirteen? How did you navigate this dual role of researcher and community member?

TWD: It was important to me that I consider my responsibility, as a scholar as well as a member of the Tibetan diaspora, to not be afraid to ask uncomfortable questions. To pay equal attention to written texts as well as to the memories and experiences of the individuals I met and interviewed. To also realize that individuals are capable of making sense of their experiences. I think that my past relationships with members of the Group of Thirteen helped me approach them but my outsider position as a researcher (and because I don’t live in the settlements) offered a possibility of their stories being placed within a larger context of Tibetan exile history. I think many of the individuals I spoke with had experienced being defined and dismissed before they had a chance of sharing their perspective. I had to remind myself while doing research that in order to understand their experiences, I had to respect and value their stories just as much as I might value my own experiences. 

TE: Tell us about the reception that The Politics of Sorrow received from the Tibetans across the diaspora. 

TWD: Tibetans in the diaspora who have expressed their responses to me after reading the book include the following: acknowledgement of the research undertaken; interest in learning more about the early days in exile; surprise that they had not heard these stories; as well as appreciation for our community’s resilience and achievements. But of course, like my other texts, each reader will have their own relationship to the book and that is the wonderful aspect of literature. Some young Tibetans have messaged me to say it has ignited their desire to learn more about their elders’ lives and I think that’s wonderful. 

I hope many more stories emerge because they are all Tibetan stories. 

TE: Do you see a path beyond sorrow as a primary unifying force? How has the diaspora community evolved in embracing and accepting ideological differences? 

TWD: I do not suggest in my book that sorrow is a primary unifying force. It was one stage for some on the path to national unity, just as nationalism is one stage in the life of a nation. Unity is important in building and maintaining an anticolonial movement such as the Tibetan case, and it is equally important to think about the means to it. The Tibetan diaspora has definitely found ways to embrace difference in certain areas, while we continue to struggle in other areas. We are not static, nor should we be expected to think alike.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama has been instrumental in bringing the Tibetan people together and he continues to be the glue. I think it is the responsibility of every Tibetan to educate themselves, to understand what it means to build a strong community, to learn to think independently while also building solidarities across our community. We tend to value conformity and while deference can be the solution in some situations, we have to accept opinions that depart from the norm in order to have more open dialogues. Asking questions is an important part of being a citizen. I think it’s important to maintain a multiplicity of paths, voices, and languages. It’s crucial to find a way to coexist, to understand each other, and make room for one another. 

TE: What role does storytelling play in preserving cultural identity, and how important do you think storytelling is for the displaced communities? What are you working on next? 

TWD: As a writer, I think it’s important to listen to the stories in our community–the stories that are painful as well as those that bring joy– and to allow them equal importance. I think the writer’s work is not to cause new problems but to voice the challenges and problems that people might be facing, so we can come together more honestly as a community. I think a lot about the pitfalls of a single narrative and so this book is an offering to having more than one view of what it means to be Tibetan in exile. Listening and telling stories is another way of hearing perspectives, views, and learning about experiences beyond our own. It’s important to me as a Tibetan woman to think about who dominates the movement, what does the nation looks like from the work and perspective of those considered on the periphery at any given moment in time. 

TE: As a trailblazer for Tibetan literature in English, what advice would you give to young writers from diaspora communities trying to find their voice between cultures?

TWD: I encourage young writers to listen deeply and closely to one another. What’s left out of our narratives? What are the gaps in our texts and stories? What are people telling you to be quiet about? Whose perspective do you wish to hear? What do you wish to see in our community and our future? Maybe one of these questions will lead you to the story you wish to tell, the voice you wish to share. 

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