Rules of Language in Rules of the House: Study of Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s Tibetan English Poetry

Download PDF Version

Abstract

The displacement of Tibetans in exile has also displaced the Tibetan language to some extent among the new generation of Tibetans who are born or educated in exile. However, with the new languages and forms of expression in exile, they are negotiating their culture, identity and aspirations. Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, the first Tibetan woman poet in English to be published in the West, is one of the representative voices of New Tibetan Literature in English (NTLE). Her first book of poems Rules of the House was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003, and brought NTLE to academic attention. This paper is a thematic study of the philosophical and the social aspects of language in the poems from Rules of the House.

[Keywords: Tibetan, Exile, Language, Deconstruction, Displacement.]

The new generation of Tibetans¹ in exile have just begun to articulate themselves in literary metaphors. Having inherited a ruptured identity from the history of their lost nation, and living in the ambivalent post-modern times of globalization, the Tibetans in exile have complex aspirations about their future. Exile that had meant a temporary arrangement for the elder generation, has betrayed the hope of return to homeland in fifty long years of struggle; and the impasse of the Tibetan problem baffles the orientation of the new generation. Writing for them, as the Tibetan essayist and poet Bhuchung D. Sonam says, serves as a primary pressure valve (72).

The acculturation in exile enables Tibetans with new languages, writings and forms of expression, as much it disables to some extent the pure ‘Tibetaness’ of the past. In this process of what Stuart Hall calls ‘being’ to ‘becoming’ of cultural identity (223-26), Tibetans are emerging with New Literature in English that addresses their modes of existence. Among the Tibetan English poets Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the representative voice in exiled Tibet.

Dhompa’s subject-position takes one to the history of her mother as much to the exile history of Tibet. Her mother who had escaped from Tibet to exile in 1959 was the daughter of a chieftain in Tibet, and became a Member of Parliament in the Tibetan Government in Exile.  She gave birth to Dhompa in 1969 in a train from Delhi to Chandigarh when she was travelling to deliver her child in a hospital. Dhompa grew up in Nepal and India in protection of parliamentarians and elderly monks, many of whom preserved their former reverence to their regional chieftains’ descendants in exile.  At the tender age of 24, Dhompa lost her single parent in a car-accident when her mother was travelling from Delhi to Dharamsala to attend the winter assembly meeting after being re-elected. Her mother’s death, ironically on the same route where Dhompa was born, remains a pivotal point in her life. She was urged by her elders to join Tibetan politics in her mother’s place, but she chose poetry over politics—her own poetics of talking Tibet in one’s everyday experience.

Dhompa studied in English boarding school in Mussorie, graduated from Lady Sri Ram College in Delhi and did an MFA from San Francisco. She has published three books of poems, Rules of the House (Apogee Press, Berkeley 2002), In the Absent Everyday (Apogee Press, Berkeley 2005) and My Rice Tastes like Lake (Apogee Press, Berkeley 2011). Her non-fiction on Tibet Imagined Country is due for publication by Penguin India.  Besides, she has two chapbooks—In Writing the Names (Abacus, 2000) and Recurring Gestures (Tangram Press).

Rules of the House (ROTH) is an anthology of seventy poems in free verse rendered as micro-stories. The poems function at two levels: at one level they are stories- silly stories of a boy falling down or exiled people fighting mosquitoes, grave stories of a city becoming ashes or news of accidents or a daughter looking for death, children’s stories told at bed-time or in a garden, etc; and at another level these are stories with profound themes of exile, loss, memory, identity, womanhood, etc. What brings out the web of connections and meanings in these poem-stories is the crafty use of language. Dhompa uses the language in its deconstructive mode where meanings are deferred as soon as they are made, and links it to the ambivalent states such as that of the Tibetan identity in exile.  This paper is a contrapuntal study of the philosophical and the social aspect of the language in poems from ROTH.

I

The language in poems from ROTH invites attention to its character by the peculiar way of its usage. For example, in the poem ‘She is’, there is a threadbare image of words in how children observe the words themselves in the voice of M

We are tucked into bed and kissed

            a fleeting one. Through the curtains, her voice loosens like thread

            from an old blanket, row upon row. We watch her teeth in the

dark and read her words. She speaks in perfect order, facing where

the breeze can tug it toward canals stretching for sound (24)

In another poem ‘Untitled Dance’, the speaker foregrounds the elusive nature of language through a story about comprehension and incomprehension of certain traditions, gestures, etc. The characters in the poem- M, S and the speaker go to watch the Lion Dance that is performed by Tibetan monks wearing masks. S, who appears (in other poems such as ‘On the way to the red city’) to be belonging to a different language tradition from that of M and the speaker, gets tired of trying to understand the dance. The speaker aids S’s understanding by calling his attention to the way feet kick dust in the traditional lama dance: “You can unravel a complete story by the pressure of feet on shoes”. But once the dance is over, the unmasked dancers are “themselves” and cannot be recognized. The speaker gets perplexed at the shift of the focus of the story from the masked Lion Dance to the unrecognizable unmasked dancers and tries to “settle for words”  (86).

Language too is a performance and a masked one at that, especially in different contexts of its usage. One may try to fix meanings of language in particular traditions such as that of the traditional lama dance or say in the scansion of metaphor, meter or rhythm (“watch their feet kick dust”), but the language will elude meaning in another tradition and in another’s context. In the poem ‘In the event of change’ one cannot understanding the speaker through what s/he is saying because what s/he is saying cannot be situated in one moment

I am saying primroses lined the pathway of toothless hedges.

I am saying the ocean shimmered like corrugated steel in the morning sun.

The context of my story changes when you enter. Then I am dung

on the wall of the nomad’s field. Then the everyday waking person. (15)

In the poem ‘Untitled dance’, the speaker (in attempt to settle for words) observes M in anger as she rubs her chin after S “tells her he is unable to find significance in /bowing before idols”. M and S are incompatible in their understanding of the significance of a certain traditional gesture, and this ignites in the speaker the urge to understand language and its meanings. She turns to trees in the garden and tries to understand the trees’ language in how they “send their branches to lean in one /direction.” She then listens to the gardener’s interpretation: “The gardener says predictions are made by the self opting for aberrations”. For the gardener, meanings seem to exist in relation to his vocation, i.e., “aberrations” are the wild growth that predicts for gardener what he has to do in maintaining the garden. There is an alterity in the gardener’s interpretation of the language of the trees that “send their branches to lean in one/direction” (86). In this power structure of the powerful (gardener) and the powerless (trees), meanings are made in relation to the context of the powerful-subject who is interpreting the language rather than the object whose existence is being interpreted. Also, what is at play are the different language structures of our cultures that we belong to. In another poem ‘Saying it again’, for example, the cook and the speaker who belong to different dialects, have but different interpretation of the same story that the cook tells

A love story, I say. He says no, I wasn’t paying attention to details.

It is a story about hunger. How it can change even a parrot. (89)

In yet another poem ‘On a way to the red city’ the speaker says that she and S are “divided by two mother tongues. Both nomadic”.  Still they keep in each other’s company when “He spread the word ‘vast’ between us” and she sees “the sky as he might have” (87).

In the poem ‘Untitled Dance,’ the speaker finds “possibilities in interpretation” rather than accepting fixed truths. She finally settles with words without words when she sees the dance of the moon

The moon labored over the hill, breaking the dark’s code.

When I turned to show him how a moon too can appear timid, it

had moved.

The moon that throws light in the dark of the night symbolizes hope or meaning, but this too appears timid in yielding fixed meanings. The moon’s timidity is symbolic of the loose structures of language, meanings and definitions. The last two lines further reinforce the idea of the deconstructive mode of language for what remains for the speaker is the ruins of language accentuated in the playful moon-light.

The ruins complete in its light.

No words pass between us. Vultures overhead were combing.

From attempts of comprehension of the lama dance, to that of the “unmasked” dancers identity, to S and M’s disagreement with each other’s interpretations of the lama dance, to that of the trees’ gesture, the speaker ends her attempt of settling with words (after seeing the moon’s hide-and-seek) in the deconstructive aporia- a state of impasse where no words pass between her and S. It is as though there has been a demise of definitions symbolized by “vultures combing overhead” (86). Thus, the dance of words can only have interpretations but no fixed meanings in the poem titled ‘Untitled dance’.

            Many other poems in ROTH call attention to the philosophical aspect of the deconstruction of language, such as in another poem ‘F’s’,  the character F tries in vain to have control over his son with words that he thinks cannot break (39). In an interview Dhompa tells how the deconstructive aspect of language comes in her poetry from the Buddhist religious philosophy of the impermanence

For me language stems from a desire to tell, to re-tell, and in a way get closer to that which I seek to know or comprehend. This is not entirely possible because language is a construction and comes with rules and expectations whereas life and the emotional world is not predictable or containable. The Buddhist concept of impermanence is a tool that helps me from taking “my language” too seriously or to view it as being the only way of telling a story. How does one use language, which assumes or intends one meaning, to speak of experiences and life which happen simultaneously and where meaning is in the process of living. (Dhompa)

II

The language in its deconstructive mode in ROTH is craftily woven into the social complexities of being a woman and of being an exile– both as states of existence run over by essences.

The poems in ROTH work around a network of relationships, mainly that of a daughter in relation to others. The girl child learns lessons about womanhood as she grows- about how woman are accustomed to the speech of silence in ‘How Thubten sang his song’ (43), for example. She begins to evaluate adjectives that must or must not be used for woman in ‘Laying the Grounds’ (47). She observes how women after marriage are expected to adapt to the husband’s world-order such as that of the change of the surname. But this girl character in the poems also learns to use language in one’s own terms mainly from her independent-minded mother as in the poem ‘Leh’

Here are people who cannot adapt to change. After marriage they

are given a new name. But mothers continue to press old names. (58)

The same language that has been structured to exclude woman, carries within itself the potential to deny exclusion or subjugation

In the beginning we use family as lineage for there are places still

where the longer you go back, the stronger is your bone.

Sister. Sister, come wrap your wound in mine.

We are framed for departures we are never prepared for.

Walk here. Into this assemblage. Into this alley of slippery language. (52)

In the lines above from the poem ‘Entry’, the speaker’s consciousness raises to the collective consciousness of the women feminist writers, who following Virginia Woolf create a room of their own outside the male discourse.

Dhompa’s feminist concerns transcend to the social context of subjugation of exiled Tibetans in her skillful use of language. The lines in the poem ‘In the event of change’ are telling

The context of my story changes when you enter. Then I am dung on the nomad’s field. Then the everyday waking person.

[….]

I am speaking your pace. Slippage of silk slippers.’ (15)

These could be interpreted for the very peculiar post-colonial predicament where the subject’s context changes from the native to the hybrid.[1] The post-colonial writers have expressed the anguish of the colonizer’s imposition of a foreign language on the natives. For the African novelist Ngugi wa Thiango for example, to write in English would be “wearing false robes of identity” (22). Dhompa conjures the same image in the befitting symbol of shoes for the refugees, who have no permanent shelter and are destined to walk from place to place. The shoe of the other’s language, no matter how glamorous in silk, is slippery.

The displacement of Tibetans in exile inevitably threatens a displacement of their language and culture. The Tibetan Government in Exile makes efforts to preserve the same through cultural institutions, but the long-lasting destiny of the Tibetan exile has led to inevitable assimilation with the culture and language of the host-countries. English in particular is envisioned as a language of international exchange and communication (despite the British colonial tag to it), and is welcomed in the Tibetan community.² Dhompa inherited Tibetan as a spoken language, another Tibetan dialect of her region Nangchen from her community, a functional familiarity with Nepali in Kathmandu, with Hindi in India, and English by virtue of her education in English medium school. The different dialects and languages that the Tibetans live by in exile have implications on their identity and writing. In Tibetan English writings from India such as Sonam and Tenzin Tsundue’s poetry, ‘Thinglish’- an exile mix of Tibetan, Hindi and English, has become a commonplace. Dhompa hints at the problem that the displaced people face while translating native emotions in a foreign language in the poem ‘Carried from here’

I translate letters for parents whose children are learning

other things. Unpredictable in his allegiance to English,

a Tibetan son send orange mountains of love to his mother (30)

The emotions are betrayed by words from a system to which one does not belong.  In the poem ‘In Between’

The walls threaten to expose us, shadows pinch as we mutter

jouissance, jouissance, while the university teacher said the use of

the word was a considerable error. A most lamentable error, given

half of us are illiterate and unattached. Think of words in their

system of birth (27)

The poem ‘Preparing for the third lesson’ brings out another aspect of status and class, attached with the language of the supposedly superior Occident. In the poem, children bury a broken tooth and are unable to remember the traditional prayers offered at such ceremonies

S had just learned the “Lord’s prayer” in school and

took the occasion to show off.

Our protectors didn’t speak English nor were we Christians. (46)

These lines suggest not only a symbolic baptism into English, but also the snobbery of glamour that is attached to English language and its culture that S occasions to show off.

Dhompa also hints the problems in the foundation of the sentiment of Tibetan nationalism through the issue of language in her poems. In the poem ‘Passage’ S learns about patriotism from another language (and thought) system

At the discover of the word patriotism, S distends like sparkles on

tin roofs. Tomorrow, and yet tomorrow, he says, he will march to liberate his country. (53)

Nationalism for Tibetans as such is what Partha Chatterjee calls a “derivate discourse” in Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative Discourse. For Tibetans in old Tibet who had strong regional identities than nationalist, if nationalism were to mean something it would be religion. But in exile, there are new meanings of nationalism learnt and adopted from new languages and ideologies.³ After having lost the sight of the country, what remains with oneself is rhetoric in a “speech measured by what is within definition” (53); and the definitions in another language’s system might not always be congruent with the definitions in Tibetan language. Dhompa addresses the issue of language for Tibetan English writers

Secular poetry is relatively new to Tibetans. As the first generation born into exile we are just beginning to articulate our experience of being Tibetan outside Tibet. For this, we’ve chosen to write in English. We are entrusting a language different from our mother tongue to speak of the loss or the absence of a country. These are complex negotiations. (‘Nostalgia in Contemporary Tibetan Poetics’)  

The Indian novelist Raja Rao talked the same issue in Kanthapura in context of his double heritage of the native culture and the British language

The telling has not been easy. One has to convey in a language that is not one’s own the spirit that is one’s own. One has to convey the various shades and omissions of a certain thought-movement that looks maltreated in an alien language. (Foreword)

For Tibetans outside Tibet, English is a language from a different culture, but not the language of the nation that colonizes Tibet. Therefore the implication of learning English language is different for Tibetans in exile from what it has been for Indians; it is even different from the implications that Tibetans inside Tibet have with learning the Chinese communist-ridden rhetoric in the respective state run schools. In exile, what Tibetans inhabit is a “third space” for people between cultures, an “interstitial passage between fixed identification” which “opens up the possibility of a cultural hybridity that entertains difference without an assumed or imposed hierarchy” (Bhabha ⁴). And this “third space” is a congratulatory platform for the new generatiom of Tibetans writing in English.

To conclude, the language in its deconstructive mode in Rules of the House works as a metaphor to address the complex issues surrounding Tibetan culture and identity today. The book advocates a critical literacy for the understanding of the lives of a displaced community, and invites the readers to step into the exile-house of Tibetans to experience the complexities in their everyday lives.

Notes

1. An attempt to classify Tibetans as first or second generation in exile is fraught with complexity because many young and old Tibetans came to exile in the 50s and 60s, and many came in the second wave of migration in the 80s when China had liberalized its policies in Tibet, and many of them are born in exile itself. By the new generation of Tibetans in exile I refer to those who, regardless of whether they were born inside Tibet or in exile, have grown up in exile.

2. Tibetans in exile are post-colonized in the sense of the geographical space if not the chronological time, or such is the suggestion that comes from His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s autobiography’s title Freedom in Exile.

3. In the first half of the twentieth century, many Tibetan aristocrats and traders sent their children to Darjeeling in India for modern British English schooling. After the political exile of the Dalai Lama in 1959, Tibetan monks began to learn English for the transmission of Buddhism to the West. At the same time in 60s, many Tibetans authored auto/biographies in English (with the help of sympathetic western friends) to introduce Tibet and its tragedy to the world. That may be called the beginning of New Tibetan Literature in English.

4. After reaching exile in 1959, HH the Dalai Lama made proclamation of the re-founding of Ganden Phodrang (the traditional government of Tibet) to counter the Chinese announcement of Liberation of Tibet. Later Ganden Phodrang became the Tibetan Government in Exile and adopted the modern model of democracy.

 Bibliography

Bhabha, Homi. Locations of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Chatterjee, Partha. Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World: A Derivative

Discourse. London: Zed Books for the United Nations University, 1986. Print.

Derrida, Jacques. Of  Grammatology.  Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Maryland:

Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976. Print.

Dhompa, Tsering Wangmo. Personal Interview. April-May 2010

—–.Rules of the House. Berkley, California: Apogee Press, 2003. Print.

—–.‘Nostalgia in Contemporary Tibetan Poetics.’ www.tibetwrites.org. N.p. 27 Dec.

2007.Web. 10 May 2011.

—–. Imagined Country. India: Penguin Publishers. TS.  

Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity, Community, Culture,

Difference. Ed. J. Rutherford. London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1990. Print.

Rao, Raja. Foreword. Kanthapura. Bombay: OUP, 1947. Print.

Sonam, Bhuchung D. “Of Exile, Youth and Writing.” Conflicts of Duality.

Dharamsala: Tibet Writes, 2006. Print.

Thiango, Ngugi Wa. Decolonizing the Mind: The Politics of Language in African

Literature. London: James Curry, 1986. Print.

Woolf, Virginia.  A Room of One’s Own. London: Penguin, 1945. Print.