In the Absent Everyday (2005), and Rules of the House (2002), as well as the memoir Coming Home to Tibet (2016). Her mother served as a member of parliament in the exile government for three terms.
Dhompa applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, and reported the following:
On this page I write about Tenzin Norbu, a monk I interviewed in Bir, India in 2015. Norbu defined the campaign of “unity,” (led by a Tibetan political party in the 1960s) as a responsibility disproportionately placed on new minority populations in exile.Learn more about The Politics of Sorrow at the Columbia University Press website.For him, unity had spelled erasure…Tenzin Norbu insisted he desired to be ‘heard’ by the exile government, which I interpreted as his and the Thirteen’s desire to be included in the narrative of the united nation. Separation was most certainly not on his mind.My first thought on scanning the page (the first half of the page describes a historical event in the seventh century) was that it didn’t provide a good idea of the whole work but on a closer examination I was stunned at how this page indeed gets to the heart of what the book is about: recognition and belonging in exile.
Tenzin Norbu lived in one of the refugee settlements established by the Group of Thirteen and he felt the group had been miscast as antigovernment simply because they were slow to embrace some of the policies enforced by the Tibetan United Party (a powerful organization in the 1960s-70s in the Tibetan exile communities in India and Nepal). Norbu felt that the project of unity led by the United Party was exclusionary. He stated that he never got the chance to explain why he was hesitant to follow their call to unity. His understanding of events and experience of events confirmed his fear that unity meant a standardization of Tibetan identity to a homogenous formation. His desire was to be integrated in a meaningful way. He was asking important questions: What is the relationship between the government and the people? Where are we going? Who is included in the story of the nation?
The book focuses on the first two decades of life for Tibetans who had fled Tibet in 1959 after the Chinese occupation of Tibet, and found themselves refugees in India and Nepal. In addition to the difficult task of organizing an anti-colonial national movement, and establishing a government-in-exile, the community had to respond to complex internal tensions over what it meant to be a Tibetan. While it was easy to galvanize Tibetans to identify a shared timeline to the loss of a nation or feel certainty in not being Chinese, building solidarity behind the idea of what made a Tibetan, a Tibetan proved more complex because people had come from diverse regions and from a variety of political and social formations. The story of the Thirteen in The Politics of Sorrow is a glimpse of exile history from the periphery.
--Marshal Zeringue
Posts
