TALKING BACK: Tibetan Women’s Writing Workshop, June 2008
Fours weeks of reading, meditating, thinking, discussing and writing took place during the month of June. TWA is in a genuine bid to empower Tibetan Women on the literary front. Encompassing the Tibetan society in exile with a breed of intellectual Tibetan Women is in our strongest vision. Hard work! ufff...but worthwhile we all thought. Four young Tibetan women(in the picture) met weekly with Cristina Bonnet, a graduate student from Stanford University and Vali, an experienced photographer from France, in order to write...To write? What? Yes, to write, to speak and to talk back. The sessions started with a group reading (well, if we don't count the giggles and teasing of the first few minutes). The reading was followed by a reflective meditation on the topic that gave rise to interesting and insightful group discussions. We concluded by choosing a topic for our week and this topic resulted in an original piece of writing from each participant handed in the following session.
The last few decades have seen a social and academic movement to retrieve and hear the voices of women from around the world. Since the official histories (he-stories should we say?) have often effaced and erased the lives of women, we have had to recur to alternative ways of expression in order to share our lives, our stories and our current struggles. Recently, a book came out of a gender workshop in the Tibetan Autonomous Region titled: Heavy Earth, Golden Sky: Tibetan Women Speak About Their Lives. This collection filled an important gap in letting the world know about the lives of rural Tibetan women who struggle to receive an education and to expand their opportunities. However, nothing parallel exists from the numerous Tibetan female refugees in Indian exile...So we set out to work.
In week one we discussed autobiographic writing and gathered inspiration from a story by a young Tibetan woman published in Heavy Earth: Golden Sky, the abovementioned book. The participants were moved, almost to tears, by reading the stories of their Tibetan sisters who live inside Tibet, a land most participants think of as their country, but which none has yet met. We thought about our own stories...growing up in the Tibetan Children Village (TCV), being a girl, and growing up in the Tibetan settlements...the memories crystallized in beautiful stories that will speak about the young Tibetan generation growing up in India.
The second week gathered inspiration from writings by the African-American author bell hooks on "self-recovery". This was a tough one as we struggled with abstract and complex theorizing of being a black woman in the USA trying to recover herself. But we were also inspired and thought of what does it mean, this "self" that we are to recover...and how is the self transformed in our different environments. How does race, class, caste, religion, nationality, citizenship (or a lack of it for that matter!) produces or interacts with this self? And most interestingly...How do Tibetans negotiate the "self" of compassion and emptiness that they learn about through Buddhism with their modern and personal self...All these questions took beautiful shapes in the writings.
Week three moved along with excerpts from Orientalism by Edward Said. How does the West think of Tibetans? And what do Tibetans think about that? What are the pros and cons of the mystical and Shangri-la images about Tibetans? We could not finish this week's discussion without exploring the contestations of such images by other Tibetan women. So we read some pages of Rhinchen Lhamos's, We Tibetans, in which she contests the Western images of Tibet prevailing in India in 1926. Then it was our turn to talk back, to speak about the current image and its effects on Tibetan women's lives.
Week four had high expectations. We read an article by Toni Huber in Imagining Tibet to continue discussing Western representations of Tibetans coming from the academic hub. So it seems as if Tibetans are putting up a show for the Westerners in order to gather strategic support... or at least this is what some scholars, who probably have not spent much time here in Dharamsala, are saying. We refused to be convinced that what we believe is just a show, but we had to find the right words to express this. So we spoke some more about our "selves" and our "speeches". Rhetoric about the environment, gender, and peacefulness interact daily with most of us Tibetans. And what do Tibetan women think about this? Let us see what comes up from it.
We ended our discussion with some poems by Tsundue in Kora about life in exile. What is it to not have a citizenship and to not have met our country? What is it to learn what a refugee is and that we fit that description? What is it to have people from rich countries working on us, meaning, studying us, and to have no citizenship rights to respond? And yet, we responded.
This workshop was inspiring and intellectually enriching for both the participants, and perhaps especially for the conveyers who gather inspiration from the rich ideas and perspectives of Tibetan women.
We are convinced about continuing with a series of similar workshops for young Tibetan women and this is a unique opportunity for you to hone your literary prowess and also share and grow intellectually. Your autobiographical account and your wisdom of words will be finally compiled into a book that will be published. This is a good opportunity for Tibetan women to contribute to the Tibetan cause by letting the world know about your life in exile. If you are willing to spare only 10 hours (2 hours per Sunday) for one month, then please write to tibwomen@gmail.com.