After I finished Tsering Yangzom Lama’s novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, I searched the internet to find out how big an area Tibet actually is. The answer: two-and-half million square kilometres. An area almost the size of Argentina. A place of legends with a topography to match. The roof of the world, as the encyclopaedias of my childhood used to tell me.
Towards the end of Lama’s remarkable, powerful book, the right words appear to describe this land: mythic scale.
In the 90s when I was learning about Tibet’s sobriquets in encyclopaedias, the sad struggles of its exiled people seemed to be everywhere. Rock bands had Free Tibet stencilled on their guitar straps and drum kits. Benefit concerts with musicians and actors were broadcast on MTV. The Dalai Lama, twinkly-eyed and impish, appeared on talk shows and spoke with a wisdom that seemed ancient and otherworldly. Movies were made with Brad Pitt and soaring soundtracks to match the magnificent Himalayan peaks.
And yet, all those stories, concerts and narratives were told through a western lens. White saviours abounded in these tales. There were very few Tibetan voices that we could identify with, besides the Dalai Lama. Having passionate ambassadors like Richard Gere and Patti Smith was all well and good, but where were the writers and filmmakers who carried the stories of ancient history and loss in their blood and on their tongues?
Unfiltered history
From the mid-2000s onwards, Tibet seemed to fade from popular consciousness, no longer a fashionable cause for Hollywood. And I can’t help but think that enabled writers and artists like Lama who are part of the Tibetan diaspora to be given the opportunity to put forward the authentic and unfiltered histories of their parents and grandparents who were forced out of their homeland by the Chinese army’s incremental occupation of Tibet through the 1950s.
Lama’s novel, her first, is told through the voices of four survivors of this exodus: Lhamo and her younger sister Tenkyi, Lhamo’s daughter Dolma, and the man Lhamo loved all her life, Samphel.
We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies (the title comes from the prostrations Buddhists make in prayer, laying their full bodies on the ground) begins in the spring of 1960 on the borderlands between Western Tibet and Nepal.
Lhamo and Tenkyi’s mother is an oracle, whose gift is revealed to her when she hits menopause. While the rest of the village considers it an affliction, Ama (Lhamo refers to her by the Tibetan word for mother) considers it a blessing. Ama’s gift intensifies with time, especially as news filters through to the village about the People’s Liberation Army’s (or the Gyami as the Tibetans call them) gradual spread to the west. Bad omens abound; waves of wolves and rats, earthquakes, and the flight of the Dalai Lama (or the Precious One). Ama then calls upon the gods to guide her and the villagers. She says they have no option but to leave — the army is brutalising the people, and they need to save themselves.
Thus Lhamo and Tenkyi become refugees. They lose both parents on the journey to Pokhara in Nepal where they will spend most of their childhoods in a camp cared for by their maternal uncle who’d been a nomad in Tibet. Both daughters have something of the oracular gift of their mother, the ability to see visions into the future. These in turn are tied to a Nameless Saint whose ancient statue appears and disappears to guide their people in times of distress.
Lhamo and Tenkyi grow up to become two very different women. Lhamo, barely literate most of her life, will stay back in Pokhara making Tibetan trinkets to sell to tourists while yearning for a life and love beyond the confines of the camp. Tenkyi is given formal schooling and then the opportunity to go to college in Delhi. However, the past haunts both the sisters and the trauma they’ve suffered means they can never quite build whole lives. As soon as it seems they could be realising an escape to better things, the ground beneath them shifts and hope is shattered. Tenkyi eventually lands in Canada where she works menial jobs. She is joined in 2007 by Dolma who’s hoping to do graduate research about Tibet. Dolma attends a party at the house of a well-to-do collector of Oriental antiquities and learns of the presence of the Nameless Saint’s statue there. Once again the fates of the two sisters and this enigmatic relic become intertwined.
Given the weight of the historical injustice that Lhamo, Tenkyi, Dolma and millions of their people have endured, where does one get the hope to go on? You keep hope alive and feed it, this book says, by remembering and bearing witness.
Halfway through We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies Tenkyi stands before a door and imagines the rich family who live in that house asking her who she was and giving them this response:
“Please overlook our present degradation. You should have seen us before the invasion when our country had kings and gods and an unbroken thread of history from a time before time.”