Of exile and writing: An interview with the Tibetan poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

Abstract

Exiled Tibetan writers have just begun to experiment with new languages, writings and forms of expression, while understanding that this has modified the “Tibetan-ness” of their past. Among them is the contemporary Tibetan English poet Tsering Wangmo Dhompa, whose first book Rules of the House was a finalist for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003, and who is sometimes regarded as the representative voice of exiled Tibet. Dhompa was born in 1969 in the Tibetan community in India, after her mother followed His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama into exile after China's assumption of control of Tibet. Dhompa grew up in Nepal and India and was educated there. She took her master's degree in creative writing in San Francisco, and since then has been living and writing in America. She has published three books of poems, and her non-fiction account of Tibet, Imagined Country, is forthcoming in 2012. Dhompa's poetry is postcolonial in dealing with colonization, displacement and identity as well as the experience of everyday life in exile. Indeed, it reminds us of the unfinished project of decolonization. This interview with Dhompa, which took place in April–May 2010 through e-mail exchanges, is based mainly on her first book, Rules of the House, and centres on the issues of memory, exile, tradition, language, writing and identity