Sliced Tongues: The Inconvenient Voice of Tibetan English Writers

Abstract

The literary production of the Tibetan English-speaking diaspora remains largely ignored in postcolonial studies, although it constitutes a good example of what Bill Ashcroft categorizes as ‘transnation’ (12), since it is ‘not a moment of state administered national identity but a moment of decisive identification’ (17) from the margins and from the bottom up. The state-lessness that signals the ‘modern [Tibetan] condition’ (Bhum 114) ought to be regarded as the context in which English is taken up and appropriated, which does not necessarily instantiate a form of ‘ideological conformism’ (164), as Lazarus argues in relation to analogous dynamics in the West Indies. English-speaking Tibetans inhabit the interstice between two powerful non-European nation-states: India and China. However, they do not simply sit at the physical and imaginary margins of such nation-states: as a globalized and transnational community, they engage, in turn, in a ‘marginalization of the nation-state’ (Appadurai 33). By looking at Tibetan English writing from this angle, I wish to explore an alternative trajectory of globalization, the one accomplished by Tibetans who contest Chinese power through the language of a proxy colonizer, and in so doing also contest Western expectations and stereotypes in the language in which they were first forged (English). This process of globalization freely appropriates elements from the Chinese and Western milieus, while remaining resistant to the totalizing and essentialist representations of Tibetans crafted in both China and the West. In this sense, Tibetan English literature might be regarded as a singularly Tibetan response to combined and uneven development.