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Diasporic Dilemmas: Conflicting Ideals and Identities in the Writings of Baimanazhen
Abstract
Contemporary Tibetan literature was forced to engage with the themes of movements and diaspora, after a significant percentage of Tibetans left their homeland to seek freedom in exile. Nevertheless, the majority of Tibetans remain in the People’s Republic of China, and have experienced alienation from their own culture in a land to which they claim heritage, effectively creating a diaspora in situ.
This complexity in place and displacement gave rise to a new generation of Tibetan writers who alternately utilize and trouble, play and mock, the notion of diaspora. This essay focuses on the writings of Baimanazhen (1967-), a Tibetan writer who was educated in Chinese schools and writes in Chinese about Tibetan subjects. Her essay, “Dekyi, Who Left Home,” negotiates a set of conflicting ideals and identities between the “modern” Han Chinese and the “traditional” Tibetan culture, as well as the “secular” identity of the writer herself and the Buddhist faith of her female monastic friends to which she (sometimes) aspires. In this paper, I juxtapose Baimanazhen with the writings of two other prominent women writers who write in Tibetan, Nyimatso (1985-), who writes in exile in India, and Tsering Yangkyi, in Tibet proper in PRC. The comparison reveals a complex sense of ironic reverence in Baimanazhen’s writings that complicates the direct expressions of displacement and nostalgia by Nyimatso and Tsering Yangkyi and resists the dichotomy of “good” and “bad” diasporic identities.
