A Genre to Remember(3)

Contemporary Tibetan Poetic Songs as Therapeutic Remembering:

        The enormous appeal of the poetic song genre for Tibetans, and in particular the genre of nyam mgur or poetic songs of experience, can be explained at least in part by their ability to facilitate both remembrance and emotional expression.  They facilitate remembrance both through their forms and contents.  Not only do the rhythms and repetitions assist people to remember the texts, the specialized metaphors and cultural allusions and forms help the reader or audience to remember both their culture and history.  Yet even more significant is their ability to express and to convey liminal emotional and experiential contents in highly condensed linguistic images and signs.  As the most personal of all Tibetan literary genres, they offer the poets and their audiences a space for exploring the complex feelings and traumas they continue to face from the events and dramatic changes of the last fifty years. 

        Like other societies influenced by Buddhist values, the Tibetan culture emphasizes subduing self-centredness.  This poses a certain challenge for those facing severe personal psychological suffering and trauma.  In this respect, the Tibetan genre of poetic songs, founded on the idea that even our most intimate and deeply personal lives and experience have collective resonance, offers an effective and culturally appropriate expressive avenue to deal with the deep pain of their recent history—both personal and collective.  Interestingly, some of the leading poets of this popular genre are people from groups excluded from literacy until very recently:  non-aristocratic laypeople and nuns.  Just as oral cultural genres like songs can serve a subversive and socially cohesive role in the face of colonization by a literate culture, so can this transitional or hybrid genre of poetic songs, located as it is between oral and literate poetic forms.  Its attraction lies in part because, like songs, it is able to express the strong emotional contents that underlie both group identification and healing processes. 

        So, it is not surprising that the genre of poetic songs have become a key mode of therapeutic expression in the Tibetan society in exile, and possibly within Tibet as well.  In exile, nowhere was this therapeutic role more apparent than on the day of Thupten Ngodrup’s cremation, when so many historical traumas resurfaced in the tears and poems of those present.  There are few Tibetans who have not suffered from the loss of family members and loved ones during the last fifty years, leaving scars close in memory and only too ready to resurface with the right provocation.  The sacrifice of Thupten Ngodrup was just such a provocation, a sign of the many deaths and sacrifices Tibetans have endured for the well-being of their culture, history, and people.  His actions were a defiant gesture against the modern indifference and forgetfulness seeping into the Tibetan exile community, even in their isolated Indian Himalayan enclave. The poems marking his death are referred to as “a lamp” to remember the past and heal from its pain:  “We offer these poems to him as a lamp so that his wishes may be fulfilled and so that people will always remember his sacrifice” (Gyal, 1998). 

        Such remembrance is part cultural and part therapeutic.  It is a way both to honour and to heal history, a history that is simultaneously personal and collective.  It is in this respect that these poetic expressions are “therapeutic,” not in the highly subjective Western sense associated with modern poets like Sylvia Plath.  The Tibetan poems are deeply cultural and historical, not just personal.  This therapeutic form of cultural remembrance is reiterated by Palden Gyal (1995), the editor of the Thupten Ngodup tribute poems:  “Though this book does not have the power of prayer to lead him to heaven, yet, I will pray that this collection will help keep the lamp of his life always burning brightly in the hearts of Tibetans and people around the world” (p. x).  Even the Tibetan title for the collection, Fire Offering (mchod me), in contrast to the English title, A Lamp, is laden with cultural significance, insofar as fire offerings are “therapeutic” purifying rituals in Tantric Buddhist meditations.  As a collective act of therapy, the poems helped empower and reconstruct Tibetans’ confidence in their culture, while counteracting the despondency and depression from the disappointment of the hunger strike and the extremity of Thupten Ngodrup’s reaction.  This is suggested by a passage in the preface (Gyal, 1998, p. vii):

        A human life has value – and power:  Throughout the winding path of history with its turns of sadness and happiness, we, as the people who settled on the roof of the world, have offered countless lamps for the purpose of decreasing sadness and heightening human happiness.  However, until now the only individual who has been able to offer himself as a lamp for our people has been Thupten Ngodup.  His offering was made for freedom and justice and for lighting a future for our nation.  Before the eyes of the world, Thubten Ngodup has created a new image of Tibet and Tibetans.

 

 

Commemorative tribute to Thupten Ngodrup immolation & protest, 1998

        The recent history of Tibet is frought with suffering and trauma that defy rational representation and understanding.  Yet, for Tibetans, the need to share and remember these experiences and histories persists in the face of the failure of rational thought and institutions to offer redress.  It is in such a gap between experience and reason that the songs of experience have so much to contribute, for the very fact that their imagistic representations are closer to the emotions and images of the direct experiences.  For this reason, poetic songs above all other genres carry such therapeutic promise. 

Tibetan Poetic Songs as Pedagogical Doors to New Languages and Knowledge:

        In providing a way to communicate in language and images that closely approximate felt, sensed experience, poetic songs offer an effective genre to realize, represent, and share emerging knowledge and experiences.  So, it is not surprising to find that in exile, Tibetans are highly motivated to share experiences in this genre.  The relative freedom of exile removes some of the state-sanctioned inhibitions to communication in Tibet, and in such a milieu many Tibetans are keen to communicate more openly both with one another and with Western visitors, perceived to be key allies in their plight for liberation.  Yet, the motivation behind such communication is not only strategic, but reflects a keen interest to make sense out of the extremity of their recent personal and collective histories, and the dramatic changes they are witnessing in their lives and culture within one short generation. 

        This desire to bear witness to the suffering of their own and other Tibetans’ lives, and to the deep devotion and love they feel for their culture and country, is channelled in part once Tibetans come into exile through their experiences in education.  Tibetan refugees in India have relatively easy access to education, and many receive literacy education for the first time in their lives.  Even young adults are able to attend special newcomer programs for basic education, including English language studies.  In the process of attending these programs, many are exposed to reading and writing poetry in both Tibetan and English.  Indeed, poetry often serves as a key motivator, for to read and write poetry was historically associated with the highest accomplishments in the study of language.  Even beyond this, however, is the aforementioned political, spiritual, and therapeutic rewards offered students when they write in this genre.  Accordingly, the use of poetry both in reading and writing has assumed pedagogical significance above and beyond its social and psychological effects.

Tibetan refugee nuns learning English, Dolma Ling, India

        Furthermore, I was most surprised to discover young refugees newly-arrived from Tibet ready and able to write effective poetry in English even before they could communicate orally with competence.  This poetic readiness appeared to be related to all the reasons previously outlined.  The net effect, however, was to provide a highly rewarding task for students and second language learners in the Tibetan exile community.  As an example, below is a poem written in English by a newcomer from Amdo, Tibet.  He was literate in Tibetan before coming into exile, but had only been in India studying English for less than a year when he wrote this poem.  At the time, he spoke English in broken sentences with very simple contents, in marked contrast to the sophisticated use of English language and content in this poem, which he entitled “White Moon:”

Where are you coming from?
Everybody said you came in the East.
I think you came from in the snow mountains
Because your colour is just like white snow
Mountains
White Moon.

May I ask you to something?
Have you seen palace Potala
Now that it is empty? 

Have you seen living people?
Now they very suffer
White Moon.

Sometimes you are full then you are very beautiful.
Sometimes you are half and then you are harmful.
Sometimes you are like a star,
Then everyone mentions you.                          
White Moon.
You are like snowland.
I love you.
White Moon.
You are my country.
                     Tsedup, intermediate ESL student
                     Evening Yongling School, Dharamsala

 

 

        Witnessing the potency of poetry as a tool in Tibetan education, both in a second language and in Tibetan, made me better appreciate the pedagogical potential of poetry and songs to serve a comparable role in other, non-Tibetan educational contexts.  To understand more fully that potential will require researchers to move away from strict textual studies to look at ethnographies of language use across cultures, as I have attempted to do here, including an examination of how particular genres and forms of literacy and language serve people in the process of dealing with the struggles of living and learning outside of classrooms.  As a genre that opens a space for communicating emotion, images, and representations of experience closer to felt memory, poetry can open a door to allow students to use literacy to help heal and empower their lives, even when composing in a second language.

Three-year-old Tibetan girl learning to write in English as a second language

Beyond Poetics:  Non-verbal Acts of Remembrance and Representation

        Then there are the representations of suffering and memory that don’t come in the form of words at all.  They are representations of the body and the flesh—the offering of lives in the prisons of Tibet and on its streets, in hunger strikes and in immolations.  The natural, inarticulate signs in the tears and cries I am bathed in as I wait to meet HH the Dalai Lama in his Dharamsala office, as he met with Tibetans newly-arrived from Tibet and with those about to return.  He continued to speak through their anguished sounds, offering what comfort and encouragement he could. I’ll never forget those sounds and their rhythms, the best witness I have yet heard testify to the truth of the Tibetan cause.  Their cries defy abstract representation, yet, if they became words, those voices might repeat the prayer of the anonymous Lhasa monk (Schwartz, 1994, p. 244-245):

…Now when the melodious sound of the wheel of Dharma
is spoken everywhere in foreign lands,
       Look with your eye of wisdom on those who have stayed behind,
like the corpse of a dead lion.
…Like the agony of a baby bird whose training is not yet complete,
       Look soon with your eye of wisdom upon the suffering of these sentient beings…

Author with His Holiness the 14^th Dalai Lama, Dharamsala, India, May, 1998

References:Cabezon, J.I., and Jackson, R.R. (Eds.). 1996. Tibetan Literature: Studies in Genre. Ithaca, NY:  Snow Lion Publications.Dhondup, K. 1981.  Songs of the Sixth Dalai Lama. Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.Ellingson, Terry Jay. 1979. The Mandala of Sound: Concepts and Sound Structures in Tibetan Ritual Music.  Ph.D. dissertation.  Madison:  University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Gyal, Palden (Ed). 1998.  A Lamp (mchod me,Tibetan title). Dharamsala, India: Tibet Times.Gyal, Palden. 1997. The Offering (mchod). Dharamsala, India:  Amnye Machen Institute.Gyatso, Tenzin (HH the 14^th Dalai Lama). 1991. Freedom in Exile: The autobiography of the Dalai Lama. New York, NY: HarperCollins.Jackson, Roger R. 1996.  “Poetry” in Tibet:  Glu, mGur, sNyan ngag and “Songs of Experience.” In Tibetan Literature:  Studies in Genre.  Ithaca, NY: Snow Lion, p. 368 – 329.MacGregor, Molly. 1989/1992.  The Magnificent Trickster: The Story of Milarepa.  Kapaa, HI: M.M. Press.Milarepa. 1978. Drinking the Mountain Stream:  New Stories & Songs by Milarepa. Trans. Lama Kunga Rimpoche and Brian Cutillo. New York, NY: Lotsawa.Murcott, Susan. 1991.  The First Buddhist Women:  Translations and Commentary on the Therigatha. Berkeley: Parallax Press.Schwartz, Ronald D. 1994. Circle of Protest: Political Ritual in the Tibetan Uprising. Delhi:  Motilal Banarsidass Publishers Private Limited.Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy (TCHRD). 1998. Fearless Voices:  Accounts of Tibetan Former Political Prisoners. Dharamsala, India: TCHRD.

 

 Tibetan singers, dancers and musicians 
 

Funeral procession for Thupten Ngodrup, Dharamsala, India, May, 1998
(资料来源于影云)