‘Old Demons, New Deities’ review: The point of departure
In her Introduction to Old Demons, New Deities: Contemporary Short Stories from Tibet, Tenzin Dickie talks of young Tibetans being “cut off from our historical past, our historical literature and culture” after the Chinese took over Tibet.
Read the full review here.
Andrea Miller reviews Old Demons, New Deities
Old Demons, New Deities is the first English language collection of contemporary Tibetan fiction. As Tenzin Dickie states in the introduction, the contributing authors offer Western readers an authentic look at the lives of Tibetans navigating occupation and exile, but they offer their fellow Tibetans a great deal more.
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Lowell Cook reviews Old Demons, New Deities
Tibetan literature is a national literature that lacks a nation. You may wonder: what it is about these stories that makes them Tibetan, beyond the simple fact of the authors’ ethnicity? The writers in this collection come from a range of different backgrounds. Some are natives to Tibet; some are refugees in India and Nepal; and others live out their exile in Western countries. The stories are all originally composed in either Tibetan, English or Chinese, and their subject matter is just as diverse, from the story of a nomadic family forcibly relocated to “Happy Resettlement Village,” to that of a young nun turned prostitute who finds out she has AIDS.
Read the full review here.
Look within: a review of Old Demons, New Deities
Tenzin Dickie traces the fascinating history of the alienation of Tibetans from their literature in the poignant Introduction to Old Demons, New Deities, her conversational tone and lucid language making up the best part of the book. The representational void, she says, impelled her to put together this collection to show how ordinary Tibetans are “navigating the space between tradition and modernity, occupation and exile, the national and the personal”.
Read the full review here.
Shelly Bhoil of World Literature Today interviews Tenzin Dickie on OLD DEMONS, NEW DEITIES.
SHELLY BHOIL: You explain in the introduction to Old Demons, New Deities that fiction begins with desire, and desire is a non-Buddhist ideal that was demonized in old Tibet, which led to the delay of the organic evolution of Tibetan fiction. Can we say that the coming out of this first-ever collection of Tibetan stories in English signifies Tibetans’ disenchantment with religion?
TENZIN DICKIE: I do think that’s fair to say. Most Tibetan writers used to write about religion, about Buddhist philosophy and metaphysics and epistemology. They all pretty much came out of the monastic tradition and wrote about things that tradition cared about, which was emptiness and cessation of suffering and enlightenment and not love, honor, betrayal, redemption, and loss. The epic of Gesar and the Sixth Dalai Lama Tsangyang Gyatso’s love poetry were the great exceptions. Otherwise, these were books about getting to nirvana and not about making an accommodation in samsara.
It was only later that the Buddhist religion lost its monopoly on Tibetan intellectual life. It would have been nice to get to make this change gradually and voluntarily, but we didn’t get to choose, and we were forced, which has left its scars on all of us. I think Tibetans are disenchanted with a great many things, not just religion. We are disenchanted with occupation, with assimilation, with exile, with diaspora, with politics, with religion. We are disenchanted with enchantment itself! You know, the Tibetan life-writing tradition has always been hagiographical rather than strictly biographical, which is one way of saying we have insisted on seeing the divine instead of the human, when actually it’s far more interesting and inspiring to see the human.
Read the full interview here.
Modern Tibetan literature has been rather hard to find, with the exception of religious and spiritual writings, and some poetry, notably Woeser’s Tibet’s True Heart: Selected Poetry, the only book of modern Tibetan poetry I have come across. Woeser has a short story in this new collection, and was the only Tibetan writer represented that I actually knew by name..
Read the full review here.
Modern Tibetan literature has been rather hard to find, with the exception of religious and spiritual writings, and some poetry, notably Woeser’s Tibet’s True Heart: Selected Poetry, the only book of modern Tibetan poetry I have come across. Woeser has a short story in this new collection, and was the only Tibetan writer represented that I actually knew by name.
Tenzin Dickie, with a story of her own included, has done a singular service in gathering together these twenty-one stories from Tibetan authors, the first collection of such writings that has been made available to the English-language reader. Quite a few of the writers are from the Tibetan diaspora, notably that in the United States, and a number of them have either been educated abroad or occupy teaching positions there now. Some of them actually write in English..
Read the full review here.
