Tsering Yangzom Lama, Dawa Lokyitsang and Natalie Avalos at Jaipur Lit Festival

This conversation titled “Tsering Yangzom Lama and Dawa Lokyitsang in conversation with Natalie Avalos, introduced by Holly Gayley” took place at the Jaipur Literature Festival in Boulder, CO on September 23rd, 2023 to honor Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel We Measure the Earth with our Bodies.

Long term readers of Lhakar Diaries know that Tsering Yangzom Lama is one of our founders. So it is a pleasure to share a video of us in conversation talking about her book, We Measure the Earth with our Bodies, and topics such as: the centrality of land in how we as Tibetans imagine and enact ourselves in the world, colonial dispossession, the coloniality of Tibetan Studies and the extractive nature with which some of its scholars engage Tibet/ans, theft of sacred Tibetan objects in the making of expertise and museums (see video of my presentation at SOAS on this topic in 2020 at 1:10:32 time stamp), intentionality in Tibetan Buddhist ritual practices of compassion and how its not about just the self but about all.

To scholars and academics inspired by our conversation to write, please make sure to source us and this conversation properly. Choosing not to cite us is a political act.

The following is from JLF’s description of the event: We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies | Tsering Yangzom Lama and Dawa Lokyitsang in conversation with Natalie Avalos

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies, is a meditation on displacement, colonization, and the human need to remain connected to homes, families, and ancestral lands. Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang is a cultural anthropologist. Her scholarship focuses on how Tibetans produced a sovereign community in exile through the development of their own educational institutions in India to resist the dissolution of their identity as a people. Her scholarship sits at the intersection of Asian imperial-colonialisms, anti-colonial nationalisms, and Indigenous sovereign-futurisms. Academic and writer Natalie Avalos’ work focuses on urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life, healing historical trauma, and decolonial praxis. Moving across time and two continents, this is an evocative session that explores the Tibetan experience of exile and losing the homeland, and recording and chronicling it.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies (being published in eight languages and ten countries), was a finalist for The Giller Prize, and long-listed for The Carol Shields Prize and The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Born and raised in Nepal, she splits her time between Canada and Sweden.

Dr. Dawa Lokyitsang’s dissertation is about the establishment of sovereignty in exile by the Tibetan refugee collective following China’s invasion of Tibet in 1959. She looks specifically at the development of Tibetan educational institutions and the making of kinship in India as avenues for securing Tibetan continuity.

Natalie Avalos is an assistant professor in the Ethnic Studies department at CU Boulder. She is working on her manuscript titled Decolonizing Metaphysics: Transnational Indigeneities and Religious Refusal, which explores urban Indigenous and Tibetan refugee religious life as decolonial praxis. She is a Chicana of Mexican Indigenous descent, from the Bay Area.

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In addition to hosting us, JLF also hosted Dominique Townsend, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Tenzin Dickie in New York on September 13th.

Here’s the description according to JLF of their event: In the face of cultural obliteration the living memory of Tibetan culture and spiritual practices remains strong and resilient. A session that looks at the sacred heritage that the Tibetan diaspora carries with them.

Dominique Townsend is Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at Bard College with a focus on literary and historical materials. She is the author of A Buddhist Sensibility: Aesthetic Education at Tibet’s Mindröling Monastery, Shantideva: How to Wake Up a Hero, an adaptation of the classic text for young readers, and a collection of poems, The Weather & Our Tempers. Her research interests include the interplay between the religious and the secular, Tibetan Buddhist approaches to dreams and dreaming, aesthetics, poetics, and translation theory.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of the poetry books, My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday, and Rules of the House. Dhompa’s non-fiction book, Coming Home to Tibet was published by Penguin, India. Dhompa teaches in the English Department at Villanova University.

Tenzin Dickie is a writer, translator, and editor. She’s the editor of the English language anthologies of modern Tibetan fiction and nonfiction, Old Demons, New Deities: Twenty One Short Stories from Tibet and The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays.