Tsering Yangzom Lama’s debut novel, We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, feels like a place I’ve lived all my life, or maybe it’s a place I’ve been waiting to live in. Lama’s novel is groundbreaking, and not just because the anglophone novel is a more recent feature of Tibetan literature. We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies begins in 1960 with the novel’s three main protagonists, Ama and her daughters, Lhamo and Tenkyi, being thrust into a life in exile in the wake of China’s invasion of Tibet. With heartbreaking clarity the novel explores the slow recovery of self, memory, and place.
Lama’s masterful control over a plot that covers more than fifty years exposes how displacement is never a singular event. She is precise in her writing about the tumult that encapsulates the life of her protagonists. “People find our culture beautiful,” but “not our suffering,” she writes in the voice of Dolma, Lhamo’s daughter, speaking to Samphel, a man whose life is entangled with that of the three women. In Lama’s saga of love and sacrifice, there is no romance to exile. We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies offers a way to believe that the land will persist and, with it, those who long to return to homelands stolen from them.
The title We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies lingers in me. Can you tell us a bit about how you came up with this title?
This story is from the July - August 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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This story is from the July - August 2022 edition of Poets & Writers Magazine.
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