Review: We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies by Tsering Yangzom Lama

Lama’s novel is about both these things: the scattering of the people and the dispossession of their knowledge. She follows the lives of a refugee family as they disperse to Nepal, Delhi and Toronto. And she interrogates the loss of the Tibetan ethos — cultural identity taken over by China and the narrative monopolized by Western scholarship.

There’s magical realism in the sense that the magic in this novel is just as real in the real world. This is an act of decolonizing the Western lens. Complex ideas that would be understood in the West as mythical are central to the plot and asserted with such clarity, they become tangible — you can experience them bodily.

During the Tibetan uprising, a decade after China annexed Tibet, tens of thousands of Tibetans fled. Many were arrested or killed in the process. But the entire village in Lama’s novel is led to safety by an oracle. (In 1959, the Dalai Lama was also guided by an oracle — the Nechung Oracle, a medium of Tibet’s protector spirit — through the mountains to India.)

In a refugee camp in Pokhara, the village oracle’s elder daughter Lhamo raises her sister Tenkyi, the brilliant star of the camp, who moves to Delhi for college and ends up in Toronto. Lhamo’s childhood boyfriend Samphel deals in Tibetan antiques for customers around the world. Lhamo’s daughter Dolma, supported by these three adults and others to gain premier education, joins her aunt in Toronto as a graduate student where she firmly asserts her authority to reclaim the narrative of the Tibetan story.

Their journeys are tied together by the Nameless Saint, a small mud statue of an emaciated figure in a loincloth, who appears for each of them in times of need.

Tibetans call it a terma.

In the eighth century, Padmasambhava, better known as Guru Rinpoche, carried Buddhism from India to Tibet. He hid many of his teachings for future generations to discover in termas. They don’t have to be actual texts — they can be mind termas found in rocks, tree trunks, in caves, at the bottom of the lake… Any object or place could be a terma waiting to resurface when it is most needed.

“All you have to do is hold out your hand. That’s what it’s like to receive a terma. To lay a hand on a rock and recognise verses of metaphysics. To grind an herb and discover a moment of wisdom that unleashes entire teachings. Or to look up at the sky and see a symbol right there that unlocks a transmission from a thousand years ago. Imagine how that feels. To come up against something so ancient, which was left there just for you…” Dolma explains to condescending academics at a party in Toronto.

Lama’s novel itself is a kind of terma — it has profound insight on trauma for whoever comes looking for it.

Trauma comes in different shapes. It can make some sacrifice so others can flourish. But half-remembered wounds lodge themselves in our bodies to destroy us from within because success is especially terrifying when shame is a familiar place that can hold infinite pain. Unrestrained ambition seems like armour and the only antidote to the unbearable agony of loss — it is not, especially when it chips away at the moral core erasing the ability to fully feel, and prosperity is a fickle thing.

READ MORE: Interview: Tsering Yangzom Lama, author, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies – “Tibetans are always translating”

Trauma can make us feel like we do not deserve to be loved. Or take up space. And it can make us learn a foreign tongue and mannerisms to hide behind until we’re ready to reclaim what is ours.

And that is what the book is about: how loss manifests, festers and is ultimately passed on. Lama shows us that it is possible to understand and process it, but also that sometimes it is too late. All the while though, help is at hand.

Lama was born in Nepal in the mid 1980s. Her family was from Western Tibet, and her parents and older siblings had lived in refugee camps — but they moved to Canada when she was 12. We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies is a novel of memories — personal, cultural and mythical memories integrated into history — all extensively researched. It is also a project in postmemory.

Writing about the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch, a professor at Columbia University had introduced the concept of postmemory: the trauma and loss inherited by the children, grandchildren or subsequent generations of those who directly experienced a traumatic event. Later generations “remember” through stories, visuals, testimonies and behaviours among which they grow up — and they preserve and build on these inherited memories through archives, museums, fiction and other forms of art.

The title — As We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies — is a reference to Tibetan pilgrims who make their way by prostrating at every step, laying their face and their bodies on each part of their journey. To Dolma, “The idea alone was staggering. To measure the earth with my body, to know our country with my own skin. It seemed like the only way to fathom such a land. Yet I did not know if I would ever glimpse a meter of Tibet with my eyes.”

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.

Tsering Yangzom Lama’s exceptional debut novel We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies opens in a village at the border of western Tibet and Nepal. Soon after the Dalai Lama escaped to India, the members of the village decide to leave. Chinese soldiers were clamping down on not only protests but also their way of life. “They will not be satisfied with our land alone. They want to possess our minds,” they said. They recounted an ancient Tibetan prophecy: “When the iron bird flies and horses run on wheels, the People of Snows will be scattered like ants across the face of the earth.”

Lama’s novel is about both these things: the scattering of the people and the dispossession of their knowledge. She follows the lives of a refugee family as they disperse to Nepal, Delhi and Toronto. And she interrogates the loss of the Tibetan ethos — cultural identity taken over by China and the narrative monopolized by Western scholarship.

There’s magical realism in the sense that the magic in this novel is just as real in the real world. This is an act of decolonizing the Western lens. Complex ideas that would be understood in the West as mythical are central to the plot and asserted with such clarity, they become tangible — you can experience them bodily.

During the Tibetan uprising, a decade after China annexed Tibet, tens of thousands of Tibetans fled. Many were arrested or killed in the process. But the entire village in Lama’s novel is led to safety by an oracle. (In 1959, the Dalai Lama was also guided by an oracle — the Nechung Oracle, a medium of Tibet’s protector spirit — through the mountains to India.)

In a refugee camp in Pokhara, the village oracle’s elder daughter Lhamo raises her sister Tenkyi, the brilliant star of the camp, who moves to Delhi for college and ends up in Toronto. Lhamo’s childhood boyfriend Samphel deals in Tibetan antiques for customers around the world. Lhamo’s daughter Dolma, supported by these three adults and others to gain premier education, joins her aunt in Toronto as a graduate student where she firmly asserts her authority to reclaim the narrative of the Tibetan story.

Their journeys are tied together by the Nameless Saint, a small mud statue of an emaciated figure in a loincloth, who appears for each of them in times of need.

Tibetans call it a terma.

In the eighth century, Padmasambhava, better known as Guru Rinpoche, carried Buddhism from India to Tibet. He hid many of his teachings for future generations to discover in termas. They don’t have to be actual texts — they can be mind termas found in rocks, tree trunks, in caves, at the bottom of the lake… Any object or place could be a terma waiting to resurface when it is most needed.

“All you have to do is hold out your hand. That’s what it’s like to receive a terma. To lay a hand on a rock and recognise verses of metaphysics. To grind an herb and discover a moment of wisdom that unleashes entire teachings. Or to look up at the sky and see a symbol right there that unlocks a transmission from a thousand years ago. Imagine how that feels. To come up against something so ancient, which was left there just for you…” Dolma explains to condescending academics at a party in Toronto.

Lama’s novel itself is a kind of terma — it has profound insight on trauma for whoever comes looking for it.

Trauma comes in different shapes. It can make some sacrifice so others can flourish. But half-remembered wounds lodge themselves in our bodies to destroy us from within because success is especially terrifying when shame is a familiar place that can hold infinite pain. Unrestrained ambition seems like armour and the only antidote to the unbearable agony of loss — it is not, especially when it chips away at the moral core erasing the ability to fully feel, and prosperity is a fickle thing.

READ MORE: Interview: Tsering Yangzom Lama, author, We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies – “Tibetans are always translating”

Trauma can make us feel like we do not deserve to be loved. Or take up space. And it can make us learn a foreign tongue and mannerisms to hide behind until we’re ready to reclaim what is ours.

And that is what the book is about: how loss manifests, festers and is ultimately passed on. Lama shows us that it is possible to understand and process it, but also that sometimes it is too late. All the while though, help is at hand.

Lama was born in Nepal in the mid 1980s. Her family was from Western Tibet, and her parents and older siblings had lived in refugee camps — but they moved to Canada when she was 12. We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies is a novel of memories — personal, cultural and mythical memories integrated into history — all extensively researched. It is also a project in postmemory.

Writing about the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch, a professor at Columbia University had introduced the concept of postmemory: the trauma and loss inherited by the children, grandchildren or subsequent generations of those who directly experienced a traumatic event. Later generations “remember” through stories, visuals, testimonies and behaviours among which they grow up — and they preserve and build on these inherited memories through archives, museums, fiction and other forms of art.

The title — As We Measure The Earth With Our Bodies — is a reference to Tibetan pilgrims who make their way by prostrating at every step, laying their face and their bodies on each part of their journey. To Dolma, “The idea alone was staggering. To measure the earth with my body, to know our country with my own skin. It seemed like the only way to fathom such a land. Yet I did not know if I would ever glimpse a meter of Tibet with my eyes.”

Saudamini Jain is an independent journalist. She lives in New Delhi.