Where Is Tibet in World Literature?
Contemporary Tibetan literature–writing that reflects the variety of Tibetan experience in the world–is beginning to attract the kind of attention that promises both to intrigue and infuriate. Tibet’s ambivalent place in the world of literature is even suggested by a recent issue of World Literature Today in which the “literature in review” section included, among categories for countries such as Algeria, New Zealand, and China, the heading “Tibet.” Beneath this heading is a review of Tales of Tibet: Sky Burials, Prayer Wheels, and Wind Horses, in which the reviewer notes that after decades of communist Chinese control, writers in Tibet are beginning to publish in the Tibetan language, “although some of those writing in the Tibetan language are, in fact, Chinese” (Lussier 101). Lost in this welcome response to “Tibetan literature,” however, are the facts that Tales of Tibet only includes stories originally written in Chinese, not Tibetan, and that no Chinese writer writes in Tibetan,
