‘Imaginary’ and ‘Promised’: Redefining (Home) land in Contemporary Tibetan Writings in English

The academic discourse on Tibetan refugees’ political, social, cultural, and national experiences highlights their success as a model for other displaced communities, yet their loss of homeland and identity remains traumatic. The displaced Tibetans have documented their experiences registering their response to the catastrophe of annexation and deterritorialization in contemporary Tibetan writings in English. The paper attempts to analyze Tsering Wangmo Dhompa’s memoir A Home in Tibet and poetry collection In the Absent Everyday, Tenzin Tsundue’s collection of poetry titled Kora, and Buchung Sonam’s collection of poetry Dandelions of Tibet to understand how they articulate their relationship with their homeland as displaced Tibetans. By using the method of textual analysis in literary research, it probes the problematized representation of homeland as ‘imaginary’ as well as ‘promised’, a discourse that emerges in response to the deterritorialization which subsequently pushed them into exilic living. The question of homecoming then becomes indispensable to such writings and the paper interrogates these nuances of return in the selected texts revealing the new definitions of home, homeland, and homecoming that the Tibetan poets form while grappling with the challenges of exile.