Power, Trauma, Stories, and the Struggle for Peace

Here's one from the grad school archive, written after a class on nonviolent protest movements that culminated in a trip to Dharamshala in India, where the Tibetan government in exile operates. We met with countless community members and community groups, listened to the Dalai Lama speak, and I spent three weeks working with the Center for Living Buddhist Art reading and analyzing Jataka stories that will eventually be turned into a mural illustrating all the previous lives of the Buddha.

ISL Dharamshala: Tibet and the Power of Nonviolence

Three weeks in a Tibetan community in India has a powerful effect on both understanding and empathy. It's not long enough, but it's never long enough. Two years and change wasn't long enough in El Salvador, a year wasn't long enough in Georgia, six months wasn't long enough in Chile. I get a little glimpse and think I've learned a lot, then know it's not even the tip of the iceberg. Even so, it is one thing to complete academic study on protest and resistance, and another to speak with the disenfranchised about their personal struggles and victories. It makes them real people, not names in a textbook. Purbu and Yeshi and Ama are only a few of the thousands affected by China’s occupation of Tibet. After meeting upon meeting with individuals and organizations explaining the trials of Tibetan life under Chinese rule, the shape of the struggle is beginning to become clearer in my mind. 

Access to information is greatly diminished after a Chinese crackdown a few years ago, so the organizations advocating for political prisoners or against human rights abuses, or those supporting newly arrived exiles operate on limited information with limited effect. It is still valuable work, but I wonder whether a strategic re-evaluation for a number of the Dharamshala-based organizations may help them adapt to modern technology and modern issues. Tibet, China and the world do not look the same as they did in the 1960s or even the 1990s. Could pushing the issue of water protection to Indian and Chinese citizens be a method more effective than the human rights and moral authority argument? Are the UN and individual governments the access point for political and economic change, or should the target shift to MNCs and businesses conscious of their social image? It's not enough to be right. In learning about community organizing, that was the most important lesson - being right and being moral is not enough. The fight has to shift the balance of power.

Some of the same themes cropped up in many of our meetings in Dharamshala. Yeshi spoke of the extreme danger of leaving Tibet countered by the extreme danger of staying. Even after escaping across the border patrolled by Chinese armed forces into Nepal, the danger is unceasing. Nepal is dominated by China and will return Tibetans to the Chinese. The natural threats are myriad, but they evoke less terror than the human ones. At Gu Chu Sum, which advocates for political prisoners, the imprisonment of life in Tibet became clearer. It is a surveillance state with no due process or protection of freedoms. Tibetans can be arrested for having a Tibetan flag or a picture of the Dalai Lama; for being related to a self-immolator; for bringing condolences to the family of a self-immolator; for speaking Tibetan; for protesting; for escaping. It is, as various Tibetans pointed out, an “open prison.” Tibetans in Dharamshala, even those born in India, expressed their feeling of responsibility towards their country and their brethren in Tibet. Tenzen embodied this well when she said she had two responsibilities, the first as a human being to care for others, and the second as a Tibetan to take action. As the border becomes less porous and more Tibetans are born outside of Tibet, however, the cultural disconnect between those in exile and those in Tibet will grow. Kaysang worried about this when she asked, “Who are we to make decisions for the 95 percent of Tibetans still living in Tibet?” She wondered aloud if perhaps the way forward is by going back, physically and culturally reconnecting with a disappearing heritage. For those growing up in India, part of the effort to maintain a cultural connection with their homeland has manifested in the creation of children’s literature in Tibetan, both to encourage interest in Tibetan language among children and to preserve Tibetan history, practices and mythologies. The worry about the loss of Tibetan culture is similar to Sarika’s fear that Buddhist art would die within a generation. Her response was to digitize archives, create textbooks and curricula, create a school and plan a museum, all while continuing to create original artwork. Buddhist art now stands on firmer ground and is more accessible than ever to a modern audience. It is an impressive effort, indicative of the power of even one person to  create substantive change. I have no illusions that one person will solve the complex Tibetan political issue, but it reminds me that passion and compassion with each individual can become the tipping point.  

Most organizations and individuals, Ama Adhe and a representative of the Tibetan government in exile among them, were careful to distinguish between the Chinese Communist party and Chinese citizens. Their quarrel is with the government and the party, not the average Chinese citizen. I asked my sister who lives in China about the general perception of the government and limited freedoms it offers. She made the point that although China limits “freedom to,” it offers many “freedoms from” for the majority of its citizens. The middle class is growing, transportation is efficient, education is good, health is adequate and costs are low for many Chinese - a relatively small price to pay for watching what you say. That is not to say that there is no discontent with the government or the communist party in China, but that citizens must decide whether “freedom to” outweighs “freedom from” if substantive policy change is to happen on Tibet or any other issue.   

I wonder if the Dalai Lama’s urging to merge traditional and modern education and practices may also be turned towards its own people. Many of those we talked to emphasized the discipline of Tibetan Buddhism as a mechanism to find inner peace and cope with PTSD, but I wonder if perhaps some “modern” support and reconciliation methods may help the healing process. It seems very lonely to live through atrocities and hardship of both loss and travel, then be expected to live through the rest of life on the strength of meditation and self-reflection. 

I think about a conversation we had: 

Before age four, I don't remember much of my mother, so I only really have two years. I remember when I was little I thought she was harsh, angry, but I think now that maybe she was worried and had a lot of responsibility. I don't know my father. My mother always told me, "Remember, your father is a soldier." But that is all I know. Sometimes I look at my face and I wonder if he has a moon face, a face like mine. Listening to Ama Adhe, her story, it always reaches me and makes my heart heavy. "Day grows colder, but heart gets warmer,” I think. We had wars and rebellions, 1959, 1987, 2008. It makes me wonder about my father. You know, in 1987, where was he? What did he do? 

I asked about returning to Tibet, maybe to visit.

I want to. I want to see it with my own eyes. You know it is changed. And I wonder if I go, how do I even find my mother? We were nomads, but Tibet is changed. I heard a few years after I left that my mother was being relocated to a village. It is a false village, you know? They force nomads to live in these towns with no freedom, no lives. I know where it is, but I wonder if I can go back if she would be there. I haven't had contact for sixteen years. Tibet is different now - so much aggression, suspicion. I wonder how I could even get there. Do I ask someone for directions? And the danger? Will I be imprisoned? Will I be able to leave again?

I have no answers. It is difficult to expect a person to live with so much uncertainty, creating a new life without the answers from the past. It reminds me of conversations in El Salvador with former guerrillas building lives from the ruins of the country and the ruins of their past. I think about my friend Luis who lived through bombings of his community by the US-backed Salvadoran military, whose brother was killed, and who spent years as a guerrilla and as a refugee. He was part of a community of refugees who returned to El Salvador without authorization to create a village from the ground up and has spent the past twenty years intimately involved in the development of that community. Was he right to take up arms? Right lay them down? Right to return to El Salvador and right to stay? Tibet and El Salvador have very different issues, but they both have large populations of refugees running from violence. I cannot fault those who stay to try to change things nor those who escape to create safe lives for themselves and their families nor those who live in exile as activists. 

Ama Adhe related her story of family members murdered, imprisonment at the hands of the Chinese government, her young son falling into the river before her eyes as she was dragged away, deaths by starvation, her continued exile in India and her lifetime dedication, at the request of the Dalai Lama, to retelling her story for the world. I had a strange sense of deja vu listening to her story. Although the facts are different, the feel of Ama Adhe’s story is much the same as that of Rufina Amaya. Rufina Amaya lived in the mountain village of El Mozote in El Salvador. The Salvadoran armed forces feigned friendship, then massacred the entire village in 1981 during the Salvadoran Civil War. As the sole survivor, she watched and heard the rape and murder of her children, friends and relatives, hiding under bodies until nightfall then in caves for weeks. I heard her story not from herself (she died in 2007), but sitting in the grass in the Garden of Reflection for the Innocents in El Mozote with a former Jesuit priest in 2013. His colleagues were murdered at the UCA (Central American University) in 1989 by the same armed forces just hours after he had left them for the night. That feeling of bearing unbearable loss permeates the telling on both sides of the world.       

It leaves me at a loss. Condolences are inadequate and tears are selfish. I think about the two deaths of a person: the first when they die, and the second when the last person no longer remembers their name. When I was in El Mozote, I found the names of children written row upon endless row and wondered if finding and remembering Sonia or Mario’s names would help respect their memories or help bring about a world without such atrocities. I cannot change the past, but listening to understand those who suffered and died cannot be a bad thing.  

It is hard to know where this new experience will manifest. I cannot see myself becoming a politician, even to advocate for the marginalized in our country and around the world. I also doubt I will turn to organized religion, even Buddhism, as a personal path towards self actualization. Organized religion has caused so much bloodshed and antipathy throughout the ages that although I know people do good in the name of their faith, it can hardly outweigh the bad. Reading the Jataka stories reminded me that culture is a dynamic thing and religion should not be stagnant either. When women appear in the Jataka stories, they are almost uniformly treacherous or evil. It was difficult sometimes to parse out a larger moral than the obvious “do not trust women” message. I am glad Sarika is working to modernize the messages of the texts, but that does not hide the misogyny integrated into that and many other religions. Catholicism comes to mind. It also makes me think of modern debates on reproductive health, an issue that has no place in politics and less place among men, but that nevertheless is determined to silence those affected. Women are cast as irresponsible villains or as fools incapable of making rational health decisions. In much the same way, women in the Jataka stories are fickle in love and treacherous in deed, necessitating male dominance or at the very least strict avoidance of women to avoid entrapment. The devout female is rare, and the Boddhisata is invariably male. Although monks and nuns seem to play similar roles in modern Tibetan Buddhism and Sarika is a good example of a woman changing the game in Buddhist art, the world continues to be an unequal place. I am interested in working towards gender equality, and a good portion of my studies and previous experience have focused on engaging men in gender equality and sexual health. That interest has only been reinforced the more I travel and learn. 

I found the study of Buddhist art and our conversations with Buddhist monks to be both informative and interesting. My academic focus has always been Latin America, so India and Tibet were an entirely new area for me. Within Latin America, much of what I study is either related to gender (in)equality or prison systems - issues of violence. Although violence is ever-present even in the history of nonviolence, the opportunity to examine methods and motivations of leaders like Gandhi, Badshah Khan, the Dalai Lama and Martin Luther King, Jr. provided a different perspective from my traditional studies. It is a study in the power of inspirational leadership and discipline, education and re-education. Whereas I often study politics and policy, much of our conversation highlighted “people power.” I know that protest movements depend on the power of the people, but it is something that I should remember in everything I study. It is easy to get wrapped up in the theoretical, ignoring lived reality and historical memory. 

My previous experience informs my current understanding and future action. To take the example of a recent assignment on gender-based violence in Brazil, my policy response was based on experiences co-facilitating gender equality and sexual health trainings for young men in El Salvador and last summer living in Rio de Janeiro learning about the Brazilian health system and from new friends running a local community development organization in their favela. Their disillusionment towards NGOs and the police in the area made me re-evaluate my assumptions about networks of power and the effectiveness (and intentions) of socially-oriented organizations and programs in Brazil. The month in Dharamshala and the course on nonviolence colors my understanding of issues from great power politics to religion to inequality, not only in the Tibetan context, but in the wider world as well.