An Analysis Of Losar Greeting And Exile House

Edward Said, defines exilic consciousness as the “unhealable rift forced between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: it’s essential sadness can never be surmounted” (“Reflections on Exile”, 173).He also notes that though the exilic condition is not new, being prevalent from the time when kings banished unlawful subjects, our own times is truly the age of the “the refugee, the displaced person” (ibid, 174). The twentieth and the twenty first centuries have witnessed different types of mass migrations and dislocations owing to myriad reasons ranging from ethnic cleansing, persecution by totalitarian regimes, and threats of genocide to causes like economic and educational advancements. These composite displacements

“Losar” is the Tibetan New Year that falls in February or March every year. Similar in many ways to the Babylonian Jewish lament and prayer “Next year in Jerusalem” the persona of the poem, a rootless Tibetan restlessly hopes that at least the next year he can spend it in Lhasa. William Safran in an important essay notes certain distinct characteristics of Diasporic communities exiled from their traditional homelands. Some of these facets are evident in the plight of the Tibetan exile in the poem. The persona and the addressee a fellow Tibetan regard Tibet (signified in the poem as Lhasa) “as their ancestral home as the place to which they or their descendants would eventually return” (Safran, qtd in Paranjape, 23). Beginning with the Tibetan New Year greeting “Tashi Delek”, the persona, asks the listener to attune her spatio-temporal coordinates to a possible future-Lhasa while in a present-Dharamshala. So the listener is asked to “say an extra prayer/ that the next Losar/ we can celebrate back in Lhasa” (Kora, 10). And in the subsequent stanza education acquired in the host land is to facilitate once again the homeland, “...that you can teach children back in Tibet” (ibid). “Exile House” springs from a personal recollection , which

The speaker, in “Losar Greeting”, for instance observes with biting satire that “Last year / on our Happy Losar/ I had an idli-sambar breakfast” (Kora, 10) .The implication is that this return had been a hope last year but - they are still here, hence the greater possibility that they might be here the next year and the next. Similarly in “Exile House” the loss of cultural roots and insularity that had earlier differentiated a host-home binary gradually disappears. For the earlier “changmas” have through the years in exile have become a jungle and the exilic voice laments “now how can I tell my children/ where we came from?”( Kora, 25).So the poems move on this “contrapuntal” ( Said, 186) perspective that perceives simultaneous dimensions like - hope-futility, desire -despair , dream-reality - of the Tibetan exiles, whose memory and desire move backward and forward hoping to return in a future to their traditional homeland , though the present and the reality disparages such a possibility. As a corollary, the speaker in “Losar Greeting”, suggests that the “sister”, “grow well in the borrowed land” (Kora, 10) and try to “grow roots” in