Iona Macduff
"'We left Lhasa at night and headed for the mountains. We walked for 17 days,’ Kelsang Dolma, sitting in her small rain-battered room in Dharamsala, tells me her story. ‘The snow was deep and my shoes kept slipping. We had to help each other walk. Nights were so cold and the days so long. We had to cross a high pass because the Chinese soldiers wouldn’t go that way. On the pass we found a body of another Tibetan in the snow. That terrified me. But we were lucky, we made it to the border.’" Read full piece
"Appetite whet and now hungry for more of the world’s words, I hurry off through the melee to another tent, where four women are discussing what one’s migrations (forced or otherwise) do to one’s writing. Belarussian poet Valzhyna Mort speaks of her family’s exile from a neighbouring hill as having more of an impact than her own later migration to the US. She finds she is still writing her grandmother’s stories – the woman who was forced to move hills. Lila Azam Zanganeh, French-born to Iranian parents, speaks of living between tongues – “I heard the names of streets I had never been to…I heard the names of harbours and summers I would never see” – and as a lonely 15-year-old her writing itself was born from a longing to create a tongue of her own. Lila’s teacher once told her that the wealth of the 21st century would be people like her – people who are both of a place and not of a place. These dislocated women locate themselves in words, all agreeing that their sense of longing provoked their writing, and that writing in turn provided a home." Read full piece