Conjuring Tibet - Softcover

Painter, Charlotte

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1562790951 ISBN 13: 9781562790950

Publisher: Mercury House, 1996

Activists, rock stars, and Hollywood celebrities have raised awareness of the plight of Tibet. In Conjuring Tibet, Charlotte Painter creates a compelling frame for the issues - China's desecration of Tibet's religion and culture, its wasting of Tibet's natural resources for industry and nuclear stockpiling. In this novel, an American woman travels with a young Tibetan lama to forbidden terrain, a remote monastery. Her notebook records stories of Tibetan persecutions, the agony and humor of her journey, as well as a parallel tale of magical lovers and friends who undertake the liberation of Tibet. Pulsing through this exotic journey is a celebration of the imagination to overcome human limitations and transcend boundaries, even geographic ones.

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From the Back Cover:

Diane Johnson: "Charlotte Painter is that "perfect traveler..." Her Tibet is varied, funny and gripping... her grace and learning make this a wonderfully true book." Jeff Greenwald: "deeply personal yet politically astute...a compelling accountby a witness of great integrity."

Maxine Hong Kingston: "a wonderful book that tells mythically and realistically a story about Tibet in the nuclear age. Charlotte Painter evokes the old gods that they might free us from the inhuman world we have made."

"CONJURING TIBET is an affecting documentary novel about present-day Tibet under Chinese rule. It is a remarkable literary achievement that weaves together fact and fiction to depict a land held in bondage... Reading CONJURING TIBET produces the same chilling reaction as does BRAVE NEW WORLD, THE HANDMAID'S TALE, A CLOCKWORK ORANGE or 1984. Raymond Lifchez in Inquiring Mind.

Chapter 1

l959. The Tibetan woman struggled until they reached the narrow suspension bridge. Then above the swift river her body went still. The two Chinese soldiers turned her back to them as they bound her hands behind her. They didn't want to look at her face. She was a young woman, but her face was not young, was too terrible to look at, ferocious, crazed, and her hair rose above it in a tangled corona of black. They had stripped her, and could see chill mounds rising on her flesh as she stood naked on the river bank. This took place on a bitterly cold, cloudy day in a remote desert in Kham. One of the men bent down to bind the woman's ankles, slender ankles for a Tibetan's. The rope slapped against the sand where her feet dug in. They had beaten her on the legs earlier, but she had stopped bleeding; in fact, the men felt edgy because they could no longer see any trace of the whip on her calves. Next they lifted her. One seized her shoulders, the other her ankles, and they ran with her onto the shaky bridge. They held her face down over the rushing water.

Ever since they were stationed there eight years ago, she had jeered at the soldiers, and spat in their eyes. She had hexed them into strange suicides and sent tigers to attack them. She had even called up ghosts of ancestors the Chinese had exorcised from their minds by self-criticism. She was insane -- their commanding officer had decided that. They wouldn't look at her face, and so they did not see its fiery concentration. They simply flung her into the agitated water, then turned and walked back to the horses they had taken from her ranch.

As they were mounting, they heard shouts from a settlement across the river. A number of Tibetans were hurrying down to the riverbank. The soldiers smirked at one another, for they knew the woman could never be rescued. The current would have already taken her half a mile downstream. Anyone trying to get to her would drown in that surging water. It was over for the witch.

The soldiers angled the horses toward the bank, to enjoy the futile effort of the natives. The Tibetans had waded waist deep into the water, were crying, reaching out their hands. All at once their voices rose in something like a cheer. The soldiers looked down then, and they saw the woman. She was not drowned but had rotated face up, her arms and feet still tied. Chill mounds formed now on their own flesh under their khaki uniforms. Even at that distance they could see her eyes, as brilliantly lit as if a shaft of sunlight had parted the clouds to illumine them. She rode the wild river, her hair spread out behind her head like spikes of cast iron. She lay calmly, floating toward her people. She was floating upstream.

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